Five Days in Summer

then twelve. Caro was seventeen and it had been eight years since they’d lived together. Will thought she was beautiful: slight and pale with very long brown hair tangling down herback. She tended not to look at anyone except Will, her little brother, her only full-blooded relative. The others she avoided as if she knew what they thought: that Caro was “on drugs and sleeping around at her age,” said Aunt Judy over dinner the night before Caro’s arrival, and “putting too much stress on Grandpa and Grandma,” who had taken her in because at the time she was considered an easy child. “Well not anymore!” Judy had said. So Caroline was leaving their grandparents’ home in upstate New York and was coming to stay with the Parkers in Westport, Connecticut, until she decided to either get a job or go to college. It was 1973.
    Caro sat next to Will at the dinner table that first night while the family chattered and mostly accepted her silence, partly because it was the Parker family philosophy not to peel back someone else’s layer of privacy, and partly because they didn’t understand this girl who had been pried screaming from the apartment of her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend the very day of his arrest for dealing drugs. Heroin. It was bad. Caro came to the family in summertime, wearing long black sleeves. Will noticed Aunt Judy’s eyes crisply record that fact and file it away behind half-lowered lids.
    And so Caro came to them and stayed only briefly. Will was happy that the bedroom reshuffling had put them alone together: “They’re siblings” — this was Steve — “it’ll give them a chance to reacquaint.” Will got ready for bed in his green summer pajamas — teeth brushed, face cleaned, hair slicked neatly behind his ears — and found her waiting for him in her black sleeves, on the edge of her borrowed cousin’s bed. Will pulled back his covers and sat cross-legged on his plaid sheet and looked over at his big sister and smiled. Caro nodded, then told him something he had never known.
    “They didn’t die right away, Willie.” She had brown eyes, a clear brown like antique light, and they reminded him of something he couldn’t grasp.
    “But Judy and Steve said they did.”
    “I know they told you that.”
    Will shrugged. He had not reached puberty yet and his shoulders were skinny. He felt like a baby in Caro’s eyes and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what she had to tell him. His life here had been pretty good, but hers hadn’t gone as well, and maybe, he wondered, just maybe he’d be better off not knowing.
    “They didn’t want to tell you,” Caro continued, “but you were there, so it’s not like you don’t already know.”
    She had those familiar eyes, clear and ancient as amber, and when she turned them toward the window, away from him, Will felt a thread of panic at the departure of her gaze.
    “What?” he asked his sister.
    “Mrs. Simon brought us to the hospital the next day, to see Mommy,” Caro said softly. “Don’t you remember? Daddy had died that morning in the hospital.”
    Will shook his head; he didn’t remember.
    “I went in first. You waited in the hall with a nurse. Then Mrs. Simon brought me out and you had your turn.”
    Caro waited and still Will couldn’t recall anything other than the long-reiterated fact that both their parents had died instantly in a car crash on their way to register Caroline for summer camp, then go out to lunch. That it had all happened so fast they felt nothing, thought nothing; that the crash had worked quicker than their brains and they never had a chance to realize they were dying. “It was like turning off a light,” Aunt Judy had told him quietly, thinning a tearacross his cheek. “They didn’t feel any pain.” This simple fact had always reassured him.
    “What did Mommy say to you?” Caro asked Will, her thin legs bent like jointed sticks over the edge of the other bed. Her eyes back on him.
    “Nothing,” Will said. “I didn’t see her.”
    Caro’s lips bunched together and he was afraid she was angry with him. Her eyes narrowed. “She told me it would be my job to take care of you because you were just a baby.”
    “I was four.”
    “Almost four. She died the day before your birthday. Did you forget that too?”
    No, Will remembered that, but supposed now he had the timing wrong. It had been a store-bought cake, chocolate, with a cowboy riding a horse and a lasso bent above his hat. His