Brothers and Bones by James Hankins

all the time, every hour, day and night. As the months passed, then the years, those feelings grew less strong. Less and less often I felt the cold touch of faceless eyes on me at a supermarket or in a mall. As I improved, we reduced my sessions to biweekly then, eventually, to the monthly schedule we’d been keeping for the past few years. The feelings never went away completely, though. From time to time they’d come back, nearly as strong, but they’d fade away again and I’d have relative peace for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two. The past few months had been the best so far. Fielding and I had made real progress.
    “Charlie?” Fielding said.
    I blinked a couple of times. “Sorry. Daydreaming, I guess.”
    At Fielding’s prompting, I began talking. The good doctor nodded now and then while I covered things very generally at first—my slow death in court the day before, my relationship with Jessica, my very mild and slightly petty annoyance with the strength of the bond between her and her father. When the conversation moved to my parents, as it often did, Fielding spoke less and nodded more. He took notes the whole time. Or, who knows, maybe he was working on a crossword puzzle concealed in his notebook.
    Then we moved on to well-trodden ground. He asked, as he did every month, “And how have you been feeling about Jake lately?” as if I might suddenly decide that my brother, who I’d long believed to be some of God’s best work, was in fact a prick. But I knew what he was asking. How was I dealing lately with Jake’s disappearance? Had I come closer during the past month to truly accepting that he was gone? Was I was still making efforts to find out what happened to him or was I nearer to that point in my life, which had eluded me so far, where I could finally move on? I lied and told him that nothing had changed for me. I could have mentioned the homeless guy who may or may not have been Jake, but I kept that to myself. I had hope at the moment, slim and fragile as it was, and I didn’t want Fielding crushing it under the heel of his canvas sneaker. Once I’d seen it through, maybe I’d share it with him. But not yet.
    Fielding made a few more notes, or possibly filled in the letters for seventeen across, then said, “And how’d you do this past month with your other issue?”
    He always called it that. “You mean, has anyone been following me?”
    He smiled. “No, I mean, have you thought anyone has been following you.”
    It was the same semantic dance we did every month. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t really believe me, either. I thought about ducking my “other issue” this session. I was tired and wasn’t really in the mood to get into it. But I was there to get better, right?
    “Well, actually, yeah, Dr. Fielding,” I said. “I know I’ve been doing pretty well lately, but I had the feeling again. And I thought I heard footsteps.”
    He nodded and made some more notes, then said, “The feeling that you’re being followed?”
    It was my turn to nod. I liked Fielding, but sometimes he had a way of saying things that made me feel paranoid. Then again, that was his clinical diagnosis.
    “Want to tell me about it?” he asked.
    I actually did want to. I usually found it reassuring when he asked me why anybody would want to follow me around for thirteen years. And, he usually asked, even if someone was doing that, why wouldn’t that person have confronted me? Why simply follow? And watch? Year after year after year. It didn’t make sense. And he was right. I could see that. So I told him about my feelings lately—in general and, in particular, on the streets the night before. Again, and for the same reason as before, I didn’t yet share with him the homeless man in the Harvard sweatshirt. That would wait for now.
    When I finished speaking, he sang me a familiar song, one he serenaded me with once a month. I’d been considering taking up the harmonica so