“Three-inch gaps,” my coworker said.
“That’s what the bride told us.” She set down
the lemonades and rearranged a chair.
“You realize no one’s gonna die,” Alex said.
I snorted. My coworker stopped what she was doing.
With a short, low hiss, she repeated her cousin’s name.
“I’m fine,” Alex said.
The way Alex said the word “fine.”
The look on her cousin’s face in response.
I felt the sense of being misunderstood,
the awkward feeling when other people
desperately want you to be someone different.
Normal. Maybe because you’re embarrassing.
Maybe because you’re too sad.
“Okay, I’m not fine. Of course I’m not fine.
But it’s funny. Right?”
“It’s funny,” I replied, because I wanted
her to know that I saw her,
not as a tragic story, locked into a genre,
with a formula and an ending.
She almost startled at my response,
like she recognized me, that I wasn’t
a stranger she just met for the first time.
“Hey, we’re going to a party later.
You should join,” she said.
My coworker gave Alex a look
that said, We’re not actually friends.
You don’t have to invite her.
But she did, maybe because she needed to know
that there were people in this world
who could understand her.
Row
“Are these her friends?”
Kennedy says, and I almost forgot
that she was even here.
The screen is a series of photos
of girls I don’t know.
I expand a photo to get a better look.
I can tell that these girls
are trying too hard.
The way they tilt their chins
forward and slightly upturned.
The way they smile
and plead for attention.
I glance at my sister’s stats.
Ariana has a thousand photos.
Ariana has a thousand followers.
But I’m not convinced that Ariana
has any friends.
Kennedy kinda looks at me
in a way that suggests she knows
something is up.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
She sets down her phone.
“We can talk about whatever is going on.
Because obviously something is going on.”
I ignore Kennedy.
It’s a serious contradiction,
to want to be heard, to want to be listened to,
to want to feel what I feel without clothing it
in unruffled indifference
and then not letting
Kennedy in.
Why do I act this way?
Why do I say the things
that I say?
Why do words sometimes come to me
all at once like an unstoppable nosebleed,
or sometimes never at all?
Why do we want to be our true, real, full selves,
but only around certain people?
Maybe it’s because with sisters,
you can say and be the person you are,
and there’s no choice in whether or not
to accept you. They just do,
because you’re sisters.
At least that’s what
I always believed
would be true.
I thought Ariana and I
had a solid relationship,
that our fights were normal
sisterly fights. About using
all the hot water. About eating
that last yogurt. About who was going
to tell Dad about the nail polish
we spilled on the carpet. Or the soda
we spattered on the wall.
But I don’t know what
keeps her up at night.
I don’t know whether she worries
about test scores or fitting in
or finding her place
in the world.
It’s like Ariana
doesn’t want me to know her,
and I don’t know if she wants
to know me.
Maybe I shouldn’t expect
this much out of my sister.
Maybe I should let
other people in.
Kennedy sits quietly behind me,
watching me scroll
through Ariana’s feeds.
She points to more photos
and asks who everyone is.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I don’t know what Ariana sees
for herself next year,
but it scares me,
her leaving.
This time
and forever.
Ariana
When we arrived at the party, we could hear voices
and music from down the road.
There were acres of land between us
and the next plot, so there was no one
around to tell us to turn the volume down.
The party spilled onto the porch and into the fields.
Inside, I overheard a girl wearing boots
that looked like legitimate work had been done in them
talk about the record labels
and the patriarchal bullshit of the industry.
The room pulsed with confidence.
People had their shit together.
It intimidated me, for sure,
but I also felt this thrilling sense
that maybe this is what life could be like
in five or ten years.
Maybe I would be like the woman
with the loudest laugh in the room,
or the one with stories about
bad dates and terrible bosses.
Maybe instead of trying to make myself small,
I would be the woman
shouldering her way through the crowd,
barking at people as her beer splashed around.
I stood in the kitchen of the farmhouse,
sipping on cheap beer, trying to soak it all in.
Wanting to etch it into my brain
so that I could open it back up
and study this moment like a textbook.
A song came on and it throbbed under my skin,
and I was wedged in a conversation
I only sort of wanted to be in
because it made me feel less of a nobody
in a crowd full of somebodies.
I listened to the song play from the other room,
but no one was dancing.
From across the crowded kitchen, wedged between
the sink and refrigerator, I saw Alex swaying to the beat,
stuck in a conversation she was no longer listening to.
She looked over and saw me watching her,
but instead of feeling embarrassed, I bounced my shoulders
to the beat, and she nodded her head along with me.
Her mouth moved, but I couldn’t understand
what she was trying to say,
because all I could hear was the music
seeping into my skin, beating against my chest,
reminding me of what it feels like
to be alive.
Row
The battery life falls from 10 percent
to 9 while I hold open the phone
and scroll through pages of photos.
I reach one of Ariana’s earliest posts.
Six years ago.
A photo of a photo
of Ariana and me
and our mother,
which she printed out
/>
on computer paper
in black and white.
An image missing
the smell of sunscreen,
the sound of our mother laughing,
the taste of salt spray,
the feeling of sand between my toes.
Kennedy leans closer to look at the screen.
“Is that your mom?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” Kennedy says.
“For what?”
“It’s just shitty that you lost your mom.”
“There’s nothing to apologize about.”
“I know. But it sucks.”
“It’s life,” I say.
“It’s not fair,” Kennedy says.
It wasn’t.
It never will be.
Kennedy hands me a cord.
“Here. Use my phone charger.”
Ariana
Alex began showing up to my shift at the Wyndover Lodge
even when her cousin wasn’t working.
“So, what do you know about boats?” Alex asked.
“Uh, not much,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her
that boats reminded me of islands and islands
reminded me of Mom and Mom reminded me of,
well, a lot of things that I didn’t want to think about.
“Why?”
Alex hesitated. “Will you come sailing?”
I almost said no, but Alex glanced downward.
I recognized the gesture. When you want something,
so badly, but you’re scared of watching for a reaction.
“Sure. I’m off in twenty minutes.”
At the public dock, I found Alex tangled in a rope.
“Why the heck do you have a boat?”
Alex mumbled something that sounded like, “I inherited it.”
We fumbled with the sails
and floundered our way across the lake,
but eventually we sailed into a cove as daylight clung to the sky
the way a baby clung to its mother,
not wanting to go down for a nap.
“I used to love it here,” Alex said,
and I was struck by the way she said the words “used to”
like the way I would occasionally let it slip to strangers,
to people who don’t matter that I “used to” live in California,
because packed between those two little words
was a whole history that neither of us was talking about.
Row
Kennedy is distracted
by the rabbit hole she’s entered
scrolling through Ariana’s social-media feeds.
My phone is on Ariana’s desk,
and my eye lands on an empty spot
on a bulletin board above.
A subtle form of tightness
grows against my chest.
A grainy black-and-white image.
An ultrasound.
A printout that Ariana labeled
Calamansi
isn’t there.
I run my fingers
over the bare cork.
Two sisters gone.
Row
We were supposed to have
a baby sister.
We were supposed to have
something to love.
But I never got to touch her fuzzy head.
I never saw her feet.
We never had a chance
to call her
sister.
Ariana
In the cove, there were bugs everywhere,
hungry and eager for blood.
I felt one land on my bare shoulder, exposed,
and open for business like a twenty-four-hour drive-through.
Just as quickly as it landed, it began to stab me
with its needlelike mouthpiece.
I slapped at it and flicked the remnants
of its body into the water below.
“Tiny deaths,” Alex said.
“Huh?”
“What you just did.”
“Is this some sort of spiritual teaching moment?”
Alex shook her head. “It’s just what I’ve been thinking
for a new song. When is it okay to treat death
as inconsequential? Where do we draw the line
between big deaths and small deaths?
Who gets to define the significance of death?”
I tried to hear the questions turn into lyrics,
to find something resembling a rhythm
in the way she spoke, but that’s not what I heard.
It was the hollowness in the words
“death” and “inconsequential”
that I understood, that I could feel,
that I heard so clearly from inside.
“Who did you lose?” I finally asked.
She reached into her backpack and handed me
a can of bug spray. “Oh. I thought you knew.”
Row
I wanted so badly
to experience every aspect
of having a baby sister.
I spent hours imagining her name.
If my baby sister came out with chubby cheeks
and dumplings for legs,
I would name her Calamansi.
If she came out like a little loaf of bread,
I would name her Martha.
If she came out with an elongated torso
and a face that looked like a pickle, she would be Harper.
Dad and Maribel never asked for my opinion.
“We just don’t want to be influenced
by anyone else,” Maribel would say.
“Like, what if we choose a name
that is the same name as a girl
in your fourth-grade class
who didn’t invite you
to her birthday party?”
“Madison? Are you considering
naming her Madison?”
“No, but if we were,
that’s exactly the thing
we are worried about.”
“Don’t name your kid Madison.
She’s destined to be a bitch,” I said.
“Row. Language,” Dad interrupted.
“Okay she’s destined to be
not a nice person.”
“Well, I can assure you
that Madison is not
on our short list of names.”
“What about Amista?” I said.
Amista like our mother.
Neither of them said anything
for a minute.
“Not as a first name,”
Maribel finally responded.
“But maybe a middle name.”
“Calamansi Amista Lujan,” I said,
and Maribel only gave me a quizzical look.
“You’re referring to the fruit?” Dad said.
“Calamansi,” Ariana said
as she joined us in the kitchen.
Dad and Maribel looked at each other,
in the kind of way that suggested
they needed to have a talk.
Neither of them was keen on naming
their child after a fruit, but it was trendy
so maybe they should give it some thought?
They never told us her name.
But whatever name
she would have been given,
I knew that to Ariana and me,
she would always be
our Calamansi.
Ariana
Biology. Genetics. Fate. With all of the discoveries
and vaccines and treatments available in modern medicine,
human beings were not yet smart enough to save everyone.
Was it a matter of studying harder? Or collecting better data?
Or bringing more voices not yet heard into the medical field?
Why are we even here if we are only meant to die?
Is it better to save people from their death,
or
prepare us all for the inevitability?
“My brother. Overdose. Five months ago,”
Alex said, staring out onto the water.
“This was his.” She waved at the boat and the sails.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s not enough, I know,
but… yeah…” I trailed off.
The light in the distance flickered and faded.
The water around us settled into a silent presence,
like fog or heat or smell.
Right after my mother died, I overheard adults
refer to it as “untimely.” But what did that even mean?
I loved Mom. I couldn’t imagine whether she was 42 or 102
that her death would have hurt any less.
There was no right time for my mother to die,
because when someone we love dies,
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