A Million Miles Away

by Lara Avery

  “It’s boring, really. So boring. I draw every day. I write you letters.”

  “You write me… you write letters?” Kelsey hadn’t seen anything for Michelle in the mail for a while. Only college acceptance letters, which her mother had promptly thrown into the trash.

  Peter shrugged. “I’ve only sent one. But I write you every day.”

  Kelsey started to reply. Peter, there’s something you should know. That’s it. That’s what she would say.

  But then he continued, “I write you in my head, too. As we walk around in the hills, and ride around to villages. I talk to everyone back home in my head. Is that insane?”

  “It’s not insane,” Kelsey said quietly. She did that sometimes with Michelle, too.

  Peter’s shoulders loosened. A happy, faraway look returned to his eyes. He didn’t communicate like any other boys she knew. He wasn’t shifty, or distracted. He thought long, and as he thought, his face was an open book.

  “I always mean to write down what I say, but I forget,” he said. “I remember wanting to tell my dad about how the men sit around in barbershops and yell at the TV when they watch the Pakistani cricket team, just like he does. I think he would like that. I’ll have to remember that one.”

  The mention of his father brought her back to reality. He would learn of Michelle’s death somehow, wouldn’t he? “Do you Skype with your family?”

  “Sure, all the time.”

  “Do they—” Kelsey paused. “Do they know about me?”

  “They know I have a girlfriend but they don’t dig too deep into it. Said I shouldn’t be distracted.” He laughed to himself.

  He was quiet then, looking at her. Kelsey was quiet, too. They were both lost.

  Finally, he spoke. “I mostly write to you, though. I think about the different things I would tell my dad, what I would tell my mom, my sister. But I tell you everything. A lot of these guys are really…” He looked around the tent again, getting quieter. “A lot of these guys are really closemouthed, you know? I don’t have to talk all the time, but I’ve got to say something.”

  Then Peter’s eyebrows knit together. “People are dying. No one I know, but we are going to have to…” Kelsey could see Peter’s jaw working, trying to hold back. It hung in the air, sinking into both of them. Kelsey speculated the end of his sentence. Kill people.

  “Ugh.” He let out a sound, shaking his head. “I’m not allowed to talk about it, but, anyway,” he said.

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “Tell me what have you been up to. Distract me.”

  Kelsey felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. “It doesn’t really seem important—”

  “It’s very important,” Peter interrupted. Kelsey could tell he was determined to put all he had toward her, to forget. “How did finals go?”

  Kelsey’s instinct was to answer terrible, as usual. But that was her, and Peter wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to Michelle. I’ll just let him have this. Just a little while longer until the right time comes.

  “Great, I think! The, uh, Art History essay questions were fascinating.”

  “I’m sure you nailed it.” Peter lit up. “Did you listen to that song I told you about? The Cicadas?”

  Kelsey would say, Uh, no. Kelsey only listened to songs you could choreograph dances to. Including musicals, which Michelle made fun of mercilessly. The Cicadas sounded like an indie band. Michelle would probably say, “Yeah! I loved the… guitar.”

  “And? It’s better than Weast, right? But it still has that sixties sound.”

  She kept going. “No way. I’ll never give up on the sixties.”

  Peter laughed. “It’s so nice not to talk about supply trucks that I’m not going to argue with you this time.”

  It was that easy. All of this had come out of Michelle’s mouth so many times, it was impossible to forget. Kelsey had a strange, brief feeling of relief. As if Michelle were next to her, telling her what to say.

  “Can I say something else?” Peter asked.

  “Sure,” Kelsey said. Slowly, the guilt crept back. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have stopped him.

  “You look so beautiful. I know you hate it when I say that, but you do.”

  Kelsey closed her eyes to him. She couldn’t look at his face. She didn’t want to picture it on the screen, how it would fall when he knew the truth.

  “Look at you,” she heard him say softly. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  Maybe Kelsey could just keep her eyes closed when she told him. Peter, she would say to the darkness, I lied to you. But he seemed sensitive already, showing his fears and doubts to her. She didn’t know what to do.

  When Kelsey opened her eyes, a figure darted into the tent behind Peter, yelling at him to move. Crackling sounds, like fireworks, rang out from somewhere in the distance.

  “Okay,” he said, turning back to her. “I have to go.”

  “What’s going on?” Kelsey asked. But she knew. He was under fire.

  “I have to go. Write me back.”

  “Peter, I have to—”

  “Tell me you’ll write me back.”

  He was looking at her straight through the screen, his scared eyes digging into her, begging her. She would have to write as Michelle, but then again, she didn’t know if he would ever get it. She didn’t know if he would even make it through the next half hour.

  “I’ll write you back,” she said.

  He swallowed, taking her in for one last second, and smiled. More shouts echoed behind him, and the rumble of an engine. The call ended.

  For a moment, Kelsey didn’t quite know where she was.

  Panic seized her. She rubbed her face with her palms. Her identical face. Michelle’s cheeks. Michelle’s eyes. Michelle’s nose. What would she do? Michelle would protect him, at least until she could find a way to let him down gently. This wasn’t a text message breakup situation. Michelle had loved him. Peter had one of those smiles that could transform everything else about his face, his eyes, even the air around him. Kelsey didn’t know how, but she wasn’t going to take that away from him. Not now.

  She was left alone in her sister’s room with the sound of absolutely nothing, which was different than silence. It was the sound of being covered with a blanket, of falling with no end, of being very deep inside something, so deep you can’t see a way out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kelsey woke up to a naked ceiling, her covers gone, feeling like she had been kicked by a horse. She struggled to hold what she knew to be true and so very, very false. Peter saw Michelle when he looked at Kelsey. In Peter’s mind, he had talked to Michelle. But Michelle was nowhere.

  A noise at her door made her jump.

  Her father’s face poked in, beard first. “City Market day,” he said, a little hoarse.

  “What?” They hadn’t made their monthly road trip to the Kansas City farmers’ market since the summertime. They used to buy oddly shaped produce their mother sliced and put in salads, useless trinkets the girls collected and eventually gave away at garage sales, cuts of meat her father used on burger specials.

  “City Market day,” her father repeated the phrase louder, as he did lately, instead of giving an explanation. He closed the door.

  When they were very little, his grizzly-bear body was their playground. He’d stand in the middle of the living room, feet apart, knees bent, hands on hips, and she and Michelle would put their feet on his knees and become mountaineers from either side, racing to get to his shoulders.

  They used to pretend to go to bed, but wait until he got off work from the restaurant late at night, and surprise him when he got home by sneaking into the kitchen and leaping up from behind the counter.

  “Who are these girls?” he used to say, pretending to be shocked.

  “Michelle! Kelsey!” they would scream.

  “Who?” His eyes would go wide, trying not to smile.

  It was fun to tell him the stor
y of who they were, what they meant to him. “I’m Kelsey and that’s Michelle! I’m your daughter, silly! You love me and all that! Remember?”

  Then the moment when he remembered, even though they knew it was coming, ended in glorious hugs and kisses, as if he were remembering them after such a long time. As if eight hours away from someone you loved was such a long time.

  And it was, when she was a kid.

  But every time she and her father tried to comfort each other now, they ended up just forcing words into a thick silence. Because they reminded each other of Michelle, she guessed.

  Kelsey, especially, was a reminder to him. She was a reminder to everybody. She had no choice. People in the hallways, people on the sidewalk, people in the grocery store. Their eyes widened and they drew in breath. Their mouths tightened in pity and they looked away, as if it were too hard to look at her. Try looking in the mirror every morning, Kelsey wanted to tell them. She was used to being mistaken for Michelle, but Michelle used to make people smile, not cringe. The only person who still smiled at the thought of Michelle was Peter. Maybe that’s why she did what she did.

  Kelsey blew out a thin breath at the thought.

  She sat up and stood on her mattress, shaking out her arms and legs. She cleared a space on the floor covered in dirty clothes to do a sun salute, then some splits, and some butt-bouncing in the mirror for good measure. She put in her gold studs. She put on a cardigan and tight, dark jeans. She straightened her hair and layered on blush and mascara until she was unmistakable. She pointed and flexed her toes. She was put together.

  She was Kelsey. She lifted her arms over her head and let her belly breathe. No need to explain. She let her body do the talking.

  When her parents pulled up to the entrance of City Market to let her out and park the car, Kelsey was hit by the sounds of laughter and other languages, the smells of cinnamon and pine. Christmas was close.

  Both she and Michelle had always wanted a real tree, and their mother had always refused, giving excuses. “Out of respect for your Jewish grandparents,” she would say, or, “The kind of gifts we give you don’t fit under a tree.” It was true. They had always gone on trips at Christmas, and when they remembered to put one up, it was a tiny artificial tree from Walgreens that sang carols until it was out of batteries.

  After getting a cup of hot cider, Kelsey searched for her father’s uncut hair towering over the crowd. She shuffled around young couples wearing large glasses and small, stumpy women with carts, wandering toward the butcher’s booth.

  Michelle’s ghost was everywhere, her baggy plaid coat darting in and out of a line of people. Her sister always got sulky on these trips to the market. Kelsey could grin and bear the hours for tradition’s sake, for the sake of her mom and dad humming happily to every corner, but her sister would burn out. Now was about the time she would start moaning for money to go to the thrift store or keys to the car.

  But Kelsey missed that, too. She was slowly finding out you don’t just get to miss the parts you liked about someone who had died. You had to feel the whole weight of them, tugging at you.

  She found herself in the middle of a makeshift grove of trees standing crooked in their asphalt pots. When the two of them appealed to their dad for a Christmas tree last year, he took them out to the garage, pointed to an ax, and invited them to go to the river and chop one down themselves.

  Kelsey felt a smile come on at the memory of Michelle taking the ax from her father and swinging it with enthusiasm, almost cutting off a limb. She could feel her sister laughing next to her, see her breath in the air, urging her to Get one! Get one! Mom and Dad will understand.

  She approached the salesman, a gangly kid in a KU pullover, much younger and taller than her. “How much for that one?” She pointed to a sickly pine tree about her height.

  “On sale for twenty,” he replied.

  “If you help me carry it to my parents, they’ll pay.”

  “No way.”

  Kelsey stared at him for a long moment, inching closer. She mouthed the word Please, and gave him a wide smile.

  Bridged by the skinny tree, Kelsey and the boy parted the City Market crowd in a trail of needles. She imagined her and her parents sitting around the lit-up tree in the living room, with syrupy, old-timey Christmas music in the background. She could feel her blood getting warmer.

  “This will be the first time our family has a real tree,” Kelsey called back to the boy, searching for the Maxfields’ car.

  “Cool,” he said, his breath heaving.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kevin.”

  “Kevin, this tree is special. It’s kind of a tribute. To my sister.”

  Kevin said nothing. He was too busy lifting his end over the hood of a car. She could barely get a word out to her parents, her friends, but people like Kevin didn’t feel the remotest bit of sadness for Michelle to begin with. Unlike her, they could only see Michelle in what she told them: from far away, an outline.

  “We used to come here every month. She used to pick up onions and tomatoes from the booth and ask for the price in French, just to practice. No one could understand her. It was embarrassing.”

  Kevin still didn’t care. She kept going.

  “When we were eight we snuck into a concert they held in that pavilion,” she told Kevin. “It wasn’t even fun. It was just a cello. But we were proud.”

  As they crossed the street, Kelsey called back to him, “Once I caught her reading aloud the steamy parts of my mom’s romance novels to her Barbies.”

  That one got a laugh. Or at least it sounded like a laugh.

  After ten minutes of wandering through the neighborhood, Kevin put his end of the tree down and made a noise that was supposed to be exasperation, but sounded more like a malfunctioning blender. No sign of the Subaru.

  Kelsey pulled out her phone.

  Her mother picked up.

  “Mom?” Kelsey put on a smile.

  “Where are you?”

  “Fifth and Walnut. So, Mom—”

  “We’re coming to get you.”

  Silence. Her mother hung up. Kevin blew a bubble with his gum, popping it. As the Subaru rolled up next to them, she took the tree from him, leaning it on her shoulder. Her mother’s window rolled down, revealing a stone face, glancing at the tree.

  “No, Kelsey.”

  Something between a laugh and a cough escaped Kelsey. “But—”

  Her mother jerked her head toward the backseat. “We’re going home.”

  Kelsey threw up her hands. “We just got here!”

  Her mother sighed. Kelsey noticed she had tried to put on lipstick for the first time in several weeks. She wanted to go back to normal, too. “We didn’t even make it into the market. Your father isn’t feeling well.”

  Kelsey looked at her dad through the windshield, and rubbed her cold hands together. “I’m sorry,” she called to him. “Maybe this will cheer you up.”

  Her father leaned across the seat toward the window, his voice cracking. “You’re a very sweet girl. But it’s not that easy. Your old dad isn’t quite there, sweetheart.”

  Kelsey was sputtering, which she hated to do. “This is a nice thing, a nice thing I’m trying to do for everyone. I would really, really like to put up a Christmas tree. It’s what people do.”

  “I’m sorry, Kelsey,” her mother said. But she didn’t look sorry. She wasn’t even looking at her. Kelsey stayed still.

  “Please get in the car. We’ll come back and get it later.”

  Disappointment cut, sharpened by the rare hope she had just felt a second ago. And the guilt of it all, of lying to Peter and lying to herself, was weighing on her, pushing her. She caught her mother’s eyes.

  “Michelle would have wanted a Christmas tree.”

  She shouldn’t have said that. Her mother tightened her grip on the steering wheel. Kevin stood quiet, looking back and forth between them, not knowing what to do.

  Kelsey’s mom’s voi
ce came out shaky. “Put the damn tree down, Kelsey. I love you, but I don’t have rope to tie a tree to our car, I don’t have a stand to put it in, I don’t have a working vacuum to clean up after it, and I’m tired. I don’t—please put the damn tree down.”

  “Just leave it?”

  Kevin’s gum popped in the silence. A family with a stroller rolled by, staring.

  Her dad’s voice floated out. “We need to go home.”

  “I’ll take it back,” Kevin said quietly.

  Instead, Kelsey lowered the tree to the brick street and gave it a shove with her foot toward the curb. Kevin picked it up and, with a glance at her, carried it away.

  She got into the backseat. No one said anything more, and her father put on the radio. “Part of you pours out of me, In these lines from time to time…” Kelsey heard a woman’s voice sing, but as they got on the highway, her mother turned down the volume so it was barely audible, a whine that got lost in the drone of the wheels on the road.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Twenty minutes later they were in the driveway, and Kelsey walked inside fast, ahead of her parents, closing the door behind her.

  She turned to go upstairs, but a streak of primary colors on the front table stopped her. Yesterday’s mail sat on top of a pile of bills, and on top of that, an envelope with official-looking postage. Then, in careful handwriting, all capitals:

  MICHELLE MAXFIELD

  1316 VERMONT STREET

  LAWRENCE, KS 66044

  Peter’s letter. Kelsey grabbed it and took the stairs two at a time. In her room, she paused. This was wrong. But it wasn’t the same kind of wrong she had felt before. It was the wrong she felt seeing the tree grow smaller in Kevin’s arms as he walked away, the wrong that cut Michelle’s happy ghost from her. As soon as she had picked up the letter, the guilt had faded.

  Michelle would want to open this, but she can’t, Kelsey thought as she slid her finger under the seal. So I’ll do it for her.

  12/14

  Dear Michelle,

  I’m writing this sitting against a fir tree. We made it from the desert to the Kunar Province a few days ago, all rugged mountains and green valleys and meadows with cattle. We ride in huge trucks on narrow paths up through the peaks and the rock formations. It’s like a slow roller coaster. It’s so pretty I have to try not to get distracted. I’ve never been this high off the ground before. Most of the people in my company have been in these valleys once or twice already. Sam and I go on errands to the village for chewing tobacco and in exchange they show us how to find the best watch spots in the cracks between boulders. They use chewing tobacco to stay awake, and pass the time. Almost every soldier chews while they’re here, whether they chewed before the tour or not. Except for me, of course. I am the youngest. They call me Petey.