The Truth of Letting Go

by Amy Sparling

  Cece reaches for the keypad on the side of the garage door.

  “There’s no electricity,” I say, holding up the single key I took from the rack near our back door. “We have to go inside the old school way.”

  She stares at the key and frowns. “Right. I’m just used to going in the garage.”

  She follows me to the front door, where the potted ferns that Aunt Summer used to decorate with lights for Christmas are now dead, their leaves flaking away with the wind. I go to unlock the door but then I stop.

  “Do you want to do it?” I ask, holding up the key.

  She shakes her head. “You do it.”

  Cece is two inches taller than me and she outweighs me by three jeans sizes, but right now she looks like the ten-year-old who cried into my shoulder while the pastor gave a sermon at her parents’ funeral. My heart begins to pound as I realize what I’ve done. Mom didn’t want us coming here alone for a reason. What if this is too much for her? Do I have the strength to get her back in the car safely if she freaks out?

  Cece clears her throat. “Do you need me to teach you how to unlock a door?”

  “Oh ha-freaking-ha,” I say, rolling my eyes. Sarcasm means she’s fine. This will be fine. It takes a little elbow grease to get the deadbolt to twist and unlock, but finally it works and the door frame crunches as I push open the heavy metal door. It’s like entering a crypt.

  Everything smells stale and old, stagnant. Dead. There’s not even a hint of the lilac potpourri Aunt Summer kept all over the house in little crystal dishes. I let Cece walk in first, and then I look to the wooden shelf in the foyer. The dish of potpourri is still there, covered in a fine layer of dust, but its fragrance wore off years ago.

  The air is thick as we make our way through the foyer and into the living room. I let Cece set the pace, and I stay a few steps behind her while she takes it all in. There are spider webs in the corners, dust covering everything. The hot June air makes my skin sticky with sweat but it doesn’t seem to bother Cece. She walks into the living room; the only sound is her flip flops smacking on the hardwood floor. She runs her fingers across the back of their brown suede couch, the one with the black Sharpie stain on the side from when Cece and I were making a college of cute boys from magazines one morning.

  That was the day I officially decided Justin Bieber was kind of cute after years of declaring that I hated him and preferred Austin Mahone as my boy celebrity crush. Aunt Summer told us to take a break from collaging because she had made waffles for breakfast. We covered them in spray whipped cream.

  Weird how I remember these things. My throat feels like there’s a softball lodged inside it as I look at the framed pictures of what used to be a family, whole and happy.

  Cece walks into the kitchen, pulls open a drawer and takes out an ice cream scoop. She shoves it in the back pocket of her pink corduroy pants and closes the drawer. I lift an eyebrow. “The ice cream scoop at your house sucks,” she says, walking past me and into the hallway.

  I follow her, blinking as my eyes adjust to the near darkness in the narrow hallway. The walls are painted navy blue, a color that I guess was trendy years ago when Aunt Summer chose it. Cece stops at the second door to the left—her bedroom.

  “You okay?” I ask softly, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  She pushes open the door and a burst of light from the window burns my eyes. I squint and then follow her into her old room. Tears fill my eyes as I look around. It’s like a snapshot of five years ago. Cece’s white framed twin bed, Hello Kitty sheets all rumpled. There wasn’t room to bring it to our house so we shared my queen sized bed.

  Her dresser is here too, covered with plastic beads and necklaces she’d made over the summer. There was one to match every outfit she owned. The accordion door of her closet is half open, unwanted shoes and toys and clothes spilling everywhere. It hits me now that even though everything has changed, not much really has. Cece is still messy. She’s still colorful and matches jewelry to outfits she’s bought at the thrift store. She’s still obsessed with Hello Kitty and she’s still right here next to me like she always used to be.

  I turn around, the memory of Aunt Summer walking by with a smile on her face, a cup of chai tea in her hand so real I can almost see it. My heart clenches and I put a shaky hand to my mouth. “Shit,” I say, just as the hot tears stinging my eyes begin to fall.

  Cece turns around, her green eyes wide. “Lilah!”

  I am not expecting it at all when the person I barely talk to now pulls me into a hug. And it’s a good hug, too. All warm and squishy and smelling like Cece’s vanilla shampoo. She rocks slightly, holding onto me like she’s the adult here. Like she’s the one supposed to take care of me instead of the other way around. “We can leave.”

  I pull back and wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Why aren’t you crying about this? You’re not upset?”

  She gives me this sad smile, her eyes watery. “I am.” Her voice is soft as her lips slide to the side. “It’s these damned pharmaceuticals.” She gives a little shrug. “It makes it hard to feel anything.”

  I swallow and look down, wiping the remaining tears from my cheeks. Cece’s medication makes her appear normal to everyone else, but at the cost of the things that also make her human. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it. But some things have to be the way they are. She has to take her medication or she puts her life at risk. I may have forgotten a lot of things about our old friendship, but I’ll never forget the time she almost took her own life on accident. It was a manic episode and she had no idea what she was doing. If the drugs ensure that never happens again, then I’m a fan of the drugs.

  A moment of silence stretches out between us, and then Cece brightens. “Let’s get the other thing I came here for, then we can go home.”

  “What’s that?” I say, following her out into the hallway.

  She presses her hand to the door across from hers. Her shoulders rise and then she shoves it open. Thomas’s room still smells like him. His bed is gone, moved into his room at my house that now belongs to Cece. Stuffed animals and old shoes that used to be tucked underneath remain, and the carpet is still pressed in where each foot of the bed used to be, even after all these years. His room sports trophies and posters of video games. He was fifteen when he moved in with us, and he didn’t bring many things back then, just a bed, clothes, and a dresser. I hang back by the door while Cece gazes around the haphazard remainder of her brother’s old room.

  She walks over to the nightstand. I guess they never moved it to our house because it wouldn’t fit. She reaches for a framed picture of her and Thomas on Christmas morning. She was a pink-faced baby in a red Santa onesie and he was probably four or five with a jagged haircut he must have done to himself. Her hand stops just before she takes it. She jerks away and takes a step back.

  “Do you smell that?” she asks, her voice higher than usual.

  “Smell what?”

  “Thomas.”

  I walk into the room even though being this close to all these old memories feels like I’m suffocating. “I smell his cologne, yeah. He used to wear way too much of it.”

  “Coolwater,” she says so softly I almost don’t hear it. She points toward the nightstand and I walk over to see what’s got her so freaked out.

  A mostly empty blue glass bottle of men’s cologne sits on the nightstand next to the picture frame. “I’m surprised he didn’t take it with him,” I say. “He was obsessed with that stuff. Must have been in a hurry.”

  Cece shakes her head softly. When her eyes meet mine, there’s fear behind her green irises. She looks out the window into the back yard that’s overgrown and unkempt. “I wasn’t talking about the cologne,” she says.

  I look back at the nightstand. There’s cologne and a picture frame. “Then what are you talking about?”

  “This,” she says, pressing her finger to the clean circle of wood next to the bottle. “Everythin
g in this house is covered in dust, except this. The cologne was moved.” She looks up, her eyes searching franticly around the room. “Someone’s been in this house. Someone sprayed his cologne and that’s why it smells like him in here.”

  Chills prickle down my arms and I realize where she’s going with this the second her lips twist into a grin. I know I can’t let her hop on this conspiracy train of thought and ride it into a manic episode again.

  Deflect.

  Deflect!

  “Gross, there’s probably squatters in here,” I say quickly, grabbing the picture frame and shoving it into her hands. “We should go in case they come back. I’ve heard homeless people who squat in empty houses can be really violent.” At first I say it just to scare her, but then I scare myself. Someone has definitely been in this house, and they might still be here. “Let’s go.”

  She shakes her head, her knees locking as she roots herself to the dusty carpet in her dead brother’s bedroom.

  “You know what this means, Lilah?” Her eyes fill with tears again, but this time there’s no sadness in them, only joy.

  “It means we need to go,” I say, grabbing her arm. Of all the times her medication mutes her feelings, it has to stop working now? “We have to get out of here before the squatters come back. We’ll call the police and they’ll get it taken care of.”

  She shakes her head. “No, Lilah. It’s not squatters. It’s my brother. He’s been here recently.”

  She takes my hands in hers and squeezes them so hard it hurts. Her eyes have this fiery sparkle that sends a chill down my spine. “I knew it. This whole time I knew it.”

  “Cece—” I begin, but she cuts me off with a sharp glare.

  “Lilah, he’s alive.”

  Three months after Thomas turned sixteen, I tapped on his bedroom door and yelled that he was going to miss the bus if he didn’t hurry up. He didn’t say anything back, but Thomas was always running late, out-sleeping every cell phone alarm and human who yelled at him to wake up each morning. My cousins might have been brother and sister, but they had very different sleeping patterns. Cece was always awake before me.

  Knowing Thomas slept like a hibernating bear, I abandoned my efforts and stood at the end of our driveway with Cece. We got on the bus without him and I spent the entire day at school not thinking anything of it. Thomas had been grounded more than once for missing the bus and then making Mom or Dad late to work because they had to come back and get him. I was thirteen, and I didn’t care about any of that. We were studying human anatomy in science class and the boys kept whispering and laughing and pointing to the medical drawing of a penis on page 268 of our science textbook.

  That’s the thing about being blissfully unaware: I was telling Cece about the weirdly shaped medically drawn penis on page 268 when her brother was dying.

  It was just after lunch, and we were playing tetherball outside when the lady from the front office walked out with a woman, whose name was Joan I think, and I vaguely remembered her as one of the ladies who worked at Mom’s office. Mom wasn’t a superintendent back then; she was a principal at the high school.

  “Hi girls,” Joan said, bending down and putting her hands on her thighs to talk to us at eye level. Her short hair was dyed red and still smelled faintly like a hair salon. “Your parents sent me to come get you. And um, we need to stop and buy some asparagus.”

  Since my mom was a principal and my dad was a firefighter, we had all kinds of safety regulations in our house. From first aid kits in nearly every room, to a laminated handmade fire escape route with our mailbox as the meeting place, my parents made sure we knew about stranger danger, how to safely hide in a hurricane, and how to administer basic first aid. We also had a code word. Asparagus.

  “Don’t go with anyone for any reason unless they have the code word,” Mom had repeatedly instructed us during our bi-annual family safety meetings. “That’s how bad people kidnap children. They tell them something terrifying like their mom is in the hospital and then the kid will go with them because they don’t know any better. You two are not to believe anyone unless they have the code word.”

  Joan had the code word. Cece took my hand and squeezed it and didn’t let go the entire time we rode in the backseat of Joan’s BMW. I knew something terrible had happened, but Joan wasn’t talking. Cece’s parents had died only six months ago, and the wound was still fresh. Now my parents? Where would we go?

  But when we pulled into our driveway, there were two cop cars and my mom and dad, holding each other and crying. I looked at Cece and burst into a smile. My parents were alive. Whatever happened couldn’t be that bad because they were alive.

  In the end, a female police officer had to tell us what happened because my mom was crying so hard she couldn’t get any words out. The memory of that uniformed woman kneeling on the grass, taking me and Cece’s hands in hers, has become a permanent fixture in my mind. Like a framed photo of brain waves, I can relive it day after day, never forgetting a word or a single piece of what that day looked like.

  Her name was Officer Ruiz and she told us that Thomas was feared dead.

  He never called my parents that day to tell them he missed the bus. Instead, he must have walked to school himself, even though it was thirteen miles away. His backpack was discovered at the top of small bridge on Lone Pine drive, just three miles from home. There was blood all over it and blood on the road. Below the bridge, the Telico river was high and flowing fast that day. It could have easily floated him miles down toward the coast.

  It had the power to take him under. Take him whole.

  Cece’s brows furrowed as Officer Ruiz talked to us. She was a lot chubbier back then than she is now, and she crossed her arms over her stomach and gave the officer this prissy look, her brows furrowed and cheeks red. “So you didn’t find his dead body?” she said, using words with less tact than I would have chosen. “That means he’s not dead.”

  They never did find his body. But Thomas also never came home. And less than a year after our family had been all over the news for the tragic deaths of my aunt and uncle, we were on there again. Orphan Boy Presumed Dead.

  And as everyone slowly came to accept the gritty reality of what happened to Thomas, Cece stood alone in her stubborn rejection of the truth. She claimed habeas corpus. Without a body, she refused to believe that Thomas was gone.

  We’re sitting in Mom’s car in our driveway. Cece hasn’t stopped talking since we left her old house and I’ve barely heard a word she’s said. She talks animatedly, her pilfered ice cream scoop twirling around her hand. I can feel it happening, sense it coming like our feral backyard cat senses a thunderstorm before the clouds turn black. Cece’s medicated sanity is about to go off the rails again. She never believed that Thomas was dead, and I guess no one could blame her. She’d lost her parents and her brother in under a year, and as long as they never found a body, she wouldn’t let herself believe he was gone. Even though the blood later matched his DNA and they found bullet casings near his backpack proving what the police considered to be a shooting, a random act of violence that ended my cousin’s life mysteriously and quickly and horrifically. None of that matters to Cece.

  My knuckles turn white as I grip the steering wheel. My heart’s been pounding so hard on the drive home that it’s now sprung full on into an anxiety attack and I am freaking out.

  I catch the tail end of Cece’s sentence, “—he probably got amnesia all these years and was picked up by a potato farmer and brought back to Idaho and now he finally remembered where he’s from and he came home to find us.”

  Why a potato farmer would be driving through Texas is beyond me. She turns to me, her eyes wide and full of adventure. “He came to find us and we weren’t there, Lilah. Can you imagine how terrifying that was for him?”

  “You’re forgetting the fact that if he came looking for us, he’d have come to my house,” I say. I cut the engine and shove the keys deep into my left jeans pocket so she can’t do somethin
g crazy like try to take them from my hand. “That’s where he lived when he was killed. He lived right here.” I point at our house in front of us, grateful to be home, but that’s only part of the problem right now. I need to get Cece back inside and take her mind of this ridiculous subject before she takes it too far.

  I keep my voice calm. “Life isn’t a fairytale. Thomas is dead. I’m sorry, but he is.”

  She shakes her head and chuckles under her breath. “You’re just like those people who believed the world was flat even after scientific evidence proved otherwise. I feel sorry for you, Lilah.”

  Gritting my teeth, I throw open my door and jump out of the car. Cece does the same and I quickly lock the doors with the remote on the keys. “Where’s your scientific evidence?” I say, my voice rising even though I know I need to keep it down. Therapy lessons on dealing with bipolar people fly at me from all angles, but I ignore each one.

  “If you’ll recall, the evidence is that Thomas’s blood and backpack were left on a bridge. The people whose job it is to determine these things have decided that he’s dead. I miss him too, Cece, I do. But he’s gone. We need to go inside and make a police report that someone’s been in your old house.”

  Even as I say the words I know I can’t do it. Not yet, not when I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near that house while my parents are gone. Great, that’s just one more thing I have to freak out about. I need to get Cece inside the house immediately. Later, I can talk her into pretending we never went over there. We can “find” the moved cologne bottle when we go with my parents next week.

  “Let’s talk about this inside,” I say because I know from experience that when you tell her to shut the hell up, she’ll only explode on you. This is not what I need on the first day of my parents’ trip. If I screw this up my mother will never forgive me. I walk toward the house, praying that Cece will follow. She does, and when we get inside I let out a sigh of relief.