So I haven't decided yet. What do I want? Do I want you to lie to me? Do I want you to just shut up?

Somebody wrote down the time, the exact time it happened. I saw. We'd been talking on the phone just eight minutes before. Eight minutes, and you didn't say a word. Didn't give even a hint of what was happening right over your shoulder.

I kept asking you why you were biting your lower lip (don't ask me how I knew you did it, I just know) and you kept shrugging it off. The nervousness of years ' that's what you supposed, you said. 'Wasted time'� were your exact words, I believe. Coulda been the title of a crappy only-suitable-for-TV movie or maybe a pimply boy band's love ballad, but I wasn't gonna call you on it. Not in the first conversation, anyway.

It took Carol three days to reach me on the phone. I guess somewhere in me I knew what she had to say, or maybe it was just the memory nag telling me that Carol has never been in too big of a hurry to give me any good news. Horrible, yes. Nasty, yes. But not good. She is the foul-weather fairy, bringing a cloud of rain with her wherever she goes.

How did it happen? Umpteen years of cholesterol lodged in his gut? A short fall out a tall window? Never mind, now I see it here in the obits, you're asking for donations to the Lung Cancer Society in lieu of flowers.

Smoking. The one vice he actually *called* a vice. God. I hope he didn't spend his last days in one of those stupid tents, with the oxygen hookup and the painkiller on tap sucked through a tube. He thrived on his own pain, relished it; wallowed in it like a warm bath. To deny him that crucial little bit of comfort would have been damned cruel.

You don't want to know how I feel, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I feel cheated. I feel scammed. I feel pickpocketed. I wanted to ask him things. Wasn't that my right? I want to know if he had trouble sitting through songs and movies and magazines with their posters of airbrushed happy families without screaming; I want to know if he thinks I grew up strong or pretty or wise; I want to hear his version of what happened on That Day and see his face as he tells it.

I want to know what he told himself. I want to know where the other half of my story is.

No, I'm not going to the wake. I don't want to see it. The snapshot I imprinted in my brain has no wrinkles etched into it, no creaky knees or sagging jowls or wispery old-man farts. No spare tire around the midsection, no reddish spots of age, no disappearing hairline. Just razor stubble that tickled, and a strong back for carrying, and eyes of washed-out blue.

There's no wake for those. They've already been burned and buried, long ago.

And you: in my picture you have chipmunk cheeks and chicken-fluff blond hair, and a little bit of spittle leftover from a baggy full of Cheerios. Even if my last sighting of you was dated just yesterday, I will still miss that baby. Just as I will remember the washed-out blue and revere him and maybe even love him but I will still hate that old man.

Did he cry afterwards? Did he shut himself up inside? Did he refuse to say my name? I know how that feels, too, to throw away a match not because it's useless but because once upon a time it held a fire.

No, really, it's all right. I would've done the same thing. In fact, I almost did.

Because I was the one who forgot.

A child's mind can't help but scab over the bad parts. That's what my shrink says, anyway.

Even now I can't see the faces of the most critical players; they're all fuzzy and smeared and steam-wrinkled. I see myself, and you, and a highchair being shoved back and forth between two sets of strong hands.

I see dishes being broken, and sometimes I even dream about the murmured screams. But not them. Not those two about to decide who was whose and who went where.

Maybe I'm easy to blame, because I'm easy to remember. I remember me and you remember me, and I remember some part of me believed that if I went with her I could always come back, but if I stayed she never would.

No, that's not it. I'm not saying it right.

I knew if I left, I could keep getting fresh starts. Fresh starts, hot and toasty, plopped right into my lap over and over and over again. Houses that didn't smell like babies. Apartments missing the marks on the baseboard showing how much we'd grown. New schools and new friends who envied my mysteriousness, who didn't ask questions.

Who went where. Who was whose.

I am choosing to believe that he lost the ability to speak those last eight minutes, or didn't want to. I am choosing to place the blame on his stubborness, and not on you, because if I can't ever forgive you for your silence I would just as soon not know.

You ever noticed that? How corpses make useful little dumpsters for stuff like blame, and love, and forgiveness, and pity? The dead are lucky; they don't know what a mess they've made of things and wouldn't care if they did. At every funeral, it's ourselves we cry for.

What you think you know is this: that I was the golden one, the chosen child, the one she wanted to keep.

What you refuse to remember is this: she wanted both of us, and I was the only one he didn't want.

I do know that I want you to lie to me.

I want you to tell me that I'm forgiven.

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