The Window

by Amelia Brunskill

  “It’s her,” Dad said quietly.

  She was wearing a dress, one she’d bought a few months back but had never worn before. It was dark purple, her favorite color, with little pearl buttons running down the front. She had a thick cardigan on over it, and one of her hands extended from underneath the long wool sleeve, fingers bent toward her palms. It was twisted, though, at a strange angle from the rest of her body.

  It was easier to look at her body, or at least the part revealed from beneath the sheet, than her face. Her face, my face—her skin pale, with a hint of blue around her mouth. I felt myself reaching up to touch my own mouth, not sure whether my skin was still warm, not sure how it could be that she was on the table and I was still upright.

  I dropped my hand and took another step toward her. Then it hit me. Lavender, I thought. You smell like lavender. You’re wearing a dress and you smell like lavender. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, I thought. This is all wrong.

  Dad took a deep breath. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go check on Mom.”

  “No. She shouldn’t be alone,” I said.

  “Jess…”

  She’ll wake up, I wanted to tell him. If I stay, I’ll find a way to wake her up. If you give me a minute, I’ll figure something out. But even as I opened my mouth, the words stuck in my throat, no match for her bluing skin, for the stiffness of her twisted limbs.

  * * *

  —

  WE WERE ALMOST BACK TO the elevator when something broke inside me, slamming against my organs with the force of a fist. I swerved off course, staggering away from my dad and toward the closest bathroom. Inside, I lurched to the sink and grasped it with both hands to avoid sliding down to the tiled floor. I dry-heaved into the basin as my body tried to exorcise the image of Anna’s too-pale face, the knowledge that she was gone.

  But it was buried deep within me and could not be extracted.

  I don’t know exactly when it started, when I decided to diverge from who I was before.

  It seems like there should have been one big moment when it happened, when it all began spiraling down.

  Doesn’t it?

  MY PARENTS USED TO THINK there was something wrong with me. They never said as much, but I clearly remember long drives to meet with doctors who asked me a lot of strange questions and spent no time checking my physical health. Anna came along on those visits, but she didn’t get asked those questions—she was allowed to play with toys in the corner, to write and draw on sheets of construction paper. It’d be her turn next time, our parents said when we asked about this disparity. It never was.

  I knew, of course, that people found Anna easier to get along with than me. I saw how their shoulders relaxed when they interacted with her, how those same shoulders tensed when they talked to me. How she somehow knew what to do, what to say. Sometimes I’d watch her and try to mimic her, but her words and gestures felt wooden, unnatural when I performed them.

  Not that it really mattered. In Birdton, Montana—population 4,258—once people decide who you are, there’s little you can do to change their minds. Everything about you could change, but they’d always remember the time when someone bumped against you in the grocery store and you screamed and screamed, or how, back in kindergarten, the teacher’s aide had to come with you to the bathroom so you didn’t spend thirty minutes washing your hands.

  Anna knew those things were only small parts of my history, not the whole of who I was. She had been the only one who’d understood that. Who had understood me.

  And I thought I’d understood her too. Thought I’d known everything about her. But I kept going back to the policeman’s questions: if she’d seemed upset recently, if she’d had a boyfriend. I’d said no to both, without even thinking I could be wrong.

  Yet looking back, things had been different for the past few months. We’d talked less, and she’d been tired, distracted, and forgetful. She’d even snapped at me a couple of times, which she’d never done before. I’d been so sure of what we were to each other that it hadn’t occurred to me that these changes were a pattern, that they might indicate some larger problem beneath the surface.

  I’d been so confident when I’d said there was no boyfriend. Anna used to talk to me about boys sometimes, starting back when we’d still shared a room, her words floating down to me from the top bunk, but it had been months since she’d commented on any boy in particular. And I hadn’t asked, hadn’t brought anyone up. Because boys remained a question mark for me. While it had been a long time since I’d screamed at an accidental touch, wanting to touch someone or to be touched weren’t feelings I understood.

  Once, Anna had told me how she imagined she’d get ready for a date. “I’d want to wear a dress,” she’d said, her voice dreamy. “A pretty one. And perfume. I’d want to smell like lavender.”

  * * *

  —

  CASSEROLES WERE THE STANDARD TOKENS of condolence in Birdton, and within three days of Anna’s death, we received eleven of them. The only one we ate was the one from the Andersons. The Andersons were notable for being the only black family in Birdton, and their casserole was notable for being the only one without cream of mushroom soup.

  I assumed when the bell rang, on the fourth day, that we were about to receive our twelfth casserole. Instead, when Dad opened the door, the policeman from the hospital was on our front porch, holding not a casserole, but a notepad.

  After an awkward pause, Dad ushered him in, told him to sit anywhere he wanted. Mom asked him if he wanted coffee, or if perhaps he’d prefer tea.

  “No thank you,” he said politely as he sat down on the edge of a chair, notebook in hand. Unlike some of the other people who’d dropped by—neighbors and family friends who seemed ready to camp out in our living room for as long as necessary—he appeared to have an efficient visit in mind.

  “I’m sorry for the delay,” he began. “We’ve been a bit short-staffed, and there was some confusion at the beginning, so it took longer than we thought to get to this point. But I wanted to let you know that the police chief himself has been very involved in this case, and we now have some information.”

  He paused and looked at me and my parents, all seated on the couch across from him, as if waiting for a sign that he should continue.

  I glanced at my dad. He in turn looked at my mom. Tiny as she was, all small bones and narrow shoulders, she managed to look more solid than he did at that moment. “All right,” she said to the policeman. “Tell us.”

  The policeman nodded. “Well, we’ve been talking to kids at the high school. Anna’s friends and classmates. Trying to figure out if there was anything we should know about what happened.”

  “Anything like what?” Mom asked.

  “Just standard questions. Seeing if anyone had any information that might be useful. There was a big party that night down in the quarry, and most of the kids we talked to were down there. Anyway, we managed to find someone who knew what happened.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Lily Stevens.”

  Lily. It made sense that it would be her. She and Anna had been partnered for a history project last spring and they’d become friends—and then in the fall they’d joined cross-country together. For a long time, Lily’s claim to fame had been her parents’ dramatic breakup, which involved her dad hightailing to Florida with his secretary, leaving behind only a sticky note on the kitchen table. Then, over the summer she’d suddenly gotten very pretty—in a cat-eyed, witchy kind of way—gotten a boyfriend, and become completely insufferable. Pretty or not, I was fairly sure she was, and had always been, a moron, although Anna had tried to combat this idea by saying that surely Lily’s being in calculus with me was solid evidence to the contrary.

  “Lily’s mom was out of town,” the officer continued. “Some seminar on”—he blinked at his notes—“spiritual healing. Lily said that
she and Anna were going to hang out at her place—have some ‘girl time.’ When Anna didn’t show up, Lily figured she’d been caught sneaking out. So it looks like it’s what we thought—that she lost her footing climbing out her window. There’ll be an autopsy with a toxicology screening, but we expect that to simply confirm that’s what happened.” He stopped and nodded, as if to punctuate his sentence.

  “ ‘Girl time’?” I repeated, incredulous. The phrase seemed plucked from another era, conjuring images of paper dolls and lemonade, pastel-colored magazines and curling irons. “Girl time” was not what Anna had in mind for that night. “Girl time” did not involve a change of clothes or perfume. “That’s what Lily said?”

  He consulted his notebook, scanning the page with a quick glance, and then nodded. “Yes. Something about movies and wine coolers.”

  “Movies and wine coolers? Just the two of them?”

  “Yes,” the officer said.

  “At the station, they asked if Anna had a boyfriend.”

  “Yes, and you said she didn’t,” he said. “That’s what all her classmates said as well.”

  “I know I said that. But she was wearing a dress. She was wearing perfume—lavender.”

  He shrugged. “Girls do that, right?”

  “Anna didn’t. She and Lily weren’t planning to hang out by themselves. Lily’s lying.”

  “Jess—” Mom’s voice was quiet, measured, and I turned to her, hopeful that she’d back me up on this. Instead, she shook her head. “I know this wasn’t typical for Anna, but that doesn’t mean Lily’s lying. Isn’t Lily dating some boy at school?”

  I nodded. “Charlie. Charlie Strumm.”

  “Okay, so maybe Lily and Anna thought he and a friend of his might come over, but there weren’t any concrete plans. Or maybe Anna just wanted to get dressed up.”

  I stared at her. “Since when did Anna do that? Get dressed up just to get dressed up? Put on perfume?”

  “People do that sometimes, sweetheart. People change, try new things—”

  “No. That doesn’t make any sense. Anna was going to see someone. She was going to see a boy.” I was positive. Because of the dress. Because of the perfume. Because of something even less tangible that I couldn’t explain.

  Mom’s eyes blurred. “Please don’t yell. I know you and Anna had been fighting more recently, and that must make this even harder, but—”

  I shook my head, frustrated and confused. “No. We weren’t fighting. I’m not yelling—” Except now I could hear it myself—how my voice had become too loud, too fast—and I could see they’d all stopped listening to what I was saying, only registering the volume and my rising panic.

  “Jess…” Mom closed her eyes for a second. “Okay, Jess. What do you think happened? Who do you think she was meeting?”

  I took a deep breath, then another. Slowing myself, trying to make it so that they could hear me again. “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t— She didn’t say anything to me.” I paused, then turned to the policeman. “Maybe we could check her contacts on her phone? She’d have had that with her.”

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said. “Her phone was in her pocket. It’s…”

  He spread out his hands in front of him, palms up, as if waiting for a delicate way to explain what had happened to a phone that had fallen two stories. We all waited. But there was no delicate way, and so he remained silent, his hands out, unsure of how to finish.

  “Maybe you’re right, Jess,” Mom said quietly. The ache in her voice nestled under my skin like barbed wire. “Maybe there was a boy. Maybe there wasn’t. It doesn’t really change anything. It doesn’t matter.”

  Dad and the police officer both nodded, as if what she’d said was both hard-won wisdom and a self-evident truth.

  But I didn’t nod along. Because I didn’t agree.

  Because to me, it did matter.

  Because I should have known. Because we were best friends. Because we were twins.

  Because I couldn’t shake the idea that she’d tried to tell me and I hadn’t heard her.

  That somehow I’d let her slip away.

  I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the church. The whole space stretched out before me, rows and rows of pews with tall stained-glass windows all around, yet all I could see was the mountain of daisies overflowing the casket, obscene in their brightness. It took all I had not to picture Anna inside the casket, dressed by strangers in the clothes Mom and I had picked out for her: her favorite jeans, her favorite cable-knit sweater.

  The church was empty when we arrived, but soon, people began to filter in. Some of them, when they saw me and my parents standing together, maintained a careful distance. Others beelined right for us, eyes wide, hands clasped.

  A group of cross-country girls came in, with Lily hanging toward the back. They hovered nearby as my parents spoke to some people from Dad’s work. Mom gave me a meaningful look, nodding in the direction of the group of girls as if I might have missed them. I ignored her—I wanted to talk to Lily alone, to find out what Anna’s real plans had been for that night. When I made the mistake of glancing over at the group a second time, though, they saw me do it and took it as a signal to walk over en masse.

  There was a long pause as they stared at me. Then Rachel, a brunette with rabbity teeth and a nervous smile, spoke up. “We’re so sorry. Anna was…” She faltered and looked down at the floor.

  “Great,” another girl supplied, triggering a wave of nodding. “Really great.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure if that was the right response, but they began nodding again, and then we all just stood there.

  Rachel started to cry, a soft, hiccupping cry. No one seemed to know whether they should comfort her, so we stood silently as the tears ran down her face, leaving tracks of mascara down her cheeks.

  “I think I need to go sit down,” I finally said.

  “Of course,” someone said. I wasn’t sure who said it, only that it wasn’t Lily, who stayed silent in the back of the group.

  My parents tried to steer me toward the front, but I shook my head. I did not want to be that close to her casket.

  The three of us ended up sitting near the back, one parent on either side of me. My mom sat bolt upright, her eyes fixed ahead; my dad’s posture mimicked hers, but his hands lay limp and helpless in his lap.

  When the pastor came to the altar, the room went so quiet I could hear the rustle of fabric when the woman in front of me adjusted her skirt.

  Then someone behind me let out a muffled sob, which was quickly echoed by someone else. I closed my eyes and hoped they’d stop—the sound was contagious, but I couldn’t let myself cry. If I started, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I would dissolve, leaving only a ring of salt behind. I bit my tongue until it bled and my mouth tasted like rust.

  When the pastor began to speak, I tried to focus on him and blur out the sound of the people crying around me, yet his words stirred up another unwanted emotion: anger. Because he was talking about angels being returned to heaven, about lambs and shepherds, about things that had nothing to do with Anna. Nothing to do with the person who’d made terrible jokes under her breath, who’d tried to nurse injured birds back to health, who’d been the only person who ever really made me feel like I fit into the world.

  To distract myself—from the sobs, from the nasal, anger-inducing voice of the pastor—I stared out at the sea of heads in front of me, trying to identify people from school.

  Some teachers had come. Anna’s biology teacher, Ms. Brown, sat with Mr. Tutterline, her social studies teacher. Two pews up sat Mr. Matthews, who taught English and coached cross-country, his head bent forward as if in silent prayer.

  On the other side of the church, the police chief sat up so straight that his spine could have been a steel rod. His wife sat on one side of him and on the other sat
John Grahn, the head of the fire department.

  Behind them sat their sons, Charlie Strumm and Brian Grahn, along with Nick Anderson. All three were juniors, basketball players.

  I tried to think of what connections they had to Anna. Charlie was Lily’s boyfriend, so he and Anna had probably spent time around each other because of that. Brian, I remembered, had been Anna’s lab partner in bio that fall. I wasn’t sure about Nick. His family had moved here six years ago, which meant, by Birdton standards, he’d practically just arrived.

  Perhaps, though, one of them had a much greater connection to Anna than I’d realized. Maybe one of them was even the guy Anna had planned to see that night.

  Or perhaps they were all simply vultures, drawn to the spectacle of it all, feeding on the collective grief.

  Maybe the guy she was going to meet hadn’t even bothered to come.

  I wondered if she’d thought of him when she fell.

  If she’d thought of me.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER THE SERVICE ENDED, WE drove behind the hearse to the cemetery, the long blackness of it stretching out in front of us, filling our windshield.

  Once we arrived, the pallbearers—my dad, his two brothers, and his best friend—removed the casket from the hearse. We followed them as they slowly walked through the cemetery, each of them matching the others’ tempo, as if this was something they’d practiced.

  They stopped at a hole in the ground, a spot near a group of old trees.

  I stared up at the trees. Almost all their leaves were gone; only a few dry ones stubbornly remained, refusing to leave the branches behind.

  More words were spoken. I didn’t even try to listen.

  I was still staring at the trees when I heard Dad’s voice close to my ear.

  “It’s your turn, Jess,” he whispered.

  I looked down and found a flower grasped between my fingers. I didn’t remember someone handing it to me, didn’t remember accepting it. I stared at it for another moment; then I took a step forward and tossed it onto the casket, which had been lowered into the hole. The grave. Anna’s grave. The flower bounced softly against the wood before settling.