The only semi-comforting part was that we didn’t have to talk. They’d been dreaming about her, too. The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.
Eventually we’d go back to our rooms and lie in the dark and pretend, for the others’ sake, to sleep. Which, I vaguely remembered, was how you fell asleep. First you pretended, then you were. The tricky part was that thinking about pretending to sleep meant you were still awake.
One night, I heard Margaret knock on the wall between our rooms. I got up, as I always had, to see what my sister wanted. I was halfway out the door before I realized that a whole new dream had found a way to torment me.
I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second, I’d feel normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing in, and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was a reproof. Shouldn’t I feel better than I had in the dead of night?
I couldn’t remember simple words, the purpose of household objects. I used to like helping my father cook, but now I’d stare into a drawer and wonder which one was the garlic press and which one was the corkscrew. I’d go to the living room, only to find myself pointing the mobile phone at the TV and pressing and pressing and pressing.
Violet and Samantha phoned to ask if I wanted to go somewhere. It took me forever to recognize their voices. I’d forgotten why I’d liked them and what we used to do. They’d mention movies, a party. Violet’s parents were going away. Samantha’s mom had offered to drive us to the mall. I’d think, Their mothers told them to call. Samantha had a sister, so I hated her more.
When I said I didn’t want to go out, they sounded a little annoyed, as if I was acting princessy and spoiled. Why didn’t I appreciate the good deed they were doing? They seemed relieved when I said no and they could hang up before I changed my mind or started crying. Naturally, they sounded strange. They weren’t talking to the same person. I was no longer Nico. I was the dead girl’s sister.
After a while they stopped calling, which was fine with me. What would we have talked about? Boys? School? MTV? Period cramps? My friends were silly and boring. I wanted to be with Margaret.
There was nothing I wanted to do in place of the things I couldn’t do now, the everyday things I’d hardly noticed before. I had a mental list, like the one near the lifeguard’s chair at the lake, when they had a lifeguard, before the town got too cheap. A bottle, a diver, an unleashed dog with red diagonal slashes.
1. No cookies. They smelled like my sister. I even avoided the baked goods aisle in the supermarket.
2. No lake. I kept my curtains drawn so the sight of it wouldn’t sneak up on me. Every so often, I made myself look, searching for the spot where Margaret dove in. It was like staring at the sun, dangerous and searing.
3. No Margaret’s room. Once in a while, I heard my mother rattling around, opening and shutting drawers. I fought the urge to tell her to leave, Margaret wouldn’t like it. I worried that Mom might start getting rid of Margaret’s stuff, but I should have known better. Sometimes she ran out of Margaret’s room, leaving the door open, until Dad came along and closed it. Until he did, walking down the hall was like passing an accident scene. I turned my head, I tried not to look, but I couldn’t help it.
Margaret’s room had been a work of art, an installation in progress. She was always tacking up pictures of jazz singers and movie stars, vintage snapshots and hand-tinted postcards, and taking them down when she lost interest. She made altars with photos and candles to her rotating personal gods. One day it was Carole Lombard, the next day Gandhi or Marlene Dietrich, Malcolm X, Bono, or Saint Francis. Every time Margaret went to town, she’d find a treasure—a mismatched pair of mannequin limbs, a case of Mardi Gras beads, antique hatboxes stickered with labels, a crucifix made of popsicle sticks—though we lived in a town in which, I’d thought, no one threw out any interesting garbage.
I couldn’t stand it that Margaret’s room would never change again, not unless my parents gutted it. What would it become? A guest room? We never had guests, and we certainly wouldn’t now. I’d read about cultures and countries where people made shrines to their dead. But an altar to Margaret would have been redundant. All we had to do was not dismantle the one she’d made to herself.
I tried not to look, but I’d find myself staring at Margaret’s bed. How could it be there without her? I could picture her so clearly, her long limbs sprawled on the fraying thrift-shop quilt made from satin neckties. I used to sit against the pillows, my head turned away from the slightly smelly stuffed animals she’d had since she was little. I’d listen to her practice a song, or I’d help her choose an outfit before she went out with Aaron.
She’d say, “Nico, be honest. Does the green jacket look better than the blue?” Green or blue, who cared what I said? Margaret always looked perfect.
Sometimes we’d lie with my head on her stomach, listening to music. I felt the music run through me as she hummed the melody line or sang the low harmonies to gospel songs, or the country heartbreak ballads she made fun of and adored. She’d point out slight variations between two recordings of The St. Matthew Passion, the clumsy stress on a single word that ruined the entire chorus. A James Brown yelp or the way Nina Simone rolled a note around in her mouth before she spit it out.
There was almost nothing Margaret wouldn’t listen to, nothing she couldn’t learn from. I remembered her playing hip-hop so loud that both our rooms bumped to the beat. She knocked on the wall, and when I went to see what she wanted, she was punching the air along with the bass line. She said, “Don’t you love how the guy uses his voice as a rhythm instrument?” The only song she hated was the theme from Titanic, which brought up the next item:
4. No music. If I’d heard “My Funny Valentine,” someone would have had to shoot me. It wasn’t only good music that hurt, songs Margaret might have sung. Bad music was worse, in a way. Once, I went with Mom to the health food store, and the theme from Titanic was playing. I glared at the other shoppers as if they were witnesses to a crime. They were stuffing their carts with cereal to keep their families healthy. Without Margaret, there was no one to protect me from the cardboard granola and the syrupy Hollywood sound track. Which reminded me:
5. No old films. No movies of any kind.
One night, my parents decided to go to the movie theater in Albany, the only place for miles around that showed anything foreign or indie. Margaret and I used to joke that Mom and Dad wouldn’t see a film unless it was Taiwanese or Iranian and put you to sleep before the opening credits.
“Come with us,” Mom begged me. “It’ll be . . . fun. It’s . . . suspenseful.”
“What country is this one from?”
My parents exchanged guilty looks.
“Korea,” my mother admitted. “God, Nico, it doesn’t exactly make you seem smart to roll your eyes when someone says Korea.”
I said, “I don’t have to seem smart.”
“Girls,” said my father. “Please. Daisy, leave her alone. Come on, Nico, honey. Come with us.”
“Not a chance,” I said.
My father said, “How about this? If you don’t like it, we’ll pay you the cost of the ticket. It’s a win-win situation.”
I said, “You don’t have to bribe me just because you’re afraid to leave me home alone.”
“That’s not true,” said my father.
But we all knew it was. They were terrified by those three little words: only Remaining Child. The phrase had started lurking in the back of their minds and popping out like a jack-in-the-box the minute we left one another’s sight.
I liked the idea of time on my own. What scared me was the thought of sitting through a boring movie. Boredom was dangerous now that every empty second was an invitation to gaze into the abyss and think how sweet it would feel
to jump. Dangerous, because in those days, there was only boredom and grief, like two visitors, dressed in black, refusing to go home, no matter how we yawned and squirmed and kept looking at our watches.
“Mom, Dad, you can go to movies,” I said. “Nothing bad will happen to me.”
My mother knocked on wood.
“Have fun,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
I felt as if they were kidnappers who’d been holding me hostage, and now I could chew through the duct tape. But where would I escape to? Solitude and silence. The minute they left, I turned on the TV, as loud as it would go. Even though it was something I sometimes did with Margaret, I poured myself a shot of Dad’s high-end tequila. I sipped it and settled into the couch.
Within seconds I realized I’d made the wrong decision. I ran to the window, but my parents were already gone. The remote was a demon magnet dragging me toward the old movie channel. I clung to the harmless sitcoms. I tried one, then another. I didn’t understand what anyone was saying. Actors sat around waiting for someone to burst through the door and detonate the laugh track. I switched to the news: a Baghdad street, the two charred truck skeletons offhandedly tossed into a ring of campfires. Flash, flash, the portraits of boys Aaron’s age, wearing uniforms and brave smiles to convince us that they didn’t mind being dead. Their faces had always saddened me, but now I imagined being their sister.
I hit the mute button and watched a senator work his mouth like a sucker fish as his face turned redder and redder. On the Discovery Channel, a scientist was talking about building an outer-space umbrella to shield our planet from UV death rays. Once, I would have been interested, but now I turned off the TV and picked up a paperback mystery Mom had been pretending to read. The few drops of tequila had misted my brain like frying-pan spray. Every sentence slid out even as I read it.
How long had Mom and Dad been away? Why couldn’t lightning strike twice?
I shut my eyes. I awoke to the sound of my parents’ car—I hoped it was their car—pulling into the driveway. I jumped up and rinsed out the tequila glass and swished water around in my mouth. I found the cartoon channel, turned down the TV, and tried to do a convincing imitation of myself chilling at home.
I needn’t have bothered. My parents looked like patients who had just heard that some promising new treatment had failed in clinical trials. They’d brought their own weather inside, the way that people carry winter into a warm room. I could tell they’d been arguing all the way home from the theater.
“How was the movie?” I said.
Mom said, “My God, Henry, how the hell was I supposed to know it was a horror film about drowning? Your dad seems to think I would purposely take him to a film about girls disappearing under the water—”
“It’s called The Lake,” Dad said. “What did you expect? And there’s no need to involve Nico in this.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Mom said. “I can’t always do the thinking for both of us.”
“Maybe you think too much,” said Dad. “Maybe that’s your problem.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.” I imagined Margaret saying, “At least it was Korean.”
Dad said, “Nico, are you okay? Were you all right, alone here . . . ?”
I said, “I was fine. I had a nice time.”
The truth was, I couldn’t breathe. I was trying to see Margaret’s face, but I’d forgotten what she looked like.
Which reminded me of the final rule:
6. No photographs. Why had I never noticed that our house was a Margaret museum? I couldn’t walk into a room without seeing two little blond girls preserved under glass, beaming from my mother’s piano or my father’s desk. Every time I opened a kitchen drawer, Margaret smiled up at me from a nest of receipts and rubber bands.
I’d made these rules for my own protection. But every so often I broke one just to see how it felt.
One afternoon, in the supermarket, I faked a craving for cookies. My father was so thrilled that I was showing any interest in food, he handed over the shopping cart and said, “Go. Fill it with every delicious, teeth-rotting baked good they have.”
Marigold-colored biscuits, marshmallow mounds, sandy discs swirled with hibiscus beckoned to me from the shelves. I opened a package and inhaled, playing to the security cameras. Let them get this on tape! The box smelled like baked chemicals, but nothing at all like Margaret. I’d thought I could recapture her smell, but it was gone forever. I couldn’t imagine asking my parents if they remembered what she’d smelled like. I stretched out my arms, as if to lean back on the evil waves that the cookies were transmitting to innocent baby brains.
As we pulled out of the supermarket parking lot, Dad said, “Nico, is something wrong?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.
“I mean, did something happen in the store? You seem . . .”
“Nothing happened,” I said.
“You didn’t find any cookies you liked?”
“They were gross,” I told him.
We were passing Golden Oldies, where Margaret used to make Mom and Dad stop and buy things for the house. Our red kitchen table, a giant orange floor lamp—stuff that my parents didn’t really like because it reminded them of their childhoods, but that they’d bought to please Margaret, who convinced them that mid-century modern was beautiful and cool. The shop was owned by a guy named Brad, Mom’s friend’s Sally’s ex-husband. I purposely averted my eyes until we passed the store. Everything was a timed grenade set to explode on visual contact.
After a silence, my father said, “There’s this new book that’s selling really well. It’s about wizards and magic. Harry Potter for grown-ups. I never understood why so many people were buying it until . . . all this . . . this thing with your sister.” Dad couldn’t bring himself to say Margaret, he couldn’t make himself say death. “But now it makes perfect sense to me why someone would want to escape. And now when someone asks for the book, I always wonder if that person is suffering like I am, and if they’re just pretending to be normal.”
I said, “That’s what we’re pretending. Sometimes, walking down the street, I’ll see somebody and think, Someone that person loved has just died.”
“I love you, Nico,” my father said.
“I love you too, Dad,” I said.
Dad said, “I always felt that Goldengrove had a sort of, I don’t know, semi-social-work function. Someone would come in with a problem, and I’d think I could find that person a book that might actually help.”
“Peace and love.” I spread my fingers in a V sign.
“Don’t be cynical,” said Dad. “It’s unattractive in a person your age. A customer would limp in on crutches, and I’d say, ‘You should read A Voice Through a Cloud.’ ”
I thought, A Voice Through a Cloud: The Story of Dad.
“What’s that?” I said, only because he expected me to.
“It’s a great book about a guy who gets hurt in a bicycle accident. I don’t know why I thought it would help. Or why anything would help.”
“The point is, Dad, you were trying,” I said. “You wanted to help.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” Dad said.
Back home, I stood outside Margaret’s door. I closed my eyes and concentrated so hard it was like praying. Whom was I praying to? Margaret, I guessed. I did that sometimes in those days. Give me the nerve to walk into your room and go through your things, which you would have hated.
Once, I’d walked into Margaret’s room and found her nude, in front of the mirror. She didn’t seem embarrassed, which may have been why it felt less like seeing a naked person than like seeing a girl in a painting. I watched the naked, painted girl turn in tiny increments, like a rotisserie chicken
“It’s a wretched morning,” she was saying. “I’m so bored with my face. I wish I had someone else’s face. But I suppose you get the face you deserve.”
“What’s that from?” I said.
Frowning into the mirror,
Margaret said, “Nico, how about knocking?”
I’d learned my lesson so well that even now I knocked on the air. I don’t know how long I stayed in the dark hall with my fist raised until I found the courage to inch open the door.
Margaret always liked it when I noticed what was new, what image or fresh piece of junk she’d added to her collection. I’d learned to do it so well that even now I looked for what was different until I remembered why nothing would be.
I made myself stand up straight. I said aloud, “There is no afterlife.” Where was heaven? In the sky? How were the dead transported after their Houdini escapes from their coffins? I knew kids who went to church and believed that after death you and your family sprouted wings and played instruments, like at some eternal band picnic. I envied them. I wished I believed that some day I would be able to tell Margaret everything that had happened since that last afternoon on the lake.
I repeated, like a spell, “There is no afterlife.” So why had I been trying to contact her, to pick up some sort of signal? I liked it when my right knee ached, because that was her weak point. I would have settled for any indication that she was at peace, or better yet that she missed me or needed me to do her a favor. I wanted her to appear in a dream and say, “Nico, go burn a candle at my Billie Holiday altar.” My logical mind had been invaded and possessed by the spirit of a superstitious lunatic. I thought about Margaret helping me, pulling strings from beyond. But what did I want her to do except not be dead, a miracle that, even I knew, was beyond my sister’s powers?
I stood, very still, in her doorway. Then I crawled into her bed. The pillow smelled like Margaret. Not like cookies, exactly, but cookielike. Purely her. I inhaled, and it was like sucking on one of those plastic pipes that help asthmatic kids breathe. The lump in my throat dissolved enough for me to get some air, but only for a second, and I was choking again. Maybe I did have a heart condition. I rolled over onto my side and curled up into a ball.
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