P.S. I Miss You

by Jen Petro-Roy

  It didn’t make sense, though. You aren’t the kind of girl who gets pregnant. Bad girls get pregnant, girls who have … you know.

  I never thought of you as a bad girl. And you kept saying that you didn’t do anything wrong. That things would be okay.

  That you and Alex wanted to get married.

  (That, as I’m sure you remember, is when Dad’s face turned the shade of the eggplants Mom grows in our vegetable garden.)

  You kept saying stuff like that for a few weeks, until you had that big fight with Alex. Until Mom and Dad finally wore you down.

  Then it was perfectly fine to go to Aunt Maureen’s for the summer.

  It was perfectly fine to make a plan to go away to school in the fall.

  It was perfectly fine to leave without saying good-bye.

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. Even if you did all that stuff, I do miss you. And I’m not ashamed of you.

  SUNDAY, JULY 1ST

  Dear Cilla,

  Mom and Dad still make me go to church, even though I’m mad at God. I’m mad that He let you get pregnant and I’m mad that He didn’t listen to me when I prayed for you to change your mind and stay home to have the baby.

  When I told Mom and Dad that, they told me that my feelings were why it was so important to go to church. Because I need to spend time with God to hear His answer.

  I don’t want to spend time with God, though. I want to spend time with you.

  You’re my sister. God’s just the big guy in the sky who let Mom and Dad push you away. He’s the one who made them feel ashamed of you.

  Father O’Malley always says that everything happens because it’s part of God’s plan and that He’ll give us the strength to get through anything as long as we turn to Him, but God had a really bad plan this time.

  I’ve been praying pretty hard, too, and I still don’t feel strong.

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. I miss you.

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 4TH

  Dear Cilla,

  This morning was the Fourth of July parade. Katie and Maggie and I got there extra early to get good seats by the side of the road. Not that it mattered, since everyone put out their seats a week ago. You always used to think that was funny, how everyone in our town stuck their lawn chairs out way before parade day and how they didn’t strap them down or lock them up, either.

  It’s just this sea of Adirondack chairs and folding chairs and those low canvas ones, all the way from the Dunkin’ Donuts at the rotary to the Dunkin’ Donuts in the center, where the parade ends.

  No one ever takes them, either. There’s never an article in the paper talking about the local chair thief. Mom never hears rumors at church about our neighbors having nowhere to watch the parade, after all. People know the rules. They’re honest.

  I remember you were always surprised by this, like you expected the chairs to disappear overnight, stolen by some daring bandit.

  I never thought it was weird, though. Maybe because “Thou shalt not steal” is a commandment. Maybe because I’d never think of stealing a chair, so I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it.

  You could, though. You always saw the world a little differently. Like you lived in this weird cloudy area between real life and church life, real life and Mom and Dad life. Maybe it was those clouds that got you in trouble.

  Or maybe you were the only one who could see the storm coming.

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. I miss you.

  THURSDAY, JULY 5TH

  Dear Cilla,

  I totally forgot to tell you about the parade yesterday. I started thinking about clouds and you and got all sad. The parade was fun. I guess. It was the same as every year. Kids cried when the fire engines and police cars went by, and then started rushing the street when the creepy-looking clown rode by on his little bike and threw out candy. They had Spider-Man and Hermione throwing candy.

  Katie’s little brother pretended to be all cool about it, but I could tell he was totally freaking out. He has Spider-Man sheets and Spider-Man wallpaper and was Spider-Man for Halloween last year. I was more excited about Hermione, even though the person in the costume looked about thirty years old.

  It started to rain halfway through, but it was only a drizzle so we still went to the carnival in the center. Pretty much everyone from school was there, except Miri Doherty, who always goes to Cape Cod for the summer. She has a house there and won’t shut up about how awesome it is.

  “It’s almost on the water.” Miri always tells us this with an annoying smirk on her face, like she knows she’s better than everyone else. Which she’s totally not. “All I have to do is walk down a little path and I’m at the beach. It has five bedrooms, too. Mine’s the biggest.”

  Mom and Dad say material stuff like that doesn’t matter, but sometimes I think they’re wrong. Because it would be pretty great to have a house on the beach. Maybe then Mom and Dad would let you stay there instead of in Nowheresville, Virginia. Then I could visit you.

  Everyone else besides Miri was there, though. Joey and Vivek came right from their baseball game and were still in their maroon-and-white uniforms. Joey offered me a bite of his cotton candy, but I said no. Cotton candy is gross. I know you don’t agree, but it totally is. (And you’re not here, so you can’t argue back. Ha!)

  Ms. Simon from school was in the dunk tank. Not like it mattered, because she’d been up there so long that she was already wet from the rain. Katie and Maggie bought a few tickets. I think they were still mad at Ms. Simon for all those spelling tests she gave last year. They didn’t dunk her, though. Neither did Joey.

  Vivek did, but only once. He bought three balls, too.

  Ms. Simon is really young and funny, so she started making faces at the boys, which made them super upset. They started pretending they were missing on purpose. No one believed them, though. I thought Joey was going to throw a tantrum.

  The boys were all arguing about whether the game was rigged when we heard a splash behind us. Then Ms. Simon popped up out of the water.

  “Nice! You got it on the first try!” she cheered. Everyone around us started clapping for whoever threw the ball. When I looked to see who it was, I saw the girl from the playground! You know, the one who was on the tire swing reading a book. Today she didn’t have a book, but I still couldn’t see her face. She was looking down at the ground as everyone cheered for her.

  I waited until she finally looked up. A few of the curls around her face were dyed pink, which both surprised me and made me totally jealous. I’ve never known anyone with dyed hair before.

  (Well, except for Mom, who dyes her gray hairs. I bet all her mom friends do that, too.)

  I’ve never known anyone my age who dyed their hair, though. I wonder if Father O’Malley will let her in church like that.

  Even if her hair was dyed, though, she looked nice. She was wearing a bright green skirt and this cool tank top with pink and green polka dots. Pink polka-dot sneakers, too!

  I totally want polka-dot sneakers now.

  Joey and Vivek kept saying stuff about “beginner’s luck” and how she must have cheated, so the girl started to walk away. I didn’t blame her, either. Joey can be really mean. (Which is another reason why I could never like him.)

  I ran toward her. I almost tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and to catch my balance, I grabbed on to her arm. She almost fell over, which meant that I almost fell onto her. On the wet sidewalk covered with drips of mustard and cheesy nacho crumbs. She gave me a dirty look, but I must have looked as horrified as I felt, because she started smiling. Then she pretended to be falling again.

  I smiled, too. It felt like I’d been teetering over the edge of a cliff and someone had pulled me back. Where the cliff was being this girl’s mortal enemy.

  Or something like that.

  Anyway, she smiled again. She had braces, and the elastics were pink, the same as her hair. It was the first time I’d seen someon
e make braces look cool. Then she turned around and walked away. I didn’t see her the rest of the day, even though we stayed at the carnival until after lunch. I wonder if she’s new. We haven’t had a new girl in school in two years, ever since Zoe Holt showed up and became Miri’s BFF.

  After lunch, I won the ring toss game three times in a row, but the guy behind the booth only gave me a prize once. Which is totally unfair and totally against what it said on the sign. I still got a stuffed animal, though. It was a koala bear, your favorite.

  I put it on your bed, next to Cuddly the koala. You can sleep with both of them when you get home if you want, even though I’m sure you don’t sleep with stuffed animals anymore. It makes me feel good to think they’re both waiting for you, though.

  Because I know that you’ll come home. Even if Mom and Dad say you’re going to Catholic school right after you have the baby. Even if it was your idea to go to Catholic school, I know you’ll change your mind. You’ll realize that you belong here.

  You have to.

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. Because I miss you.

  MONDAY, JULY 16TH

  Dear Cilla,

  It’s been almost a month now and you still haven’t written back. Are you mad at me? Did I not do enough to convince Mom and Dad that you should keep the baby?

  (You know, when you still wanted to keep the baby.)

  I’m sorry if I let you down. I was just so surprised. Scared and confused, too. I didn’t know what to say to you. You were Cilla, but all of a sudden you were this other person, too. This other person who’d done stuff I could never even dream of. Who’d broken commandments and actually sinned.

  Plus, you guys were yelling all the time. I spent half of every weekend in my room with my earbuds in. (And I could still hear Mom and Dad screaming about “purity” and “honor” and your “reputation.”)

  You spent the other half of every weekend in your room. (And weeknights with Alex.)

  I know you think I don’t know about that, but I’m not stupid. I’m not a little kid, either. I saw his car parked at the end of the street. I heard you through the wall when you guys were on the phone.

  That’s another reason why I didn’t defend you. Because I was mad at you. I was mad at you for ignoring me for him. I was mad at you for fighting with Mom and Dad so much that they turned into different people.

  They started yelling at me about stuff, too. Silly stuff, like forgetting to unload the dishwasher and not wiping my feet on the mat. They treated me like I got pregnant in high school, too. Like getting the floor messy was the same as having … you know.

  It’s the eleventh commandment, you know: “Thou shalt not track dirt.”

  So that’s why I wasn’t on your side. When you said that you could figure out how to be a Broadway actress and still have a baby. When you were yelling about love and how you didn’t care what people thought of you. Because right then, I did care what people thought. Because you were ruining my life.

  I know I can’t change what I did now, but I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I keep picturing you at Aunt Maureen’s, knitting a sweater and eating stinky baked beans. Instead of here, living your life. Maybe you could play Mary in some nativity play somewhere. Or another pregnant character. I’m sure they’re out there.

  That’s why I want you to write back. We need to talk about how you need to come home after you have the baby. How your life is still here. You don’t need Catholic school. You don’t have to be ashamed. You’ve learned your lesson and won’t sin again.

  Right?

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. I miss you.

  FRIDAY, JULY 20TH

  Dear Cilla,

  You woke me up the night everything changed. I’d slept over at Maggie’s the night before and had gotten something like three hours of sleep, so I’d gone to bed early. It was probably only ten o’clock when I heard the yelling, but it felt like the middle of the night. It was dark and cloudy and there were no stars in the sky.

  I still remember how there were no stars. No brilliance, no light, nothing twinkling at all.

  I heard Dad first, with that big, booming voice he uses when he’s really, really mad. Like when Hunter McCoy next door drove his truck over our lawn a week after he’d gotten his license. Or when I threw a baseball inside the house and broke the TV.

  Dad gets mad when things break. And maybe to him, you broke something. Our family. His image of you. Your future.

  I knew why he was yelling the second I heard him. You guys had been yelling for months. Him telling you not to complain about your morning sickness because getting pregnant was “your choice.” Mom crying about how you’d never get a good job if this got out. You sobbing about how you still loved Alex, then sobbing about how they made him break up with you.

  So when Dad yelled that you were an embarrassment, I thought it would be the same old thing. It’d last fifteen minutes and then you’d all go in different directions. To be continued next time.

  You guys never resolved anything. They yelled about how you shouldn’t tell anyone you were pregnant. You yelled about how they weren’t the only ones hurting. You all blamed everyone else and the conversation went round and round and round.

  It was like one of those pictures of a snake eating its own tail. Or that optical illusion with the staircases that never stop going upward. No one ever apologized and the yelling never stopped. I’d started to expect that it would go on like that until the baby popped out of you. Then we’d all stare at it with confused expressions on all our faces: “Now what?”

  It was different that night, though. When Mom (for the zillionth time) talked about how embarrassed she’d be at church if anyone knew, there was a big crash from downstairs. I don’t know if you threw something or knocked something over. I don’t know if it was God’s way of telling me something important was about to happen.

  First there was a bang. Then there was you: “If you’re so embarrassed, why don’t I just go away? So no one can ever see me like this.”

  I’d crept to the top of the stairs by this point. I was hugging the wall, partially for privacy and partially because I needed something to hold me up. Because you sounded like you meant it.

  I expected Mom and Dad to say something like, “Oh, honey, don’t say things like that. We’ll be mad at you for a while, but then things will get better.”

  You know, exactly what I wanted to hear.

  They didn’t say that, though.

  Mom said that she was ashamed of you, because you’d done something shameful.

  Dad said that’s why they weren’t telling anyone.

  You said you couldn’t live in a house like this anymore and you were going to leave.

  Dad said, “Fine, you do that!”

  Mom said, “Fine! I’ll call Aunt Maureen. You can stay with her.”

  I was around the corner now, peeking through the banister like a little kid checking to see what Santa had left for her under the tree. Your eyes were open wide. You looked the way I feel when I’m at the end of the diving board with a long line behind me. When I don’t want to jump off but I know I can’t go back.

  “Fine,” you said. “I’ll go. And maybe I won’t come back after that.” You said it softly, slowly, like you were waiting for them to interrupt you, like you were dipping one toe into the ocean to test the water.

  The water was cold, though. Ice cold.

  “You do that.” Mom’s voice was ice cold, too. “If you feel so strongly about leaving us, then we’ll find you a school for you to go to after. One that’s far, far away from here.”

  “So you don’t have to deal with us and our silly morals,” Dad added.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  It wasn’t fine at all. But after that, no one backed down. Even when you told me afterward that you shouldn’t have said anything, that you want to come home after you have the baby.

>   I agree with you. It was a mistake.

  Please come home.

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. I miss you.

  SATURDAY, JULY 21ST

  Dear Cilla,

  Mom and Dad want me to forget about you. They never say your name. They took your school pictures off the wall. Now all I see are a bunch of squares of darker wallpaper. Mom covered one of the squares with a painting of a maple tree. It’s really ugly.

  Sometimes it seems like the last few months were just a dream. Or a plot on some TV show I saw late one night. The episode where someone’s sister gets pregnant and throws up all the time and grows out of her clothes and eats all the grapes and chocolate chip cookies in the house. The episode where someone’s sister fights with her parents all the time.

  Then someone changed the channel and it all went away. I still remember bits and pieces of the plot, but everything’s fuzzy.

  Two days after the big blowup, you were gone. We were supposed to go to the mall that morning. You were supposed to leave in the afternoon.

  Instead, I woke up to Dad sitting at the kitchen table alone. You and Mom had left before the sun came up. You hadn’t said good-bye.

  When Mom came home I didn’t say anything.

  Neither did they.

  We haven’t since.

  Maybe that’s why I keep writing to you. Even if they’re just words on a page, they’re still words.

  It makes the quiet a little less quiet.

  Love,

  Evie

  P.S. I miss you.

  SUNDAY, JULY 29TH

  Dear Cilla,

  I looked for that girl in church today. Which was really awkward, since Mom and Dad still refuse to sit anywhere but the second row and I kept having to twist around to see the rest of the congregation.

  I thought I might be able to convince them to change seats just this one time, but they were totally stubborn. As usual.