by Jamie Kain
Seven
Sarah
Ticktock goes the clock—
We wait and plan
for our lives to begin
Never realizing all the while
Life is half-done, and before we can catch our breath
It will be gone.
Ticktock
Goes the clock.
I sometimes think in poetry here in the great Whatever. The words arrive, neither good nor bad. Like snowflakes they drift into my mind and come out, little bits of the truth I am beginning to grasp.
Eight
Rachel
In the weeks after Sarah’s memorial or funeral or whatever it was, I feel like I’m stoned all the time, but not the good kind of stoned. More like a bad trip where you want to tell every dumbass you see what you don’t like about them, and when you’re not feeling like that, you just want to go to sleep.
I avoid David, which is fine because he must be avoiding me too. He sends me a couple of texts but doesn’t call or anything when I never answer. I am not sure what to do with him now, and I just fucking don’t think about it.
AJ, my Official Boyfriend, comes over a few times but says I’m acting like a bitch so he leaves, and I haven’t seen him in a week. He’ll come back whenever I call and say I’m sorry, which will be I don’t know the fuck when.
I just want everyone to disappear. Or I want to disappear. Or both. I go to work, I come home, I smoke, I sleep. I am losing weight. AJ pointed this out to me, said I’m getting too damn skinny, but whatever. Who cares?
The worst part though is the nightmares. Ever since the memorial service, I wake up every night, my body drenched in sweat, my throat closed up even though I’m trying to scream. In the dream, which is always the same, I am with Sarah on the trail where she died, and we are arguing about whose turn it is to have the car for the night. I am so angry at her, I could hit her, and when we round a bend in the trail, and rain has washed away a hillside, Sarah slips, loses her balance, and in one swift, horrible instant, I push her, and she goes over the cliff.
That’s when I wake up.
I don’t often go back to sleep after that dream.
Then something changes. I meet someone who wakes me up from this weird haze I’ve been in, and I don’t know why. He is the last person on earth I would think could wake me.
The first time I see Krishna, he is walking past me on the sidewalk. I am leaning against the wall outside Sacred Grounds, the coffee shop where I work, smoking a cigarette. Just off my shift, I feel on edge, shaky from lack of sleep. I can’t stop thinking about Sarah. I am haunted by the nightmare, the frightening realness of it.
So he walks past me, and he is wearing a loose white shirt that sets off his olive skin and dark hair. He is gorgeous, but he is also definitely a hippie type, which I am officially swearing off after David. I know he’s a hippie or some kind of freak because he’s wearing an orange sarong below his white shirt. He even looks a little like David, which is the first thing I notice about him.
When I catch his eye, I don’t smile. Instead I take a drag on my cigarette.
“That’s not going to make you feel any better,” he says, and keeps walking.
I stop midpuff. I wasn’t expecting a lecture on smoking, and he has my attention now for some reason I can’t imagine. Some part of me wonders if he can read my thoughts or feel the darkness of my nightmares. Seeming to sense it, he turns and looks at me over his shoulder, smiling like freaking Gandhi.
Any other day I would have rolled my eyes and told him to go blow himself. Today though, haunted as I am, I just stare at him with the cigarette dangling from my lips.
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk and seems to make a decision. Then he comes back and says, “I’m on my way to a community dinner at the meditation center over the hill. Any chance you’d like to join me?”
I am so caught off guard I laugh. “Really? You want me to fucking go to dinner with you?”
“Yes. I do.”
“How do you know I’m not a serial killer?”
He smiles, revealing straight, white teeth. Jesus teeth. “I have faith.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I’ll take my chances.” He says all this without even the slightest vibe of flirtation, which is confusing as hell. He has the sort of mellow energy that reminds me of the guy my parents used to call their spiritual leader.
I underestimated his attractiveness when I first saw him. Now that I see him full on, he has these beautiful green eyes that seem unreal next to his olive skin. That he doesn’t seem to be flirting makes him all the more attractive. I’ve always loved a challenge.
“Okay, sure,” I say. “Why not?”
He smiles broadly. “Great.”
Almost laughing again, and also thinking I’ve lost my mind, I follow him. I get in the car that he has parked in the town’s main lot across the street. The rusty, burgundy car is so old I can’t even tell what kind of Toyota it is. The cloth seats maybe used to be red but are now faded to pink. The inside is clean though and smells like that incense shit Lena is always burning. From the rearview mirror hangs a string of brass beads that have some Asian-looking symbols etched into them.
As he gets in the driver’s seat, I note his firm muscles and lightly hairy legs beneath the orange sarong thing.
What if he’s the serial killer? I don’t think I care all that much. I just want to see what happens next.
“My name is Krishna,” he says before starting the car.
Of course it is. “Hi, Krishna. I’m Rachel.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Rachel.”
“So what’s your real name? Mike? Steve?”
“It’s Krishna.”
So his parents were spiritual seekers too. Of course. Everyone around here was twenty years ago.
As he drives, he asks me about myself, and I tell him about things I haven’t said aloud to anyone else. About my family, my dead sister, my stupid relationships with guys, my job, and my graduating last December. It all just comes out of my mouth. He listens, taking in all that shit without judging it, which feels good. I can’t remember the last time anyone listened to me like that.
Definitely not a guy.
By the time I’m finished talking, we’ve made it out of town and are on the winding road that heads toward the coast. I can hardly believe myself, confessing my life story to a stranger. But there’s something about this guy, something so open and free of bullshit, that I feel as if complete honesty is the only option.
It doesn’t make much sense, but nothing about Krishna does. He catches me off guard in a way I’ve never experienced before.
He starts telling me all about himself, how he was a heroin addict and a drummer until he found Buddha or whatever. He tells me about his family back in a small logging town in Washington, how he has two older brothers, but he hasn’t seen them in years because they think he’s a freak for becoming a monk.
This logging-town childhood doesn’t mesh with his having a name like Krishna, but I don’t bring it up.
“Do you miss them?” I ask, not sure why I even care.
“Sometimes, but I know the part of them I miss, I can find anytime I recall our childhood together.”
Oh, yeah. Right on, Mr. Hallmark cards. “So you’re like a real monk? Does that mean you don’t have sex?”
He smiles like he’s remembering something. “Yep. I’m celibate.”
“For how long?” All my hopes about me and Krishna naked start to fizzle out, and I didn’t even realize I was hoping.
“Forever.”
“Are you a virgin?”
“No, I gave up sex a year ago to help myself stay focused on my spiritual development.”
Oh, whew. “So was it hard to stop having sex?”
He smiles. “Sometimes. I’ve been immersed in meditation for a good part of the past year. Bodily urges interrupt sometimes, but meditation takes me back to where I need to be. I think of meditating as the qu
estion and the answer.”
I say nothing, disappointed. I’m not used to this.
We arrive at the meditation center and get out of the car to follow a winding path up to its front entrance. It’s a low, brown-wood-shingle building of the kind people like my parents think is groovy. Big windows, big trees. Krishna holds the door open for me, and I feel for a moment as if I might float up off the ground and into the sky.
Nine
Sarah
This doesn’t seem like heaven or hell, I suppose. More and more I think I am stuck in some in-between place, a nowhere land.
It’s strange how time folds in on itself now, free from the artificial, linear labels we impose on it. I have no sense of whether moments, days, or weeks have passed. I can only get a frame of reference by watching my family. I see my mother, Lena, going to her therapist, so I know it’s Tuesday. I hear her say it’s been three weeks since my death, so I know time drifts on without me.
And still, lingering like a whisper, like a ghost, there is always Brandon.
Three days before I died, I went with Lena to my grandmother’s house in Tiberon. Her understated mansion was built to blend into the hills and trees that surround it. Walls of windows look out on San Francisco Bay and the city across it wearing a cloak of fog.
My grandmother is an heiress to a Dutch shipping company, and thanks to her my parents (who used to not believe in things like health insurance) were able to pay for my medical bills for so many years. On this day, we’d come to her house for the sort of obligatory visit that means my mom needs some money.
In the time since she and my father split up ten years ago, my father has prospered as a sell-out advertising executive. He cut off his hair, shaved off his beard, bought a bunch of suits and ties, and started driving a BMW. He also stopped going by his hippie name, Ravi, and started going by his birth name, John, to newcomers in his life.
Meanwhile, my mother has clung stubbornly to her latter-day ideals, probably because it’s easier that way. She can call herself a musician, artist, dancer, massage therapist, or yoga instructor—whatever she feels like being that week—and my grandmother will give her money to support her.
It’s a pretty sweet deal, with the only catch that Lena has to show up and ingratiate herself to her mother, whom she hates. This is why I’ve come along, because Grandma de Graas doesn’t get as mean when I’m around. A self-proclaimed invalid, she feels a bond with me and my infirm body—or at least she did when I was alive.
And here’s another weird thing—that Grandma de Graas has outlived me. Here in this wherever place, all I have to do is think of Grandma and I can see her in my mind’s eye clear as if I were in the room with her, frail and wispy, tooling around her bedroom, getting assistance from her long-suffering nurse in and out of the wheelchair, and I realize that life makes no sense. There is no sense of balance or fairness, no universal force that makes good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad.
If any assholes ever get their comeuppance, it’s purely by accident. I know that for sure now.
Case in point: racist, arrogant, selfish, narcissistic, abusive Grandma de Graas, still alive and perversely happy as she has ever been. She doesn’t donate money to charity (unless you count my mother—and you can‘t since their money exchanges are more about her exerting control over Lena than anything else) or do kind things for her neighbors or even have a fondness for animals. Far as I know, she mostly spreads unhappiness to whatever she touches. She lives a charmed life if I’ve ever seen one.
When we first moved to Marin County from the commune, we stayed here, at her house, for several weeks while we looked for a place of our own. I remember distinctly the smell of the house back then, a scent of ocean air mixed with expensive wood and the orange oil a silent, brown-skinned maid named Lupe used when she cleaned the furniture.
For most of our stay, Asha, Rachel, and I played outside in the gardens, careful to heed our mother’s warning not to disturb Grandmother by being noisy in the house. Our grandfather had already been long dead by then, having suffered a massive heart attack at the age of forty, so Grandmother de Graas was unaccustomed to noise or even people in the house. So said Lena.
Outside, we concocted elaborate games and scenarios, pretending we were a group of princesses lost in a garden, or that we’d been shipwrecked and were exploring the grounds of an abandoned but haunted castle. Forced to play together in unfamiliar circumstances, we three sisters were capable of being the best of playmates.
Not until the end of our stay, when a rainstorm forced us indoors, did we finally got a taste of our grandmother’s true nature. Asha, who was maybe four years old, accidentally bumped a table in the foyer and sent a fancy white vase crashing to the ground. Standing a few feet away, I remember watching as the shards of porcelain scattered, pelting my feet.
From the next room, Grandmother came to survey the damage, her dry lips pressed into a thin line. “You stupid, stupid girl,” she said to Asha, who was on the verge of tears. “Get out of this house right now.”
Our grandmother pointed to the front door, and Asha glared at her, astonished. It was pouring rain outside, cold, gray, not the sort of weather any sane person would banish a four-year-old into. We had never experienced anything like this in our young lives, and we were frozen, unsure whether such a demand was meant to be taken seriously.
“I’ll clean it up,” Rachel said. “Don’t make her go outside.” Until now she’d been the silent bystander, although it had been her game of leapfrog that had sent Asha careening into the table in the first place.
“All of you, outside now!” Our grandmother continued pointing at the door, her posture alone enough to convince us she wasn’t joking.
So I took Asha’s hand in mine and we went, shuffling one by one out onto the front entryway, which had a shallow overhang that provided almost no shelter from the slanting rain. Rachel was the last to exit, and she was unable to resist slamming the door behind her.
There we stayed, huddled against each other, teeth chattering until our father found us after what felt like hours later but was probably not so long. He insisted we leave Grandmother’s house that night, and we did. I’ve never stayed here again since, nor have I ever wanted to.
But that was years ago, before Lena and Ravi divorced, and before Lena discovered that her mother was our only reliable means of financial support.
So the last day that we visited her, I found myself sitting at her sleek, expensive teakwood dining-room table, staring out at the bay through the window, while my mother spoke in hushed tones to Grandma in the next room.
This was the drill. I had to stay out of things unless Grandma started getting angry. Lena didn’t like being seen groveling.
I was thinking about David (the love of my short life), wondering if he was out of his printmaking class yet, about to get out my phone and send him a text, when my grandmother wheeled into the room. I wondered for a moment if she’d finally gotten fed up with my mother and pushed her off the balcony, but I later learned that Lena had, at the last second, decided to tell my grandmother that I was the reason she needed money this time.
It wasn’t exactly a lie. I had outlived everyone’s expectations, and my parents now found that their oldest daughter was about to go on to college, and they hadn’t bothered creating a college fund for me since I was supposed to die anyway. I’d gotten an acceptance letter from UC Santa Cruz the day before, and it had prompted me to ask my mother if she’d be able to help me pay for school.
This simple question had sent her to bed in tears for the rest of the day, claiming she had a migraine. This was how Lena dealt with most problems. She wasn’t cut out for life off the commune, or life as the mother of a child with leukemia, or life in general.
“So,” my grandmother said to me in her slight Dutch accent, “you have defied all the odds and are going on to college. What a wonderful thing.”
“I got accepted to three schools so far,” I s
aid, adopting the pleasant, deferent tone I always used with her.
“Your mother tells me you still want to be a nurse.”
I nodded.
“Why not a doctor?”
People had never asked me questions like this before now—what do you want to be when you grow up? Being known as the Kid Who Has Cancer was, for a long time, my lot in life, and even when it wasn’t, people still tiptoed around me, as if the shadow of death lingered near.
“I want to help people in a hands-on way.” This was my simple, standard answer. I’d never had to try hard to make good grades in school, so perhaps my grandmother thought I should strive for the greatest academic challenge. Or maybe she was just being contrary.
She gave a curt nod. “You’re too pretty to be a doctor anyway. No one could take you seriously.”
I knew better than to react to this. Lena relied on me as the one who didn’t let Grandma push her buttons.
“How are you feeling? Still sore from your fall?”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, I can see that this was my subtle way of getting her back. While Grandma loved to talk about her ailments, anyone else’s bringing them up always made her feel weak and vulnerable. I watched her shrink back into her chair a bit, looking tired. Then I felt bad for my spite.
“No need to discuss an old woman’s frailties,” she surprised me by saying. “The more important matter is this issue of your college education. How do you intend to pay for it?”
“I’ll work, I guess, and get college loans.”
“And your father? Is he going to help?”
I hadn’t been speaking to Ravi lately, not since I’d seen him walking down the street holding hands with a girl who looked to be about four years older than me at most.
“I’m not depending on it,” I said, though I would likely ask him for help eventually, once I’d decided for sure which school to attend. He wasn’t comfortable with loose ends.