by Kain, Jamie
“Our family is in crisis, Asha. It’s not just you who’s suffering. You should be home, not here.”
She stands up, and I watch her leave. Something about her now is different, and it’s not just the expensive clothes and the salon hair. She’s walking with purpose, like she knows where she’s going, for once.
Why couldn’t she drag me out of here if it matters so much? Why couldn’t she have showed up when I first disappeared?
Why now?
I’m wearing one of Sin’s hoodies, a black one covered with little gray skulls. I tug it tighter around me, and I give him a look as my mom disappears out the door.
“Bye, Ms. Kinsey,” Sin calls after her in an impressively genuine tone.
But she doesn’t answer. She’s gone, on her way somewhere more important than here.
Sixteen
Sarah
Love, my favorite four-letter word
And the official topic of all
Bad poetry
Do you know the difference
Between Love and lust?
Between Love and hate?
Between Love and death?
Have you ever felt the subtle twist of the knife
When one turns into the other?
It’s a feeling that should need no past
Present or future tense
But tell that to the knife.
I am awake, but not Awake. Dreaming in slow motion.
* * *
I used to think that love could only be a good thing. I thought loving someone was like bestowing a gift upon them. And I listened to all those love songs and believed them. Love is all we need, right?
It only occurred to me a few days before I died that maybe love wasn’t such a wonderful gift. Maybe, sometimes, it was a curse, or a weapon, or an affliction, or all three.
Take my parents, for instance. If you met Lena and Ravi, you’d have a hard time believing they were once deeply in love. I only have a few early childhood memories to prove it. And you might not understand why they’d have had three kids. Ravi (aka John in his new and improved corporate, six-figure life) might point out that he never wanted children, and Lena, though she claims to love motherhood, is far more temperamental drama queen than nurturing maternal figure.
When you look around you though, really look, you start to see that all families are the crippled, imperfect by-products of our flawed attempts at love. Evolution created this weird chemical process to bind us together long enough to raise kids—in theory—and we in our infinite creativity decided to create a mythology around it. I see this now, and yet, I still don’t understand it completely.
It still makes me ache.
Over the years, I pieced together the more or less complete story of my parents’ falling in and out of love and having three daughters. It’s a long, sordid tale, but these days I seem to have nothing but time to consider and reconsider the past.
And I like to think that having such a messy example at home is why I never quite got things right the one and only time I fell in love.
David was my first lover. We met at the bookstore where I worked two days a week after school. He was looking for a copy of the Tao Te Ching and I told him we were all out of stock. Crazy how well that little old book sells, I said.
He smiled at me and asked if I was interested in Eastern philosophy.
“My parents lived on a commune, so I kind of grew up with it.” I shrugged.
“Really? Mine too. Which one?”
“The Peace Ranch.” I already knew he wasn’t a part of the same crowd because I’d have known him if he was.
“Cool. My mother was a follower of Osho.”
So, there we had it, the common bond of growing up in the weird, upside-down world of a commune. And we talked for the rest of my shift, flirting, laughing, sizing each other up. I told him about my cancer, my family, and my lack of a boyfriend. He told me about how he’d graduated two years ago from a school in the city and was living with some friends, attending College of Marin part-time while he painted houses to earn a living. By the end of the night, I was dizzy from falling in love with him.
And even dizzier, probably, with the sensation of seeing myself through the eyes of someone who never knew me with cancer. To him, I was just the girl who worked in the bookstore. Every guy I’d ever known, to that point, had not seen me apart from my illness. I’d never had a real boyfriend before.
I didn’t want anything from David. He’s not the kind of guy you hook up with thinking forever or even next year. But then, I wasn’t the kind of girl who needed long-term promises, given my slightly iffy health prospects. I just loved him in the pure, innocent way that is probably true of all first loves.
Funny how it works out though that when you expect nothing from a person, they might just give you everything you didn’t know you wanted. At least that’s how it felt sometimes, when he’d show up at my house all excited because he’d written a song for me, or he’d spend hours braiding flowers into my hair and telling me a hundred ways he thought I was beautiful.
Really, I’m not making this stuff up. He was that sweet. And he did it all without the slightest bit of self-consciousness.
So I never saw it coming when he fell for my sister Rachel too.
Seventeen
Rachel
Sarah’s urn, an ugly navy-blue thing with gold trim, has been sitting in our living room over the fireplace for weeks now. I find myself obsessing over the ashes. What do they look like? Will they smell bad? I sort of want to take a peek inside the urn and check it out, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it.
Part of me imagines if I open the lid, her ghost will come seeping out of the bottle genie-style and spread the word about what an awful shitface of a sister I am.
We are supposed to take Sarah’s ashes to the top of Mount Tam and scatter them, but Lena has been told this requires a permit. So, I guess we have to sneak and do it when no one is watching, because Lena doesn’t believe in getting permits.
Also, she keeps saying we have to be united as a family when we do it. This is her go-to way for putting things off. Whenever Asha is around, she and our mother have these crazy fights like I’ve never seen. Asha’s always been so whatever-I-don’t-give-a-damn, it’s hard to pick a fight with her, but Lena manages. My theory is the little donor-match sister reminds her too much of the dead daughter.
Everything reminds me too much of Sarah.
I’m not really mad at Asha anymore for showing up drunk at the memorial service. I kind of feel sorry for her since she is, after all, the one who’s probably the most wrecked over Sarah’s death. Even if I’m not sure she has the right to be.
Okay, I don’t care if my stupid little sister has decided to live in the park with Barefoot Jack and the other local homeless and crazy, but it does make me curious. I imagine she’s on a downward spiral, like we all are, but I don’t think the parents realize how much closer she is to the edge than the rest of us. She loved Sarah more than anyone else did, and she’s got to be taking her death the hardest.
You’d think any average parent could figure that out. But Lena, she’s lost in her own world right now. She is taking the role of grieving mother seriously. She’s been waiting a long time to play the role, ever since Sarah got her first cancer diagnosis all those years ago.
As I pass by the park on my way to David’s house, I consider stopping and giving Asha a personal plea to come help spread the ashes. I think she’ll want to be a part of it, even if she acts like she doesn’t.
But she’s not there now.
As I turn onto David’s street, I see his car in the driveway of the house he shares with friends, and my stomach knots. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other alone, and not just his stopping in to say hi while I’m working at Sacred Grounds, which he’s started doing again lately. Problem is, AJ stops in too when he’s in town doing business, and if the two of them ever cross paths, some shit will go down.
I cli
mb the front steps of his porch, and he must have seen me because he opens the door and comes out. “Hey, what a surprise.”
He looks seriously fugly, his beard overgrown and his shirt off. He’s wearing a drooping pair of jeans that stay up thanks only to a belt. His ribs and hip bones jut out in a way that isn’t exactly attractive, reminding me of pictures of starving people in India.
He leans in for a hug, and I hug him back halfheartedly. When my sister disappeared over the edge of a cliff last month, whatever I felt for David went with her, I think. He just feels like a whole lot of nothing to me now.
I’m relieved when he doesn’t try to kiss me.
“You doing okay?” he asks as we sit down on the front steps together.
“Yeah. You?”
“Not so much.”
I nod and make a sad face. I guess I should be falling apart more—David and I united in our grief or some shit—but I can’t muster the energy. I am remarkably calm, detached, waiting for some real emotions to come along.
I look away from David, at a house across the street, a run-down, blue cottage with faded Tibetan prayer flags hanging limp over the front porch.
“We’re scattering her ashes Sunday night, around nine o’clock,” I finally say when I feel enough time has passed.
He stares at a squirrel scurrying across the street.
“I could ask my mom if you can come along.”
“That’s okay. It’s a family thing. I shouldn’t be there.”
“I don’t think she’d care,” I say, but I’m kind of relieved he said no.
Silence again.
When I’m about to change the subject to the reason I guess I’ve come, he says, “I went out to the spot. Where she fell. I did my own thing there … and scattered some flowers … you know.”
“Oh. That’s cool,” I say lamely.
Some bitchy, little part of me feels jealous that he had this private moment for Sarah. And some part of me feels violated that he went there, to the spot that belongs to me and my own fucked-up feelings.
“I’ve been thinking…”
Before he can go on, I hold up my hand for him to stop talking. I have to be the one to say it. “I have too. I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”
I watch his face, not sure what I want to see there. Grief? Pain? Relief?
Love?
Shock.
Long, awkward-ass pause.
I look down at his hands, which are clasped a little tighter than they should be on his knees, as if he’s holding on for dear life. Here is my evidence of strong emotion, and I’m satisfied to see it.
I realize now, I came here looking for something more than an end to this thing we’ve been doing. I want to see him beg for me to stay. And if he doesn’t, then what?
“That isn’t what I was going to say,” he says.
“It isn’t?”
He shakes his head, frowning. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I was going to say now.”
“Tell me.”
“I … I was going to ask you if you wanted me to take you out there … to the trail where she fell.”
“Oh.”
This is what I am supposed to be consumed with—my sister’s death. Still. Maybe forever. I am, sort of. Breaking up with David was supposed to be part of getting on with my life, wasn’t it? Making right some of the shit I’ve done wrong?
“I just thought, maybe you’d like someone to go back there with you. So you could get some closure.”
Closure. As if that were something that happens to people like me.
The cliff where Sarah died is the last place I want to be right now, even if I do feel like it belongs to me. I am repelled from it like a burn victim from fire.
“That’s sweet of you to think of it. I don’t think I can go there now though … it’s too soon.”
“You really want to stop seeing each other?”
I open my mouth to say yes, but no sound comes out.
If I knew what the hell I wanted, life would be so easy, like a menu with only one choice. But it’s all the options that trip me up. I am dazzled by the endless possibilities.
I know how to be unhappy. It never feels the same way twice. It is an emotion full of nuance and variety, nothing like happiness, which always feels the same and never lasts long.
“No,” I finally say, and it’s like peeling back a scab, finding the tender, unhealed flesh beneath. “I don’t know why I said that. Guilt, I guess.”
He scoots closer, puts an arm around me, and I don’t pull away. I lean in, kiss him softly on the lips, as if picking at the scab some more, hoping to see fresh blood.
Eighteen
Sarah
Watching, watching, I am watching life without me go by, an endless movie. I have lost the remote control.
Watching Rachel and David together should be more painful than it is. It should be torture to see her lean in and kiss him now. She is there, and I am not. She still has a life to live, and I don’t.
Instead of its feeling painful, it’s bittersweet. I wish I could turn back time ten years or more. I wish I could remake our history into one in which Rachel was given what she needed instead of feeling like she had to take it. She used to be a sweet girl sometimes, always mercurial but occasionally lovely, the sister who, when she wasn’t being a brat, brought me handpicked flowers in the hospital and sat beside my bed reading to me from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, skipping over the boring parts and pausing to make fun of Ma when she acts like a racist.
But slowly, time and lack of attention let Rachel grow wild—a garden overtaken by weeds. She was always precocious, but once she discovered her power over the opposite sex, she changed.
Do I regret what I did to her?
Was it revenge for David?
Such questions are not as easy to answer in this strange afterlife as you might expect.
My favorite memory of Rachel is from our early days back in Marin, before I got sick.
We shared a room because Asha still slept in bed with our parents well past her fourth birthday, and Rachel used to have nightmares about a man climbing through the window and taking her. Whenever she woke up after one of those dreams, she would climb in bed with me and ask me to tell her a story to help her fall back to sleep.
One night, I was tired and cranky from her waking me up, and I couldn’t think of a story. I’d always told her tales of fairies and princesses and magical castles, but this time, I told her she had to think of her story. She started to cry, but after a couple of minutes, once she saw that I was serious, she quieted down.
“Once upon a time…,” she said slowly, her voice still wobbly with tears, “there were two sisters who lived in the woods. They had no parents, so the big sister, named … Sarafina, had to be responsible for both of them.”
Rachel nestled up against me, her small knees poking into my lower back, her hand tangled in my hair, stroking and twisting it like she always did when she shared my bed. I sometimes woke up in the morning after Rachel had slept with me to find random, crooked, little braids all over my head because she’d put herself back to sleep braiding my hair in the dark.
“Sarafina’s sister was named … Raya, and one day when Raya was walking through the woods alone, something began to chase her.”
I had always kept my stories free of scary elements, not wanting to upset Rachel more than her bad dream already had, so I remember being surprised that Rachel’s story included a chase.
“She could hear heavy breathing and footsteps behind her, and she ran as fast as she could all the way back to their cottage. When she got there, she slammed the door and locked it, and Sarafina was inside cooking their lunch.
“‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
“‘Something’s been chasing me,’ Raya said.
“The girls went and looked out the window, but they couldn’t see anything. Then Raya started to feel a little silly, like maybe she imagined the whole thing.
�
��‘Did you see it?’ Sarafina asked.
“‘No, but I heard it.’
“Just then, they heard a loud thump on the door, and the whole house shook. Raya began to cry, but Sarafina was calm. She went to the closet and got out her bow and arrows. She slung them over her shoulder and climbed up the chimney, out onto the roof of the house. From there, she could see the evil troll that was trying to get in their door, so she took out one of her arrows and shot him dead right then and there. And the two sisters buried the evil troll in the forest and lived happily ever after.”
I remember this story so vividly in part because it became one we told over and over, making it more elaborate and detailed with each telling. I remember it also because it gave me the unshakable belief that I was responsible for protecting Rachel from anything that might harm her. I knew she saw me that way, and I wanted to be that kind of big sister.
But then I got sick, and well, and sick again, and well again. Hindsight, I know now, is the cruelest view of all. I can see now exactly how this twist of fate that was my leukemia diagnosis worked its way through my whole family, a disease that would destroy them rather than me. Rachel, most of all, suffered the damage of it. I’d never be the kind of sister who’d sling a bow across her shoulder and climb onto the roof to defeat evil trolls. I was a different kind of sister entirely—and not what Rachel was hoping for.
I was the sort of sister, ultimately, who was out for revenge.
Nineteen
Asha
I mark time now as what has passed since Sarah’s death. There is my life before it happened, and here is my life after. The two parts are so different as to render me into two separate people. Once I was Sarah’s sister Asha. Now I am only Asha, a person I never intended to be.
More than a month has passed since Sarah’s death now, so the new me, the star-tattooed me, is over a month old, an infant in my grief.
It’s Saturday night, and tomorrow is the big ash-scattering event that I am trying my best not to think about. I am sitting on the couch at a party I’m not sure why I’ve agreed to attend, watching the two people across from me groping and kissing and tangling limbs together. I don’t want to watch them, but every time I scan the room, my gaze falls back on the spectacle.