by Emma Young
She takes a drag. “Maybe you could put that wig back on?” she says, and all the aggression that was in her voice before is gone. “Why are you even wearing it?”
I shake it to help me find the front. “I didn’t want to come here and freak everyone out.”
“Only me.”
“Yeah . . . I’m sorry.” And I do mean it. And not just for upsetting her.
I guess she’ll contact Sylvia’s parents after this. But her dad did come after me in the park. He broke the terms of the agreement.
I twist my hair back and slip the wig on. I’m still raking it through with my fingers to straighten it when she says, “So, what do you want to know?”
“Anything,” I tell her. “I’ve seen her memorial book in the library. But all I’ve heard is she sang, and she was talented and smart.”
Another drag. Her hand’s trembling. She sits on the edge of the step below the door and places her feet apart, her elbows on her knees. I stay where I am. If I move, I might throw up.
“She got decent grades,” she says. “Mostly she was smart about people. She had this plan to move to New York. She knew someone whose cousin’s a producer on The Voice, and he was going to try to set her up with a coach.”
There are so many questions I could ask. What type of music did Sylvia love most? Which was her favorite band? Where in New York did she think she might live? Could she really sing like Elle King? But Althea said she has only a few minutes, and I’m worried she’ll stick to it. So, with my list in my mind, I ask her, “What else did she like, apart from singing? What did she hate?”
“Hate? I don’t know . . . humidity. Algebra. People who were fakes. S’mores. She wasn’t that into dancing.”
“Really?”
Althea exhales with a little shrug. “She wasn’t that great at dancing. She had rhythm. Somehow she was just kind of uncoordinated.” A faint smile . . . then the memory fades, or she blocks it, because the smile vanishes.
“But she liked playing Frisbee?”
“That was her mom. She wanted Sylvia to do some type of physical exercise. She said she’d do Frisbee because it didn’t sound like exercise. Only it was. And you had to be kind of coordinated. I did it for a while. Mostly because I liked hanging out with Sylvia . . . I think they kept her on the team mostly because everyone liked being around her, and just once in a while she’d make these totally fluky catches, and no one could work out if she actually was brilliant or it was just her luck . . .” She stops and sighs in the direction of the shadows behind me. The wind in the leaves sounds like someone approaching, retreating, approaching.
It makes me think of that picture of Sylvia and Althea with water bottles, in a glade. “But she liked being outdoors? She went kayaking and fishing?”
Althea looks a little surprised. “Who told you that?” She goes on before I can answer. “We went kayaking a few times. But that’s because there was this boy . . .” She stops. “Her dad took her fishing sometimes. But if she caught anything, she always put it back. She said she couldn’t watch something die.” She waves her cigarette. “She couldn’t see life and watch it go. My dad, when he was a resident in the ER, he saw people die. He said it takes a few minutes after someone’s technically dead for them to go. There’s a presence that stays. And then it’s gone. The soul, maybe . . .”
The soul? No, I don’t want to think about that. In fact, right now I don’t want to think about anything Althea’s telling me. And there’s something else I have to ask her: “Were you at the party?”
She doesn’t look as though she’s understood. Then she does.
I whisper, “Were you at the reservoir?”
Althea doesn’t move. Even the glow from the tip of her cigarette hangs in the air. The throb of bass from the stage a million miles away inside the bar only accentuates how still and silent we are. Then she says softly, “Yeah, I was there.”
“What happened?”
“. . . What happened? The ice cracked.”
“What was wrong with her friend? Was it something to do with Sylvia—the reason she went out on the ice?”
Althea frowns. “Sylvia? It had nothing to do with Sylvia. She wasn’t even that good friends with Amber. But Sylvia was Sylvia . . .” She squeezes her eyes shut. “If I hadn’t been making out with Michael Chan, it could’ve been me who went after Amber, and I—” She stops. Looks directly at me. “I did all kinds of sports. I was one of the best athletes in school. I could swim when I was two. If it’d been me on the ice . . .”
A tear rolls down each of her cheeks. It hurts to see Althea cry. She takes a heaving breath. Regains control and roughly wipes her face with her sleeve. She tosses the half-smoked cigarette into the bucket. “So you’re twins. Can you dance?”
Can you dance?
I think I was as okay at ballet as any little girl can be. When I used to dance, mostly it was on my own. I haven’t danced since the surgery. For all these reasons, I don’t answer.
“Are you sporty?” she asks. The softness is gone.
I shake my head.
“But you can sing?”
I shrug.
Althea sighs. She brings her knees together. I know she’s ready to get up and go, and I’m not sure how to stop her. My brain feels numb. But then she says, “There was this song she said her mom used to sing to her when she was small, when she was upset or couldn’t sleep or she was sick. ‘Over the Rainbow.’ You know it, right? I tried to sing it to her when she was in the hospital.” Her voice starts to break. She takes a deep breath. “I can’t even sing, but I thought maybe it might help. Then I got to that part about how the dreams that you dare to dream come true, and I couldn’t sing those words. Apart from making it as a singer, her dream would have been to have a sister. That’s why I had to talk to you. But not again. Okay?”
She isn’t crying now but my tears roll. I try not to let them, but there’s nothing I can do.
With a heavy sigh, she gets up. “Good luck, Sylvia’s sister.”
Althea is gone.
I am standing, staring up at the jagged outline of trees against dark clouds, feeling the beat of the music in my chest.
I’m in Lexington, in Sylvia’s body, outside a bar that she sang in . . . and her presence isn’t around me, but inside me. We are indivisible. I am her. She is me.
I walk back into O’Neill’s through the front entrance with that sensation still lifting me. I glide through the lobby, past leather armchairs and a wall clock, and down the steps. My gaze sweeps the room. It takes in the table I was sitting at with Joe. He’s not there.
So it moves on to the other tables in the restaurant area, and the bachelorette party, past the other people dancing, up to the stage.
A redheaded girl in jeans and cowboy boots is belting out a pop song. I know it. It’s by Adele. I slip down past the dart-board and the plates of burgers and shepherd’s pie, through the bittersweet scents of beer and perfume, the girl’s pure voice luring me in.
She hits the song’s crescendo. People clap. Hands are raised. Faces are smiling, showing white teeth. I glimpse them in freeze-frames. The world’s breaking up. As the girl jumps from the stage with a lasso twirl of her arm, the singer returns to the microphone.
“Okay, guys,” she calls. “Last one before we get back to the rest of our set. Any volunteers, come on up here. Only one rule: You’d better be good!”
And I have no choice. It has to be me.
If other people make a move, I don’t notice them. Already I’m up on the stage and I’m taking the singer’s hand. Her red lips are smiling as she says in my ear, “What’s the song?”
“Elle King?” I say.
“Okay. ‘Ex’s & Oh’s’?”
I nod.
She calls the title to the guitarist, who salutes. Then she grins out over the crowd. “So here we have . . .” To me: “Tell everyone your name, honey.”
I shake my head. She raises a penciled-in eyebrow.
“So here we have ‘Ex
’s & Oh’s’!”
As my hands close around the microphone, the drums and guitar start up together in an insistent beat. I stand there, blinking at the crowd. I see a tall older man in fatigues. A girl wearing purple eye shadow and a knitted yellow beret. The bachelorette party, their eye makeup smudged, their arms draped around one another’s shoulders. A pretty, short-haired girl blowing a kiss to another girl. A sweaty-faced boy, his hands on the hips of a girl in a plunging top. I hold the microphone, and I see everything, and I feel Sylvia here, alive inside me.
I hear the guitar and the drums.
The whole world is faces.
I hear the guitar and the drums.
Someone’s touching my back. A voice in my ear says: “Any time you like, okay?”
I hear the guitar . . . and the drums.
The girl in the beret puts a hand to her mouth. The girl in the plunging top calls, “Come on, girl, what’re you waiting for?”
I know the words. I heard the song so many times in the rehab gym at the hospital. And on Joe’s phone, after learning that Sylvia could sing like Elle King.
I open my mouth. It’s dry.
“Okay,” says a voice in my ear. “It’s okay. I’ll take it from here.”
The microphone’s in my right hand. I want to grip it tight but I can’t. The singer pulls it easily from me. And now she’s stepping in front of me, spreading her arms to the crowd.
It takes everything I have to jump rather than fall from that stage. My head is ringing, my ears buzzing. There’s a deep, heavy pounding in my stomach that I think is my heart. I half push my way into the crowd, with no intention other than to escape the music. But the farther away I am, the louder it seems to get.
I sense eyes on me, but I don’t return the glances. A broad hand reaches for my back. I twist to avoid it, which makes me collide with a man in a sports jersey carrying glasses of beer. Dark drops patter onto my arm and shoulder. The smell of it makes me gag.
I try to keep moving, but the stench of beer and men is making deep strides into my brain. I’m pressed against people as I move forward. I hear Althea: She was my best friend. What did she hate? People who are fakes. The caffeine from the Diet Coke makes my heart race and skip. If it is the caffeine . . . if it is my heart . . . because I’m feeling suddenly disassociated from my body. The pulse in my neck throbs and leaps, like it’s trying to escape.
The guitar chords are so loud now they crash into my skull. The singer’s voice waxes and wanes, the music a tide that sucks at me so hard I’m about to go under, but somehow I keep my balance.
I sense a blur of green. A face emerges from the haze. Green eyes, longish blond hair—Adam? No.
My foot skids and my right leg buckles. I put out my hands. They hit something, but I can’t tell what. My vision bleaches. My pulse scares itself into a roar. I try to move but I can’t. I’m freezing cold. And I’m suspended in a terrifying fraction of a second—the fraction before Sylvia fell through the ice, immediately before the end of everything she knew.
“Rosa?”
The voice is deep within my head.
“Rosa.”
There’s an explosion of light in what someone else might call my soul.
29.
When I return to consciousness, I see Joe’s face.
The first thing I hear is a woman’s voice.
It’s muffled, in the distance. He is close. He’s holding me up. Or propping me up. Because I’m on the floor, on coarse, green-and-beige, spiral-patterned carpet, sitting with his arm around my back.
“Rosa?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Open them. Look at him. I’m able to focus.
“You okay?”
I nod. He lets out a quick breath.
“I was about to call 911.”
He glances around. I’m half aware of a couple of waitresses watching. “She’s okay,” he calls.
“You sure?” one asks.
I force myself to nod. “I faint sometimes,” I tell her.
“You haven’t had any alcohol tonight?”
“No,” I say. “You can check with our waitress. She—” I try to remember her face so I can describe her.
“I guess you’re not talking like you’re drunk,” she says. “You want a glass of water or something?”
I shake my head. Which makes my head spin. I think my eyes are closed when I say, “Can I just sit here for a few minutes?”
“No problem at all.” To Joe: “Come find me if she needs help.”
The waitresses leave and I lean forward a little, so I can sit up on my own. I rub my eyes. Open them.
Joe says, “Maybe I should call 911.”
Ice water to the face couldn’t shock me faster to full consciousness. “No.”
“No?”
"You can’t.”
“I should get you back to the hospital.”
"No. I’m okay.”
He frowns. “Did you find Althea?”
I take in my surroundings. Judging by the carpet, and the chairs upturned on tables, and the thud of bass through the wall, we’re in a room somewhere behind the bar.
“Rosa, what happened?”
Did he see me onstage? I whisper, “Yeah, I found her.”
“No, what just happened? You were on the floor. I had to carry you in here.”
“I told the waitress. I must have fainted.”
He says, “Have you been taking whatever medication—”
"Yes.”
He lets go of me. “What did she tell you?”
I close my eyes.
“Why don’t you want me to call 911? I mean, if you’re not totally well—”
I hold my breath. “I’m okay. It’s just all . . . incredibly . . . complicated.”
“Yeah, and?”
He’s done this before. Again, it startles me. “And so—I—” I don’t know how to finish.
He sighs. Shakes his head.
“If you knew—” The air falls still. “I told you: If you knew all the truths about me, you would get in your car and drive away and never come back.”
I’m focusing on my hands, my fingers white where they interlock; I’m holding on so tight to all the strength that I have left.
Then an idea comes to me. It might make everything right. “We could go away—New York, maybe we could—”
But already I can see the answer in his eyes, and it kills my sentence. Kills me.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says.
30.
We walk out of O’Neill’s together, but only in the literal sense.
I don’t know if he saw me onstage, but it doesn’t really matter. As we stand at the top of the steps that lead down to the parking lot, I call on the shattered remains of my courage. “You should go back to Boston,” I tell him. “I can call a cab.”
“To take you where?” he asks.
I don’t answer. The wind blows, and it goes right through me. Joe’s holding my jacket. He must have collected it from my chair. He passes it to me, and I shrug it back on. I watch him watch me, and see his expression stumble, and for one freezing moment I’m worried he’s seen Brandon’s number on my arm.
“I’m not going back to Boston,” he says. “I told you I’m not going anywhere.”
He must see my confusion. All he says is, “Come on.”
He heads down the steps. I follow and quickly realize he isn’t going to his car, but on toward the main road. We walk in silence, the wind blowing leaves down all around us, the weak moon glowing faintly through thinning clouds. When we reach the road, the whizz of a car makes me stagger back, and I think it’s at that moment that we both see it: a plain wooden bench beneath an oak.
My whirling mind pivots to the hospital.
In spite of everything, she loved this bench. Denise. Forever.
It feels like months since I met Joe. Years’ worth of regular feeling and experience have been compressed into a few days. I’ve heard that emotion makes memory and memory makes life.
I guess it’s true.
All kinds of emotions shift kaleidoscopically inside me as we sit down.
A few inches of gray-brown wood separate our legs.
It’s quiet out here—at least, there’s no one walking, and only an occasional car. I have no idea what time it is, but most people must be home or wherever else they want to be for the evening. At last, I realize, I can’t hear the music from O’Neill’s anymore.
His eyes on the asphalt, Joe says, “You’ve probably forgotten, but you once asked me who was the most interesting person I’ve ever interviewed.”
“The man from North Korea,” I say quickly, because of course I haven’t forgotten. “The girl.”
“That girl was me.” He twists to look right at me. “I thought, if I tell her, and she says that girl was evil, well, then I’ll know.”
Althea, the surgery, the hospital, the stage; right now, they all drop off the cliff of my mind. “You?”
My brain races as I try to recall exactly what he told me. But he’s talking, interrupting my thoughts.
“She had leukemia. We knew she was going to die. She decided to stop the treatment and we flew from San Francisco to Boston. We hired a car and made it to Cambridge. She wanted to see the house she was born in. Now it’s this neighborhood store. Afterward, she felt hot. She had a fever. We checked into a hotel on Harvard Square. We got her in bed but it hurt her to breathe. Dad called 911. They took her to Dixon-Dudley and the doctor said she had pneumonia. After four days, she started to get better from the pneumonia. I was there in the room, the monitors bleeping, all this sleet smothering everything outside, and she said to Dad, ‘I want to die here. I don’t want to go back.’ Dad couldn’t handle it. He left the room.”
I stare at him. His moment in his mother’s room. Mine on the transplant table. Ours in the park when I asked him if I’m pretty. And now here, on the bench, in Lexington. All these moments feel inextricably connected, as though strung together from the start.
He says, “I thought, one of us has to help her. It’s not going to be Dad. So.”