The person was my brother.
His name was Danny, and he had Down syndrome, and he had died when I was in my late twenties, eight years before Leo was born.
Leo had never met Danny.
He knew he had an uncle who died before he was born, because I had told him this as a fact when he was old enough to understand facts about family structure, but I had not told him much beyond that, not because I was protecting Danny’s memory from Leo specifically, but because grief has its own timeline and the grief for Danny had been something I carried in a particular way, the way you carry things that do not have a clean resolution, and I had not found the right moment to bring it forward.
Or I had told myself this.
It is possible that what I had been doing was not waiting for the right moment but avoiding the conversation that the right moment would require.
Leo looked at the photographs.
He looked at the one on top, which was a school photograph of Danny at about ten, the formal background and the good shirt and the specific quality of a school photograph in which a child is not performing anything, just being themselves for the camera.
“Who is this?” Leo said.
“Your uncle Danny,” I said.
Leo was quiet.
He picked up the photograph.
“Mom,” he said.
“He had Down syndrome,” I said. “Like our waiter tonight.”
Leo put the photograph down very carefully.
He looked at me.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” I said. “About Danny. I’m going to tell you some of them.”
I sat down across from him.
I am going to try to tell you what I told Leo, not verbatim, because I did not speak in complete sentences and I do not have perfect memory, but in substance.
Danny was three years younger than me, which meant we had grown up together in the specific way that older and younger siblings grow up, with the whole range of that experience, the competition and the alliance and the particular love that forms when you are each other’s closest companion for the years when the world is very large and you are very small.
