Everyone said, “I’m sorry.” Everyone hugged me and wept. My best friends, Samantha and Violet, were practically sobbing their eyes out. I wanted to tell them to quit it. They couldn’t have known that their tears were contagious. The minute I stopped crying, I’d look at them and start. Mom told me that all I had to say was, “Thank you for coming.” I repeated it like a tourist who knows one phrase of a foreign language.
We were heading toward our car when our path was blocked by a tall, good-looking, blond kid wearing a tan suit. His face was blotchy, his eyes were the rubbed raw pink of pencil erasers.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
Only then did Aaron emerge from his smeary disguise. As he turned to shake my father’s hand, I was afraid that my parents would be as mean to him as they were when Margaret was alive. I was less concerned about Aaron than about what I might do. Aren’t you sorry? I’d have to ask. Don’t you wish you could have back your little problem of not liking Margaret’s boyfriend?
My mother threw her arms around Aaron, Dad thumped his shoulder, and I had to walk away because it was so much worse than what I’d imagined. I leaned against the car and focused on a bottle cap glinting in the wet parking lot gravel. Who’d drunk that Diet Coke? A mourner? A cemetery worker? Cheating couples? Goth nerds who haunted the graveyard for fun? That was Margaret’s new social life, the people she got to hang out with.
Someone distracted Mom and Dad, and Aaron came over to me. Without my parents around to complicate things, I was simply glad to see him. He hugged me for a second, then backed off and patted my arm as if it were a puppy that might bite.
He said, “I promise not to ask how you are if you don’t ask me.”
“Deal,” I said.
Now, it seemed, my tears were contagious. I looked down at the bottle cap. When I looked up, Aaron was leaning on the Jeep. At the same moment, we noticed our backs were soaking wet. We tried to stand on our own, but we were both too tired, and we slumped against the car and let the water seep through.
I said, “I heard you torched your paintings. I thought that was totally cool.”
My mom’s friend Sally told her that after they found Margaret, Aaron stacked all his paintings of Mirror Lake in his backyard and squirted them with charcoal lighter.
“Thanks,” he said. “I couldn’t look at them. It was like living with the portrait of the serial killer who murdered your whole family. I mean, my whole family.”
I said, “I understand. It was genius.”
He said, “I wish you’d say that to my parents. They’re trying to make me see a shrink.”
“I heard that, too,” I said.
“A grief counselor.” Aaron sneered. “Some asshole who never met Margaret.”
I wished he hadn’t said “grief.” Or “Margaret.” I looked over at my parents, embracing another stranger.
Aaron said, “I went once. Just to shut them up. There’s a guy here in Emersonville. The dude was wearing a lab coat. He looked like a vet. He asked if I wanted to talk about my feelings. I said no. We sat there with the clock ticking, and then he said we had to wait until I was ready to talk. He’d see me in a week. In your dreams, I thought. But here’s the crazy part. As I was leaving, the guy said, ‘I feel I have to tell you, I heard your friend sing at the Senior Show. My daughter is in your class.’ ”
“Who’s his daughter?” I asked.
“Who cares?” Aaron said. “Are you getting this, Nico? The guy said he’d never heard anything like the way Margaret sang ‘My Funny Valentine’ at the Senior Show. He said it moved him to tears. He told me he’d actually sobbed out loud.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Tears? The pervert? They sent you to see the pervert dad who cried at the Senior Show?”
Aaron nodded. “You got it. I ran out of the guy’s office. I couldn’t wait to tell Margaret about the insane coincidence of their sending me to see the slob who’d blubbered during her song. I imagined her saying maybe he wasn’t a slob, maybe he’d been really moved. Maybe it was the power of art, maybe he would have cried if he’d heard Billie Holiday. I was halfway to my car when I remembered why I couldn’t tell her.”
I said, “You imagined her saying all that?”
“Word for word. But of course it wasn’t her. So where was it coming from? Me? Or was she talking to me?”
I said, “Stuff like that happens to me all the time.”
Aaron said, “The worst part is, there’s no one I can tell.”
I said, “You just told me.”
“That I did,” he said.
We saw my parents approaching. Aaron started talking faster. “Listen. One day this summer, let’s go for a ride. Hang out.”
That would be nice, I would have said, if I could have spoken. That was what the staircase spirit told me I should have said. The spirit whispered, “By summer, he won’t recognize you on the street.”
I nodded like a bobble-head doll as Aaron backed away. Then my parents scooped me up, and we got into the car.
Aaron faded into the rainy background, speckled with the blossomlike faces of kids from Margaret’s school. I despised them for being alive when my sister was dead. A winnowing had taken place, like picking teams for a game. Everyone else had wound up on the team of the living, leaving Margaret behind, chosen last, to play on the larger but more unpopular loser team of the dead.
“Poor kid.” My mother meant Aaron.
“Poor everybody,” said Dad.
I DIDN’T HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL. My parents worked it out so I could skip final exams and get the A’s I would have gotten anyway.
Samantha and Violet called to tell me again how sorry they were. I knew they meant it, they cared about me. I hated the sound of their voices. Every time the phone rang, I still thought it might be Margaret.
They were the ones who told me that Margaret’s graduation had featured a blown-up portrait of her onstage, an angel beaming at everyone who came up to get a diploma. Her friends and teachers and Aaron all gave tearful speeches, and they showed the video of her performing “My Funny Valentine” at the Senior Show. It seemed like an odd song to sing at your own memorial service.
The principal had called to invite us and ask if we wanted to speak. Everyone said they understood why we didn’t go, we needed to heal our own way. Some people probably thought we were weak. But I was glad not to have to sit there, trying not to turn and stare at everyone trying not to turn and stare at us.
The summer yawned before me, a pit of boredom and pain. A dull pressure knuckled inside my chest, and I began to wonder if heart problems ran in our family. Sometimes at night I woke to a hammering inside my chest, as if my heart were trying all the exit routes from my body. I pictured my parents coming in to find I’d died in my sleep. I was glad the idea of a heart attack frightened me so badly. As much as I missed Margaret, I didn’t want to join her.
My father cooked our favorite meals. He’d always been a good cook, but now the less we ate, the harder he worked. He made chicken pot pies with buttery crusts, lamb with flageolet beans, swordfish pounded thin and fried with bread crumbs, capers, and lemon. He never complained when the food went back to the kitchen untouched. Everything tasted like Styrofoam, and we had to sit perfectly still if we didn’t want to catch sight of Margaret’s place at the table. There was always too much food and not enough air in the room. Our efforts at conversation were punctuated by sighs that were partly sadness and partly just trying to breathe.
One night at dinner, Mom said, “Nico, darling, why do you keep touching your chest?”
“My heart hurts,” I said, and everything stopped, as if I’d dropped a heavy plate, still rattling, on the table.
“Everyone’s heart hurts, honey,” said Dad.
Mom silenced him with a look.
“Your heart?” she said. “Your actual heart?”
“Right here,” I said. “I think so.”
“We’ll ge
t it checked out,” she said. “I’ll ask Dawson to recommend a specialist.” Dawson was the doctor in Albany who’d diagnosed Mom’s arthritis. “I need to talk to him, anyway. I think my hands are getting worse.”
She held up her hands and rotated them: palms out, palms back. Her knuckles were swollen, but they didn’t seem worse than before.
“Give it a few weeks,” Dad said. “This may not be the best time to tell about your hands.”
My mother said, “I think I can distinguish one kind of pain from another.”
Dad said, “Actually, there was a piece on the news about that medication Dawson prescribed.”
“It’s dangerous, I hope,” said Mom.
“How much are you taking?” Dad took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Not enough,” said Mom. “He never gives me enough to help.”
Dad said, “Be careful, Daisy. They’ve taken a lot of that crap off the market. The good news is, you lose the joint pain. The bad news is, you lose your life. The stroke, the blood clots, the—”
My mom said, “The pain in my hands is my life.”
“What medicine?” I said. “Stroke? Blood clots? Mom shouldn’t—”
“Don’t worry, she won’t,” Dad said.
Mom said, “Maybe he can switch me to something safer. Anyhow, I’ll call him. He can recommend someone for Nico.”
Dad said, “The chances of something happening to Nico are statistically less than lightning striking twice in the same place.”
“Lightning does strike twice,” I said. “It hits the highest point. If there’s one tree in a field—”
“You’re fine,” said Dad.
“I’m not fine,” I said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Dad said.
“It was treatable,” said Mom. “Henry, my God, it could have been treated.”
That was something I hadn’t known, and wished I hadn’t found out.
“If we’d only paid attention,” Mom said. “If we’d only been more aggressive . . .”
Aggressive was the last word I would have used about my parents. They could have prevented this. Margaret would be alive.
I said, “Why don’t you make an appointment for me to see a real doctor in the city?” I was sorry as soon as I said it. I didn’t want to know.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” said Dad.
“Okay,” said Mom. “I’ll get a name. We’ll make an appointment.”
We went back to not eating. Dad had made edamame. I unzipped a pod, and teased the membrane off one bean, then another. I was getting thinner, but it wasn’t what I’d wanted when I used to stand in front of the mirror, inhaling till my ribs ached.
My mother said, “Speaking of health concerns . . . Nico, aren’t you losing a little weight? The last thing we need around here is some life-threatening eating disorder.”
My father put his hand on her arm.
“Daisy,” he said. “Relax.”
“Relax?” she said. “You’re kidding.”
“No one’s eating,” he said. “We don’t have to torture Nico about food. We didn’t when—”
“When what?” I said.
“Radishes?” my father said. “Remember the radish diet?”
So they’d known about that, too. How could I have thought it was a secret when for days I ate nothing but radishes and ramen noodles for dinner? My parents never even glanced at what I put on my plate. Maybe it was part of their theory that anything they forbade would become our heart’s desire. And maybe they were right, because the diets never lasted. Mom and Dad often mentioned how twisted our society was for making young women want to be thin. They’d pretended that they were just talking and not giving us warning advice.
“It’s not like that now,” I said. “I’m never hungry.”
“Make sure you drink plenty of water,” said Mom.
“I do,” I lied. Then we sat there.
What had we talked about before? Margaret had done all the talking. Now there was nothing to say. We were the wallflowers left behind when Margaret waltzed away.
Finally, I said, “You know what Violet told me? At graduation, the picture they used was Margaret’s yearbook photo. You know the one.” I bugged my eyes. “Margaret despised it. She told me that the photographer had gotten the kids to focus by saying, ‘Look at my hand!’ and every portrait caught the person at the moment of noticing that the guy was missing two fingers.”
My parents pretended that Margaret hadn’t told us the story. Because that was what we did then. We talked about Margaret as if all the old family stories were news. It made us feel as if our connection with her was ongoing, as if our knowledge of her was susceptible to revision. Every so often, I almost slipped and said something that might have led to the subject of Aaron. Then Margaret’s face floated before me, silencing me with a fierce look that I was already forgetting.
Dad said, “Daisy, remember the time we took her to church and she pretended to be sick so we’d have to leave, and all the way home she did that perfect little-kid imitation of the minister preaching ‘God is not a BMW’?”
Mom said, “What made you think of that?” It was a trick question. Poor Dad. The minister was the same one who’d spoken at Margaret’s service.
My mother speared a green bean and stared at it as if she’d never seen a bean or a fork. I focused on the impaled bean. I hated seeing them cry.
She said, “I can’t stop thinking about the last argument she and I had. It started about smoking and escalated. We both said things we didn’t mean, and I never got to take it back. Isn’t that the worst horror? That your child could die like that before you got to make up?”
My father walked behind her chair and held her by the shoulders. He said, “You loved each other. How could you have a teenage daughter and not have a little fight now and then? She’d been on permanent eye-roll with you for the last five years.”
“It wasn’t a fight,” Mom said. “And it certainly wasn’t a little fight.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dad. “I—”
I said, “She was smoking that day in the boat. I told her she shouldn’t. She got mad, that’s when she dove in. I should have let her have the cigarette—”
I caught myself in mid-sentence. I never told on my sister. But you couldn’t tell on the dead, you couldn’t get them in trouble.
“You told her not to smoke,” said Mom. “You wanted her to live.”
One thing I would never tell them was that Margaret’s last words were, “Smoke this.” That was her special present for me, the hair shirt she’d left me to wear until time and age and forgetfulness laundered it into something softer.
Somehow, I managed to get to my feet and walk around the table. The three of us clumped together. My father squeezed us so hard that Mom’s shoulders rattled against my chest. My tears kept dripping into her hair, which presented a logical puzzle until I realized that somehow, at some point, I’d grown as tall as my mother.
Three
EVERY NIGHT, I DREAMED ABOUT MARGARET. SHE WAS ALWAYS alive and well. I had one of those recurring dreams that trick you into thinking you’re awake, then plunge you into another dream, more brutal than the first because the fake awakening makes the second dream seem more real. I dreamed I heard my sister’s voice and followed it to the kitchen, where she was sitting with Aaron at our red enamel table. She was eating Cheerios from the box and blowing smoke rings. I thought, Mom and Dad will kill her!
She and Aaron were talking and laughing. But when I walked in, they fell silent. Aaron gave me a funny look. Why had I told him that Margaret was dead when she so obviously wasn’t? I shrugged. I must have gotten it wrong. She hadn’t dived into the water, or maybe they’d found her and saved her. Margaret smiled and touched her lips, entrusting me with another secret.
That was when I awoke, seasick, drenched, and shipwrecked, as if the knotted sheets were a sail on which I’d washed ashore. I longed to slip back into the dream
in which I might catch up with Margaret.
I counted the hours till morning, then the minutes and seconds, until I got dizzy and lay there thinking of how Margaret and I used to play those little-kid games of pain and endurance, twisting one another’s arm until the loser cried out. Now I was playing against myself, but even so, I gave in. I got out of bed and wandered through the house, tripping over the books and shoes no one bothered to pick up, as if there was no particular spot where anything belonged.
Our house had always been neat before, but now our possessions had taken advantage of our moment of weakness. In the dark, the house grew more corridors and corners, and blackness scrambled the map of how one room led to the next. Margaret had told me that the woman who owned the house before Mom’s parents saw a ghost that warned her she would die if she stopped building on additions, which eventually she did.
I used to be scared of the house at night, not of killers or ghosts, but of my own power to imagine something watching me from the shadows. Those fears were gone completely. What could the shadows be hiding? Now I wished I could meet a ghost with a message from my sister. I loved the mysterious creaks and groans. I hurried toward them on the chance that the mouse in the wall might be Margaret’s spirit. Margaret had always loved ghost stories, and now our lives had become one. But it was a ghost story in reverse, a ghost story in which the living were praying to be haunted.
It didn’t matter how much noise I made. I knew that no one was sleeping. Insomnia was our language. We’d worked out a kind of system—an etiquette, you might say. When one of my parents roamed the house, the others would stay in bed and let my mother sit at the silent piano or leave my father to open and shut the refrigerator door. But if I was awake, alone, one of them would get up and find me in the dark.
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