by Kara Terzis
“Painful.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” But my tone suggested otherwise. In a way, I was absurdly jealous. How was it fair that he’d skipped past all the pain and the tears and the sleepless nights leading up to the funeral? And then there was the funeral itself. I don’t remember much of it. It’s all just a blur of tears and words.
I fixed my gaze on the swirling contents of my cup, remembering all the times I’d ditched first period with Kesley to have coffee. That would never happen again. It felt wrong somehow to be sitting here with her former best friend, talking and having a cup of coffee. An awkward silence had descended, and Rafe broke it first.
“Do you ever wonder…” He paused, cleared his throat, and started again. “Ava, she was murdered—”
“Do I ever wonder who killed her?” I finished for him.
He nodded.
“I wonder that every second of every goddamn day.”
“Do they have any idea?”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “They don’t know.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Am I okay with that?” My mouth popped open in surprise. “Of course I’m not. But what can I do about it? I’m no detective. They told Mom and me they would do their best to find out who…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Neither could Rafe. He dropped his blue gaze to his own cup. He still hadn’t touched it. I stared out the windows at the cars zooming past on the main street and wished I could be anywhere but here. Silence fell between us, interrupted only by the clinking of glasses by the couple at the table next to us and the chiming of the bell every time someone entered or exited the shop.
I stood up abruptly. “I should go—”
“Okay,” Rafe agreed, and he rose to his feet too. There was nothing more to say here, I realized. He had only wanted to talk to me because I was that poor girl whose sister was murdered. I wondered just how much he cared about me. About Kesley. I was on the verge of asking, but Rafe was already flagging down the waitress to pay for the coffees.
He flipped open his wallet just as the bell chimed and a few more customers walked through the doors, bringing with them a strong, harsh wind. A piece of paper was blown from his wallet and fluttered onto the table. Before Rafe could reach down to pick it up, I did. My curious gaze skimmed across the paper, and I realized a moment later that it was a plane ticket from Vancouver to Calgary. The date read: September 9.
Only two days before Kesley died.
I visited your grave every day, even though you wouldn’t have wanted me to.
You’d shake back your hair and say, “Gosh, Ava, don’t be so morbid!” And a smile would appear on your lips—a sweet, playful smile. Then you’d roll your eyes and saunter away, trying to flip your hair behind you like all the bitchy girls do at school.
The day Rafe came back to school was no exception. The overwhelming need to be close to you, or where you were buried, drove me to the cemetery in an attempt to ease the knot of anxiety in my chest.
I had the way to your grave memorized from the first time I’d come alone.
Your headstone is the prettiest. It’s made from white marble that reflects the glistening afternoon sun, with golden, curvy letters marking your date of birth and date of death, and the words “You Will Always Be Loved” carved into the marble.
That day, I reached inside my pocket and placed a rose there that I’d taken from someone’s garden on the way. Even though I knew the rose would wither and die in just a few days, seeing it on your headstone made me feel better.
Most days, I didn’t know what else to do. So I talked.
I talked about how things have changed, how much Mom and I miss you, how much I’ve cried when I can’t sleep at night. I told you every small, insignificant detail of my school day—what sort of designer bag Lia had brought with her to school and how unfair it was that I received after-school detention. I wondered aloud what you would have said, how you would have reacted.
I told you how Rafe had come back to see me, about how he had enrolled in Circling Pines High School again. Would you have been happy? Upset? Sad? Confused? And finally, I told you about the plane ticket. About the date that was written there. About how I thought…how I thought that maybe he could have been involved with…
It wasn’t fair. Any of it.
I stood at your grave, actually considering that your best friend might have killed you and wondering why you were the one who had been killed.
Why not me…
Chapter Three
For a place that held so many terrible things, the cemetery was devastatingly beautiful at this time of the afternoon. I couldn’t help but think the lighting was perfect for painting.
“Ava?”
I glanced around. A familiar-looking figure appeared from the trees to my right, silhouetted against the withering light from the sky.
“I’m here,” I said, knowing he’d want a reply. My boyfriend, Jackson Palmer, emerged from the darkness and came to stand next to me. I wondered briefly whether he knew about my meeting with Rafe.
“Your mother called me, said she was worried when you didn’t come home after school.” Jackson moved forward and put his arms around my waist, brushing his mouth against my neck. It felt nice to be able to lean into something solid, something warm and so, so alive.
I sighed. That sounded exactly like my foster mother.
Ever since Kesley died, she’d been particularly protective. Not that I blamed her.
“Right, yeah.” I pressed a hand to my forehead where a dull ache had started up. “Sorry, I forgot to call her and tell her I’d be here.”
Jackson frowned.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. You just look upset. Would you rather be alone?” I thought I detected a hint of bitterness to his voice, as if he thought I didn’t need him, but maybe I was imagining it. Jackson was all the boyfriend I needed and wanted, and I was sure he knew that.
I turned farther into the circle of his arms and placed one of my hands on either side of his face, forcing a smile. “No…I just…wanted to see her.” I felt stupid as soon as the words slipped from my mouth. Was it morbid to find comfort in sitting beside a grave every day?
Maybe Jackson thought so too, because he didn’t say anything. To cover the slightly awkward moment, I looped my arm in his and started back up the path of the cemetery. Not exactly a prime location for a romantic stroll.
“How did you even know I come here every afternoon?” I asked.
“I followed you,” he said simply.
I felt a slight flicker of irritation, but I pushed it back. He was concerned about me—that was all. Emotion tightened my throat so much that I couldn’t speak. I sometimes wondered why Jackson was still with me. Wouldn’t it be easier to walk away than deal with the troubled girl who had just lost her sister?
I’d quickly learned not to question my blessings.
We reached the edge of the cemetery, and I stopped to look back. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and a blue-purple gloom had settled over the headstones, reflecting my mood perfectly.
Jackson, who seemed to realize my mood was declining rapidly, said, “Remember that first time we met?”
Almost against my will, I felt a small smile curve my lips.
I said, “How can I forget?”
He laughed, and the sound broke through the eerie silence of the falling night. “You’re right. Seventh-grade camping trip. We hiked up in the middle of nowhere that spring, though it was still pretty cold at night.”
“You lent me your jacket,” I said. “You said that if I got any colder, I’d turn blue and my toes would fall off.”
I turned to face him and saw his hazel eyes crinkle as he smiled. If the truth was told, I had been in love with Jackson from that moment on,
but I had been too afraid to show it. We hadn’t gotten together until he asked me to the end-of-school-year dance two summers ago.
And we’d been a couple ever since.
“Come on,” he said, taking my hand and leading me down the street. “Your mother will be sick with worry by now.”
• • •
He was right about that. My mother yanked me into a tight hug as soon as I unlocked the door, refusing to let me go until I told her I was fine at least five times. Then she pulled away and wiped her eyes. Tears. Guilt tugged at my insides as I realized I wasn’t the only one suffering.
We stood in the brightly lit hallway, the white light gleaming off the immaculately cleaned surfaces of the modern house. There was a lot of glass and metal and white tiles that were scrubbed clean as soon as a speck of dirt was visible. The hallway was cavernous, and from where I stood facing the arched doors of the kitchen, the bitter scent of cleaning agents burned my nostrils. Whenever she was under pressure, Mom thought she could just clean the stress away. It rarely worked.
The only room she hadn’t touched was Kesley’s. Every time I walked down the hallway to my room, I still caught a whiff of jasmine perfume. The scent of sorrow still clung to her room.
“Did Jackson tell you where I was?” I asked.
“I—”
“Mom?”
“Well, he said he had an idea…”
“What exactly did he tell you?”
“Oh, sweetie,” my mother whispered. “He said you would be at Kesley’s grave.”
I flinched. I wished he hadn’t told her that. I wished he’d just dropped me at home and I’d made up a story about my cell phone dying while I was studying at the library like a normal person. I felt my mother’s hand touch my face. Warm, gentle.
“Sweetheart,” she whispered, her voice tender. “Maybe you should see someone about this…”
My face heated, and I shook my head vehemently. I stretched a smile across my face, but it felt fake.
“I have homework I need to do,” I whispered, heading up the carpeted stairs. I made sure I looked at the woven material beneath my feet as I walked down the hall to my room. Family pictures of Diana, Kesley, and I hung on the wall, pictures that depicted happy people, pictures that showed a family full of light, where the darkness couldn’t touch them.
A family that no longer existed.
A family that had broken apart when Kesley was murdered.
• • •
If I had inherited one trait from my birth mother, it was my love of painting. Kesley found her solace in piano, and I found mine in the slashes of paint against an empty canvas.
I’d sit in my room overlooking the road and set up my mother’s easel. It was one of the few things I still had left of her—not a memory but a real, tangible object. I’d run my fingers along the wooden edges, thinking, This is where my mother painted. Drew. Did she think of me when she put paint to canvas? Since Kesley’s death, I hadn’t touched the easel. It lay gathering dust in the attic. But today—today was different. The sun seemed to shine a little brighter. The fall leaves looked a little more colorful.
After bringing the easel and paint into my room from the attic, I stared out the window and closed my eyes. Inspiration was a tricky thing. It came and went, just as day and night did. I breathed out a slow, careful sigh.
All I had to do was put paint to canvas. Simple.
I raised the paintbrush, dripping with black paint. And then I started painting.
I lost time as I painted. There was nothing but me and the strokes of paint splashing against the stark white of the canvas. Outside, the sky turned from the pale gray of dusk to the deep blue of twilight. I heard the sounds of my mother downstairs and the hiss of the kettle being turned on. I was completely, utterly tuned in to what was before me—so much so that I didn’t even realize night had fallen until I couldn’t see my own work. I finally rose from where I worked and flicked the light on, sending light across the canvas.
The painting was a tangle of lines. Black, red, dark green. It was hard to make out any defining images, but if I looked hard enough, I could see the outline of tall pine trees touching the very tips of the canvas. My stomach plummeted. And there, I thought, I could see a lake. The gravel road that usually led to the lake was twistier than in real life, and I had painted it into a texture that resembled rope.
The lake where she was killed, the rope that had strangled her…
What was I doing, drawing pictures of Kesley’s death scene? Was I becoming like my mother, whose artwork became darker and darker before her end?
My stomach twisted, my throat tight and painful. I snatched a pair of scissors from my desk and tore at the canvas until it became shreds. I didn’t want to paint. Never again.
Our foster mother doesn’t like me going to the cemetery to visit your grave. Because even where there are good memories, there are bad memories too. And during the dark times, I think a lot about our birth mother. Did you ever wonder what things would have been like if our birth parents were still alive?
Would I be the same broken person I am today? Just how much of that tragedy shaped who I am? I don’t remember much of them. Sometimes when I close my eyes and strain my mind, I can catch fleeting glimpses of what were the happiest times of my life.
All I have to remember my birth parents by are the pictures I keep on my desk, but a picture is a picture, not the real thing. My brain has protected me from the painful memories—just like with the acid incident, which was too traumatic for a barely six-year-old girl to cope with. The doctors all told Diana the same thing: the memories were there, locked somewhere in my brain, and I had the power to remember them. So sometimes, late at night, I lie in bed and think. And think. And wait for the memories to come. I know I had walked into the reception of Diana’s work. I can still remember that I was so short at that age that my legs had hovered a good few inches from the ground when I sat on one of their chairs. I can remember you, Kesley, sitting beside me and fiddling with your hair. We’d been told to wait for our foster mother in the waiting area and not to venture into the corridor. But I think I’d grown bored, and you’d said, “Let’s play a game, Ava. Let’s do something.” We’d wandered into the corridor, and…
Everything goes blank.
It was ironic though. Not remembering much of my childhood was supposed to protect me, but it still hurt, knowing that memories of our birth parents were locked somewhere in my brain, unable to reach them.
You remembered them, Kesley.
I remember the cold winter nights where we’d sit in front of the fire, and you’d tell me everything you remembered about our parents. You told me how our real mother used to sing to me when I couldn’t sleep. She was a good singer, you told me. She used to paint too. Sunsets and brightly lit landscapes, but as her illness grew like darkness within her, her paintings became darker, more twisted. And our father, a kind-faced man, balding, with lines like cobwebs around his eyes when he smiled.
What if my six-year-old self hadn’t been late for school? Would our father still have sped down those icy roads? Would he still be alive now?
What if our mother had seen someone about her depression? Would she still have taken her own life or would she be with me now?
And perhaps the most important question of all—would you still be alive…
Chapter Four
The next day started badly—and not just because it had begun to rain, though that was certainly a factor. A thick fog clung around the house like a veil as I slammed the front door shut on my way out. I was already in a touchy mood after the ten-minute lecture from my mom about receiving detention, which, ironically, was going to make me late for school.
Lia’s car was nowhere in sight, and just when I had conceded that I was going to get drenched on the way to school, golden headlights cut through the fog ahead of me. The sof
t purr of an engine filled the air, so different from the usual growl of Lia’s car. I frowned, squinting through the gloom. A moment later, I saw Jackson’s face through the tinted windows as the car pulled up neatly to the curb.
I stumbled forward past the rusty, old fence and down the sidewalk until I slid into the passenger side of his car, grateful to be out of the rain.
“Thanks,” I said in a voice that sounded like a sigh. “Where’s Lia? She usually drives me to school.” We’d made that arrangement as soon as Lia didn’t have to be supervised while driving.
“At school. She texted me,” he said, and for some reason, there was a tightness to his mouth. Though I couldn’t imagine why. Fog swirled around the car, obscuring everything except the immediate surroundings. I found it made me anxious, almost claustrophobic, so I looked down at my feet instead. Jackson drove slowly, carefully.
“You’re going to be late, you know,” I told him.
“I know.” And then he smiled. “But my track record of arriving late to school is much cleaner than Lia’s, so when she couldn’t come, I offered.”
“Thanks,” I said. We rode the next few minutes in silence.
Jackson took in a sharp breath, as though he had been about to say something but had thought better of it. His brow was pinched into a scowl as he looked at the road ahead of him.
“Yes?” I prompted, curiosity evident in my voice.
“You know Kesley’s old friend is back, don’t you?” Instantly, I stiffened in my seat. Even the mention of Rafe made me nervous. I’d managed to forget about the plane ticket for a short time, but Jackson’s throwaway comment sent me crashing back to reality. I needed to talk to Rafe to clarify things.
“Old friend?” I picked at some of the dried paint under my nails, feigning disinterest. “Who?”
“You know,” said Jackson. “The one with the blue eyes. Ralf or something.”
I smiled despite the situation. He would hate being called that. “Rafe. And, no, I didn’t know he was back.” There was a brief moment of silence before I ventured further. “When did he arrive?”