The Girl Death Left Behind

by Lurlene McDaniel

  She returned his smile. “My aunt and uncle were plenty mad when they found out she’d packed her stuff and taken off with Carl.”

  In truth, Camille had been horrified. She’d asked Beth, “Why didn’t you stop her? Or at least, come get us so we could stop her?”

  “It happened too fast,” Beth had told them. “How was I supposed to keep her from leaving? Throw myself under Carl’s wheels?”

  Beth looked up at Jared. “Call me reckless. But I didn’t do it to upset Terri. I did it to help out Sloane. You would have done the same thing.”

  “Probably, but kids expect it of me. Everybody knows I’m a rebel. You did it just because you’re a nice person.”

  Beth felt her cheeks grow warm, and she knew she was blushing. “I—I like Sloane, you know.”

  Jared smiled. “And that’s what makes you different, Beth. You look at people from the inside out instead of the other way around.”

  “That’s a good thing?”

  “That’s a very good thing.” Jared brushed her cheek, ever so softly, then left her standing in the hall with the feeling in her stomach of having swallowed a hundred butterflies.

  Beth,

  Got your present today and opened it without waiting till Christmas. The Orlando Magic shirt looks really cool. Thanks. The big news here—my brother is giving Shelby a ring for Christmas. Mom’s not thrilled (they’re too young, she says), but David’s already bought it. It’s sort of scary. David getting married and maybe having kids. Yikes! I’ll be an uncle. I’m not ready for this.

  Too bad you’re not here. The church group is having a big party and going caroling. You know how bad I sing, but I’m going because Marcie’s going. We both miss you, but I’m into your pretending game—I’m making believe you’re just away for a week and will be back. I do that, you know—pretend you’re coming back here to live.

  Well, Mom’s yelling at me to come with her to the mall, so I’ll write more later. T.

  P.S. My gift to you is in the mail.

  Beth,

  Our church youth group went Christmas caroling last night and I went with Teddy. Well, not exactly WITH him, but he went and I went, so that should count as a semidate, don’t you think? We went to the county old folks’ home and walked the halls and sang happy Christmas songs. Except the home isn’t a very happy place. Some of the patients were pretty out of it. One old woman grabbed my hand and asked, “Is that you, Tessie? Oh, Tessie, where have you been? Can you take me home?” I started to cry. Poor old lady! Anyway, Teddy put his arm around me and later when we were outside, he kissed me. Full on the mouth. I almost fainted.

  Write soon. M. Your gift’s in the mail—hope you like it!

  Hey Marcie—

  Sounds like you and Teddy are getting on pretty fine. That’s good. You’re both my friends. Still. No matter how much distance is between us.

  This is the first year in my whole life ever that I’m dreading Christmas. I’m not kidding you, I wish I could go to sleep and wake up when it was all over. We decorated the tree on Saturday. Aunt Camille and Uncle Jack have an artificial tree, not a live one like we always had. Even after we got all the ornaments on, it still looked fake to me.

  I’ll never figure out Terri. One day she’s nice to me, the next she hates me. She talks real rude to Aunt Camille sometimes too. But I bought her a Christmas present anyway. Did I tell you that Sloane gave me a pearl stud for my belly button? It’s really cool. Course you’re the only one besides her who knows I’ve had it pierced, and you’re good at keeping secrets.

  So here’s another secret. I’ll be glad when school’s out next week. And glad when it starts up again. I feel all mixed up inside. And I wonder if my parents are looking down from heaven and seeing me. If they are, then they know how much I miss them. I wish Christmas would just go away this year. B.

  “Why are you sitting alone in the dark, Aunt Camille?” Beth paused in the doorway of the living room. Camille sat on the sofa, staring at the Christmas tree.

  “Thinking,” Camille said. “Remembering.”

  Beth heard her aunt blow her nose and realized what she was thinking about.

  “Would you come sit beside me?” Camille asked.

  Hesitant, Beth walked to the sofa. “Do you want the lights on?”

  “No.”

  The curtains were open, and the tree was silhouetted against the night sky. Without lights, the tree looked dreary and colorless. The presents had been opened that morning, and the floor beneath the tree now looked barren. A cold wave of loneliness spread through Beth, making her shiver.

  “Did you have an okay Christmas?” her aunt asked.

  “It was all right.” Beth didn’t want to tell her the truth—she’d had a horrible Christmas.

  “No, it wasn’t. Every one of us knew exactly what was missing.”

  Beth squeezed her hands into fists, letting her nails cut into her palms. She didn’t want to burst out crying, and maybe the pain in her hands would substitute for the pain in her heart. “You and Uncle Jack gave me lots of presents. I—I really liked everything you got me.”

  “When I shopped this year, I saw so many things I wanted to get my sister.” Camille’s voice broke. “Every store had something. I’d hurry over and pick up it up and think to myself, ‘Won’t Carol love this!’ and then I’d remember. Like a cold glass of water hitting me in the face—I’d remember. I’ll never buy Carol a present again.”

  Camille reached over and wrapped her palm around Beth’s closed fist. “Oh, Beth. I miss my sister so much. You’re all I have of her. All that’s left of her. Please, please don’t ever leave me.”

  17

  “I—I don’t know what you mean.” Beth felt as if the air had been sucked from her. Camille’s emotion was heavy, like a weight crushing Beth’s chest.

  “I know you’re going to grow up and go away, Beth. You’ll go to college. You’ll get married. You’ll move a thousand miles from us and I won’t see you.”

  “But that’ll be years from now.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Without you, I don’t have Carol.” Camille leaned her head against the sofa cushion and stared up at the ceiling. “Sometimes when I hear your voice, you sound like Carol did when she was a kid. And sometimes when I look at you, when the light hits you right, you look so much like your mother that I have to look twice just to make certain it isn’t her.”

  “You think I look like Mom?”

  “More than I ever looked like her. I took after Daddy’s side of the family, but Carol was all Mom—your grandmother Talbert, that is.”

  “Mom used to talk to me about Grandma.” Beth’s mother’s memories had been tender and interesting to a point. But sometimes Beth had grown bored with stories about a woman she had never—could never—meet.

  Camille dabbed at her eyes. “Our mom died when you and Terri were barely a year old, and Carol and I missed her terribly. She was a wonderful mother.”

  You never get over losing your mother. The pain was with Camille to this day, Beth saw. Yet Camille’s mother had died many years before. The same would hold true for Beth. The pain of her loss would never leave her, not completely anyway. The realization did not bring her comfort. She couldn’t imagine going through the rest of her life with this terrible pain.

  “Carol was so much like Mom,” Camille said. “And you’re so much like your mother. So all my memories get trotted out when I least expect it.” She patted Beth’s hand. “You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “And then add to it that I only had one child when I wanted several—well … it makes you all the more special to me, Beth.”

  “You’re saying I’m like another daughter?” Hadn’t Jack told her the same thing over Thanksgiving? Beth wondered how Terri would react to such a statement.

  “Yes, you’re another daughter to me. And you always will be.” Camille blew her nose again and stuffed the tissue into the pocket of her robe. “I kn
ow I can’t ever replace your mother in your heart, but I’ll always be here for you.”

  “I know that,” Beth said with a shrug. “And I know you and Uncle Jack are doing everything to make me feel at home.” She didn’t say, “But this isn’t home,” though that was what she was thinking.

  “It’s been five months since the accident.”

  “Five months, three weeks, and two days,” Beth said. “To be exact.”

  “Getting through this isn’t easy, Beth. It’s going to take years.”

  Beth picked at a thread that had come loose on the arm of the sofa. It unraveled and she tugged, but it didn’t come off. “Sometimes something happens and I think, ‘Wait till I tell Mom.’ Then I remember, there is no Mom to tell.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “It’s not the telling,” Beth explained. “It’s the knowing I can’t ever talk to her again. Or to Dad, or to Allison or Doug.” She wrapped the thread around her finger and tugged hard. It stayed anchored.

  “I know what you mean. Sometimes I think about all the things I wanted to say to them. The things I wanted to tell them. But I didn’t, because I thought, ‘I’ll save it until next time I call,’ or ‘It’ll keep until I see them next time.’ Except there was no next time.”

  “I was crabby to Allison and Doug,” Beth said, her voice small and sad. “I should have been nicer.”

  “Don’t think that way.” Camille reached for Beth’s free hand. “You were a good daughter. Your parents were so proud of you. Your mom bragged on you all the time. Every week when we talked she had some story to tell me about how terrific you were.”

  Slowly Beth unwrapped the thread from her finger. It wouldn’t pull off. It would have to be cut. Just like her ties to her family. She patted the thread into place. Cutting it wasn’t an option just now. “I’m glad you and Mom were close,” she said. “It makes it easier knowing that you liked each other so much.”

  “We were close,” Camille said. “That’s what’s making this Christmas extra difficult. They should be here.”

  “No, you should be up at our house,” Beth said. “It was your turn to come visit us.”

  “So it was.”

  Beth cleared her throat. “What you said earlier, about me looking like Mom, well, sometimes when you laugh, I hear Mom. Your laugh sounds a lot like hers. Sometimes when you’re talking on the phone, I close my eyes and hear my mom.”

  “Does it upset you?”

  Beth thought about it. “No … it’s a good thing. I don’t want to forget.”

  “A wise person once said that so long as one person remembers you, you’ll never really be dead.”

  “Maybe that’s why you and Mom used to talk about Grandma Talbert so much—to keep her alive.”

  Camille cocked her head and turned toward Beth. “Perhaps you’re right. So that means anytime you want to talk about your mother, feel free to come to me.”

  At the moment Beth couldn’t imagine wanting to. Already this conversation had stirred up tremendous pain inside her heart. Her throat ached with the weight of unshed tears. And it was hard to keep pretending that her family was back home while she was just visiting her aunt and uncle. Talking about her family made the illusion fade, made the horror of her loss too real. Not trusting her voice, she nodded.

  She stood. “I’m pretty tired.”

  “Go on to your room,” Camille urged. She caught Beth’s hand. “Just remember this: We’ll never have to get through the first Christmas without them again. We’ve done it. That milestone is behind us, and we’ll never have to do it again.”

  Beth grasped her aunt’s point, but it brought her little comfort. Certainly there would never be another first time, but there would be many more Christmases she’d have to spend without them. All the Christmases for the rest of her life.

  “I saw you and Mom sitting in the living room in the dark.” Terri’s words sounded accusatory.

  Beth was in her room, tinkering with her computer. Her cousin had come in unasked. “We were talking.”

  “I don’t care.” Terri jabbed Beth’s shoulder, making her turn in the chair to face her. “But here’s something you need to remember.”

  Terri’s eyes were narrowed and looked glittering and hard. Beth looked up in genuine surprise. “And what’s that?”

  “She’s my mother. And this is my house. And you’re just a relative. And even though everybody feels really sorry for you, you don’t belong here.”

  Terri spun on her heel and stalked from the room.

  Stunned, unable to speak or move, Beth stared after her, feeling as if she’d just been struck hard across the face.

  SPRING

  18

  “For a girl having a birthday party, you don’t look very happy.”

  Jared’s voice jarred Beth into the moment. She was at the ice-skating rink where her aunt and uncle were throwing her and Terri a joint birthday party. She had been sitting on a bench, staring moodily into the rink full of skaters, unwilling to join them. “I don’t feel much like partying,” she said as Jared sat down beside her.

  “Didn’t you tell me that once before?”

  He was referring to the first time they met, when he’d found her half hiding beneath the banyan tree in LuAnne’s yard. She smiled sheepishly. “Maybe so. But this is really Terri’s party. I’m just baggage.”

  “The cake in the game room has your name on it too. I checked.”

  “You’re the only one who showed up for me. When I asked Sloane, she said, ‘No way.’ She can’t stand Terri and said she wouldn’t fit in. She was sorry, but …” Beth shrugged. “I don’t hold it against her or anything. I understand how she feels.”

  “You could have invited others.”

  “There was no one else I wanted to invite.”

  “So you have a fifty percent turnout. What’s so bad about that?”

  She looked at him and felt self-conscious, ashamed. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I’m really glad you showed up. It was nice of you.”

  “Hey, there was free cake.” He grinned.

  “I don’t feel fifteen,” Beth said, hanging her head and scuffing her shoes against the wooden floor.

  “How’s fifteen supposed to feel?”

  “Happy.”

  He stood and hauled her up beside him. “Come outside with me for a minute. It’s too noisy in here.”

  They went out into the parking lot, where the March air felt warm. She slipped off her sweater and tied it around her waist. Stars glittered in the dark sky, and light from an overhead lamp cast a circle of yellow on the asphalt where they stood. “I can’t get used to the weather here,” she said. “Back home, it’s usually still cold on my birthday.”

  “I’ve heard about spring,” Jared said. “Never experienced it myself, though.”

  “I’m sorry I’m acting so dopey. I know I’m no fun to be around.”

  “Maybe this will cheer you up.” He held out a small box.

  “For me?” For some reason it surprised her. Then she reminded herself that it was her birthday, after all.

  “No, for Terri.”

  She smiled up at him, then shook the box. “Is it a pony?”

  “Man, I can’t ever fool you.”

  She ripped off the paper and discovered a small, intricately carved wooden jewelry box.

  “I heard you had a collection of belly button rings,” he said.

  She blushed because he knew such an intimate thing about her. “Sloane told you? Can’t I have any secrets?”

  “Don’t be mad. I sweated it out of her.”

  She smiled again to show she’d been teasing. “Thanks. Really. I like it a lot.”

  “It came from India. At least that’s what the lady at the store told me.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “One other thing,” he said.

  She looked up expectantly.

  “Happy birthday, Beth.” Without warning, he lifted her chin and kissed her full on the lips. The kiss was quick
; she didn’t even have time to close her eyes.

  Her breath caught, her heart thudded, and the world seemed to tilt. She drew back. His face was shielded from the light, so she couldn’t see his expression. She fought against touching her fingertips to her mouth, where she could still feel the slight pressure of his lips. She didn’t know what to say. No boy had ever kissed her before, not in the way Jared just had. “I—I—”

  “Better get back,” he said, cutting off words she didn’t have anyway. He put his arm around her and walked her inside.

  Sloane was crying. Her nose had turned red, and her mascara made black rings under her eyes. They were outside school the day before spring break was to begin. Feeling helpless, Beth asked, “But are you absolutely sure you won’t pass?”

  “Mr. Holwerda told me so,” Sloane said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “He said I missed too many days so I’ll have to repeat.”

  Beth fumbled in her purse for a tissue. If the principal had told Sloane she was going to fail, it must be true. “Why’d you miss so much?”

  “I skipped.” Sloane took the tissue and gave Beth a sullen look. “School’s boring. It’s more fun doing other things.”

  “Then why are you so broken up about it?”

  “Because I’ll be left behind while everybody else goes on to high school. I don’t want to be left behind.” She shook her head. “Boy, my old man’s going to be pissed.”

  “What will he do to you?” Beth’s heart seemed to contract at the prospects.

  “Yell and scream and call me stupid. That’s what he always does.”

  “Can’t you go to summer school?”

  “I won’t go to summer school. It sucks.” Carl drove up. The noise from his faulty muffler drowned out Sloane’s voice. She jumped up from the stone bench where she was sitting with Beth and grabbed her stuff.

  Beth took Sloane’s arm. “Would you like to talk some more about it? Maybe spend the weekend with me?”