“I meant human.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
He kept count on his fingers. “One, you can see me, which most people can’t. Two, you can talk to me, which most people really can’t. Three, you’re sitting there all calm and composed, when most people—most human people—would be flipping out.”
I shrugged. “Does it matter what I am?”
“Not really.”
He looked down the hall as though he could see through the walls to where his mother lay sleeping. The mother who’d ignored him when he was alive and now that he was dead, still ignored him. Her mind might be filled with old memories, but none of them were of him.
“Can you help me?” he asked.
“Help you with what?”
“With…you know. Getting her to remember me.”
“Why is it so important?”
“How can I die and go on if no one remembers that I was ever alive?”
“Lots of people don’t remember me,” I said, “and it doesn’t bother me.”
He chuckled, but without any humour. “Yeah, like that’s possible.”
“No, it really doesn’t.”
“I meant that anybody would forget meeting you.”
“You’d be surprised.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, then shrugged.
“So will you help me?”
I nodded. “I can try. Maybe it’s not so much that your mother should remember you more, but that she should remember your sister less. The way it is, there’s no room inside her for anything else.”
“But you’ll try?”
Against my better judgment, I found myself nodding.
He did a slow fade and I was left alone in the living room. I sat for a while longer, looking at the place where he’d been sitting, then got down from the coffee table and walked back into the hall. There were two closed doors and two open ones. I knew one led into the old lady’s bedroom, the other into a bathroom. I went to the first closed door. It opened into a room that was like stepping inside a cake, all frosty pinks and whites, full of dolls and pennants and trophies. Madeline’s room. Closing its door, I continued down the hall and opened the other one.
Both rooms had the feel of empty places where no one lived. But while Madeline’s room was bright and clean—the bed neatly made, the shelves dusted, the trophies shined—the boy’s room looked as though the door had been closed on the day he died and no one had opened it until I had just this moment.
The bedding lay half-on, half-off the box spring, pooling on the floor. There were posters of baseball players and World War II planes on the wall. Decades of dust covered every surface, clustering around the model cars and plastic statues of movie monsters on the book shelves and windowsill. More planes hung from the ceiling, held in flight by fishing lines.
Unlike the daughter, he truly was forgotten.
I walked to the desk where a half-finished model lay covered in dust. Books were stacked on the far corner with a school notebook on top. I cleared the dust with a finger and read the handwritten name on the “Property of” line:
Donald Quinn.
I thought of bees and drunk drivers, of being remembered and forgotten. I knew enough about humans to know that you couldn’t change their minds. You couldn’t make them remember if they didn’t want to.
Why had I said I’d help him?
Among the cousins, a promise was sacred. Now I was committed to an impossible task.