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for a shade that can obscure the memory of Flatley Creek on that ineffaceable winter evening. Closing my eyes doesn’t work because the inside of my eyelids turn into Imax projection screens. Some nights the memories are so vivid that I have to tape my eyelids and sleep with my eyes wide open. The paper tape is loose enough for me to blink but too tight for my eyes to stay closed. I used regular tape for a while, but after a few nights, I looked kind of funny without any eyebrows or lashes.
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    Caleb was able to forget that December night and everything about our life before that night. He didn’t have to deal with thetragedy because he slipped into a coma and was spared the heartbreak of knowing what had transpired. Every day, I sat next to Caleb’s bed and prayed for him to wake up. I was relieved when he didn’t. When he awoke from the coma two years and six days later, he was diagnosed with psychogenic amnesia. His entire life had been erased. He didn’t know who he was or who I was. And he didn’t ask about Mom or Dad. He never even questioned why he was in the hospital. Two weeks passed before Uncle Walter and I told him that Mom and Dad were dead. We didn’t tell him how they died because his eyes were uninhabited, which meant it was hard to gauge his response to the knowledge that they were dead.
    Why was I remembering this?
    I was by his side every waking moment for several weeks after he came out of the coma. At first, we barely spoke, which in hindsight was a good thing because I didn’t know what to say to him. When we did converse, it was because I had asked a question or made a comment and he responded.
    That was also when we discovered that Caleb had developed an acute case of agoraphobia. His fear of the world outside the hospital room was virulently crippling. He couldn’t even stand to be in the room with the windows open, so, the loss of his memory was the least of our problems. However, it turned out that his memory loss was an asset when it came time to move on with our life. We were both starting with a clean slate. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make our new life work, but I knew I had to find a way to take care of Caleb and to help him move into our new life.
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    Three weeks after Caleb woke up from the coma, his doctors felt he was ready to be released. They suggested that Caleb and I both seek counseling to help us deal with the emotional impact of the past two years, but neither of us thought counseling wasnecessary. However, when it came time for us to leave the hospital, Caleb became extremely anxious. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he was nervous because he couldn’t remember his life before the accident, which meant he had no idea what life was like outside of his hospital room. I assured him that life was no different outside the hospital and he calmed down. An hour before we left the hospital, doctors sedated Caleb so that an ambulance could transport him home. Uncle Walter and Aunt Girlie were against us moving back into our parents’ house, but we moved in anyway.
    When Caleb woke up in his bedroom at our parents’ house, he lay in bed staring around at his unfamiliar surroundings. He knew he was in his bedroom at our parents’ house, but he could not remember ever being there. He asked, “Where am I?”
    â€œYou’re home,” I answered.
    â€œHome?” he asked.
    â€œOur home.”
    A lasting vestige of that December night was my brother’s inability to remember our life with Mom and Dad. He saw their pictures on the walls; sat in Dad’s recliner every day; cooked in Mom’s cast iron skillet; and thoroughly cleaned their bedroom once a year. He even wrote about them, well at least a made-up version of them, in a blog, “The (not so true) Way I Remember It.” But to this day, neither one of us had ever said a word to each other about Mom or Dad.
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    The woman I met at