by Davina Bell
I felt Winter reach around and brush her lips against my cheek, soft as they ever were. And I thought about that feeling you get when you love someone so much you want to die first so you’re not in the world without them. ‘Dear old Bartleby,’ I said. ‘Shall we stop for a snack and remember the good times?’
But Winter made no move to slide off my back. I felt her tiny body tense, her grip tighten. She must have heard it before I did, the long, low whine of the war-shaped plane that swooped in from the horizon towards us. It flew in a line so straight, it was unnatural, like a robot dog or a fake plant.
As the plane swooped past dear Bartleby, it spat two black droplets. And that was the start of the confusion, not knowing whether to look at those dark seeds as they shot towards the church, or to follow the arc of that plane up over our heads, over the mountain, the force of its flight whipping our hair around, the noise so loud I swear we went deaf. I remember the next bit in silence, unspooling before us like an ancient, twitchy film.
The church didn’t crumple down in a majestic waterfall, like the Twin Towers in all those old news clips. It shattered, like a skull hit by a bullet, blowing apart in chunks. Boy, I wish I didn’t know how both those things looked in real life.
As the pieces fell, Winter vomited something hot and putrid, like rancid squid ink. I felt it against the back of my neck just as a wall of heat blasted past us, so thick it felt like running through a banner, the way they used to do at sports games when they had real audiences watching, not just holograms projected onto the seats. Around us, stones rained down—small at first, but then larger chunks thumped into the earth like unexploded cannonballs. I should have thrown myself to the ground just then, right onto my stomach, like we’d practised in Tokyo. But there was something so enchanting about the storm of rocks, like being inside of a shaken-up snow globe. Looking back, I get that I was probably in some kind of haze, but I couldn’t stop gazing, and so I wasn’t quite prepared for the aftershock. The Earth gave a huge shudder, sharp like the buck of a horse. The force threw us across the path towards the edge of the mountain, the edge of the path, to the slope that wasn’t much more than a flat wall of rock below. I felt my head whip back, snap forwards, and an ache slime down my spine, like the innards of a cracked egg oozing.
Then my feet left the ground. And in that second, I did something I never thought I would do.
It still haunts me, even up here.
I let go of my sister.
I threw my arms over my head to protect my face.
She was ripped from my back so easily, along with my backpack, like the Velcro strap of a kid’s shoe, pulled apart.
Winter
We left Alexandria quickly and blindfolded.
We held hands through the dark, Summer and me. Stumbled up steps; the cushioned seats of a plane. Cars and vans and different rumbles.
The cloth of the blindfolds mopped up our tears.
We arrived in a house high up on a hill. We thought we’d gone blind, the light was so bright when our eyes were set free.
The walls were thick, the windows glassless. The ground was dry and the trees were gnarled. No one for miles. The soft click of bugs.
‘It’s Greece,’ Summer guessed.
‘It’s Turkey.’ I was sure.
There was a pool that was never cleaned.
It got so hot we didn’t mind the green fur.
As we swam, my father went mad.
He couldn’t sit still, stalked around through the day. Sat down, stood up. Wrote in his notebook. Disappeared and came back. His feet turned black from the old slate floor. He’d hidden things in a cellar cave.
‘Don’t go down there,’ he snarled, and then wept at the tone of his voice.
As we tried to read, he moaned. He held his hands round the neck of my mother’s dog.
I held my breath each time, waiting to see if he’d snap Pete’s head back.
‘Don’t watch,’ Summer whispered. But how could I not?
And he drank.
Till his eyes were red and spidery, thick like glass.
His breath smelled like rank fruit.
While we slept, he made wounds on his body that blazed red, then wept with old custard.
We stayed six months.
‘Fuck this,’ he said one night as we were reading The Little Prince under the kitchen table. ‘We’re going home.’
He threw his bottle into the fire. It popped so loudly, Pete sprang up and whimpered. The pellets of glass white-hot on the rug.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Summer said slowly.
I whispered to her, ‘Will Mama be at home?’
My father heard. ‘Fuck you,’ he slurred.
Summer
I turned around to grab on to Winter, but there was only air. And as I fell backwards through space, stones were raining down around me and my eyes prickled with lights and I could have sworn I was an astronaut out raving in a meteor shower. The slope of the mountain above us started to tumble, like a sheet of Arctic ice in a documentary on global warming.
You know how I’d just said the blue planet/ball of fire line and got that feeling you get when you love someone so much you want to die first? They actually have a word for that feeling in Arabic—one word—and our driver in Egypt, Ammon, had taught it to us. The word is Ya’aburnee, and the direct translation is ‘you bury me’.
Hoo boy, was my life ever flashing before my eyes. It wasn’t a quick flash, like blinking. It was scenes from an old home movie: Winter, four and brown in bathers on a driveway, six and eating a doughnut off a string with her hands behind her back, eight and dressed as a unicorn with a party hat for a horn. A snippet of memory and then a clicking noise and the next and a clicking noise and the next, on and on, until eventually I realised that the clicking was my breath, in and out, further apart each time, and it suddenly dawned on me that I was dying.
By some miracle, I was pretty much upright—must have flipped the full way around as I fell—but the stones were all around me, pressing down and in, and here’s a word I’ve always wanted to use contextually: entombed. I could still feel my toes, so my neck wasn’t broken, and though my lips were jammed up against a rock so that I was basically tonguing it hard, by some stroke of Xtreme luck or misfortune (I wasn’t quite sure yet), I had an air pocket around my nose. But it didn’t take an International Maths Olympiad Champion to figure out that with each breath, I was coming closer to choking on my own carbon dioxide emissions, which, FYI, is what kills people in these situations, not the lack of oxygen, which is the common misconception and one that I can forgive you for. And those clicks, were they my ribs, snapped off and poking into my heart? Because that’s what it felt like—as if knitting needles had been jammed deep through my aorta. Jeepers, was I thirsty.
‘There’s hope,’ I told myself, thinking of miners caught down shafts and skiers under avalanches and babies under earthquake rubble, all yanked, blinking, back into the light. But the difference was that people were looking for those guys—knew they were there, were searching for them with torches and rope and resolve. I only had Winter, and who’s to say she wasn’t buried beside me, already dead? But then again, surely I would have felt that—the weight of her absence—wouldn’t I?
And, let’s face it, even if she were still alive, Winter was half ghost now, and though they’ve got some neat tricks, a ghost can’t move a mountain.
‘You’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to die,’ I told myself chirpily, ‘and here’s your chance, and it’s not even a mediocre one, like stroke or heart disease or listening too hard to your headphones while you’re crossing a road. At least it’s original.’
But obviously some part of me wasn’t buying it, that cheeriness, because a voice that wasn’t mine ripped through my head like a bullet, and that voice said, ‘Speak no more.’
‘That’s probably God,’ I said to myself. ‘And if he’s around, well, I guess the time is nigh.’
I thought about
what I needed to ask forgiveness for—how long it would take, all the repenting. Did I just need to confess the serious crimes: letting Winter starve, the times I’d dreamed about stabbing that bear? Or was it every little lie, every pebble of untruth? Boy oh boy, I hoped God wasn’t in the middle of binge-watching a really good TV series, because this was going to take a while. I decided to really concentrate on my breathing—keeping it steady but small—because, let’s face it, by staying alive I’d be doing God a favour as well, giving him a nice deep pocket of alone time, which he probably didn’t get a lot of. It might make up for some of my misdemeanours. A few of them, anyway.
Was I scared to die? Such a good question, and one that I was pondering myself. I thought about Mikie: how dignified he had been at the end of his life, and calm. I thought of Pops, and then tried not to. And truly, I wasn’t scared of the moment when my soul left my body, which I’d always imagined would be as momentary, as fleeting, as a flower popping open into bloom. As I hung there cased in rocks, I was scared that I’d lived in a way that would banish me to an eternity alone. A forever without Winter, without Pops. Without our mother. I hadn’t always been truthful or faithful or kind. Was it too late?
As time ticked on, I thought I could hear people talking, and eventually I swear I could see them, and—blow me down!—they were the Glass family. Have you ever come across them? They’re a gang of child geniuses that J. D. Salinger made up, that grumpy old author who basically shut himself in a cabin as soon as he got famous for Catcher in the Rye and spent the rest of his life writing a web of stories about the Glasses, so tender and perfect. If you’ve never found them, go out looking—it will make your life seventy-seven times better to know those seven charming siblings; how they were on a radio show called It’s a Wise Child when they were young, and how stuffed-up they’ve been ever since in ways that will tear your heart apart. And, boy, in spite of the dysfunction, did Winter and I ever wish we’d been born Glasses—into a big, chaotic family, bubbling over with eloquent drama and brainy love. In car rides out to remote rivers, we’d ask each other the sorts of things we imagined they would have had to answer on the radio: What are the four stages of mummification? What is the difference between altocumulus and cirrocumulus? How many bones in the skeleton of a blue whale?
Our mother had all the short stories about them in different collections and, I kid you not, every single page was dog-eared, as if she couldn’t read two paragraphs without being face-smacked by a profound truth that made her stop and go in search of tea. Perhaps that’s why we loved them so much, those Glasses: perhaps they made us feel closer to our mother. Perhaps they had inspired her to be on the radio, which was her job before there was us, and apparently she was pretty dang good.
‘I think I would have married Zooey,’ I would say to Winter. ‘The handsome actor brother. What a babe. I think you would have ended up with Waker.’
‘The monk?’
‘Sure. You like the quiet.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘Protest all you like. I know you best,’ I’d assure her.
In my pre-death dream haze, Winter and the Glass family were standing in front of a huge piece of canvas in a New York loft, dipping their hands in black and white paint and making prints, the hands overlapping so their fingers made little grids. All seven siblings were there, laughing and arguing, and Winter was among them, so easy in their company that I knew she had been there a while, because she can be shy at first around people she doesn’t know.
And I was not there. I was nowhere, and I searched for my handprints on that canvas—for evidence that I had been—and there was nothing.
I was already thrashing when I woke up, jerking around in some claustrophobic fever, and though I could only move a few millimetres in any direction, I was twisting so violently that I could feel things were beginning to shift—a pebble here, some gravel there, stones crunching against each other. For some reason, our father’s voice popped into my mind, gruff as always. ‘If you keep flipping around like that, Summer, you’ll bring the whole lot down on top of you and that will be the end. Enough with the hysterics.’
And I heard him, and I understood him, and I just kept going, because the thought of Winter out there, making abstract expressionist art with the Glass family—without me—was enough to make me want to break free or die, it was that powerful.
You know the sound of a scuttle in the roof at night when you’re just falling asleep and you hear those little foot-scrapes and your eyes pop open and something deep within you says ‘Animal!’? Well, that’s what I heard, just when I was starting to tire, when my heart was loud in my neck.
‘Winter!’ I tried to yell, but it was just the vibration of my teeth on the rocks and I thought my throat would burst with the effort, so I signalled with my mind: Winter! I’m here! Winter, I need you! And we had done enough experiments over the years that we had grudgingly accepted our lack of Twin ESP, but perhaps we just hadn’t been conducting our research under the right conditions, because this time her mind whispered back.
Winter
We left that green swimming pool in the place that might have been Turkey. Days of flying. We went home to Tokyo. Everything we owned on the floor, like in a movie. Nowhere to step.
Our beds rumpled, thick hairs on the sheets.
A big wooden wardrobe tipped on its side. Magnets gone from the fridge. My snow globe cracked on the kitchen tiles, leaked dry.
Couch cushions slashed open, yellow stains through the stuffing.
The remains of our rabbits laid out in a cage. Their bodies so flat without all that blood.
My mother was nowhere.
‘It’s nice to be home,’ Summer said with false cheer. ‘Are we back now for good?’
‘Start packing,’ said my father. ‘Only the necessities. Don’t leave this building. I’ll be back in three days.’
‘Can’t we come?’ Summer asked.
But he said no.
‘Well, can we at least take the karaoke machine wherever we’re going?’
He left without saying goodbye.
‘Fine,’ Summer said. ‘Then I’m not taking anything.’
While she sulked on the window seat, I packed my mother’s books. I found a necklace with a grain of rice inside that said my name. I stared at it, sore with remembering. I tucked Summer’s fairy lights into our striped cotton bag.
I slipped out while she was glowering. I tiptoed to my mother’s study. I knew which floorboards creaked. We had listened at the door so many times.
The floor was a carpet of papers. Whoever had been here had pulled out old logs from the fireplace, stomped the charcoal around. A drawer on the ground, its front pulled off. A paperweight bluebird flipped on its back.
A broken frame that had held a photo of me eating a doughnut off a long string. It was empty now, the glass in shards across the floor. The largest piece was the shape of a kite.
But her computer was still here. So many nights I had fallen asleep to the sound of her typing across the hall. As I sat in the leather chair at her desk, I felt my mother all around me, as if I were sunk down deep in her lap.
‘Pops says no to taking the karaoke,’ I told her. ‘But can I bring this bluebird? I’ll give it back when you get home, I promise.’
I felt her fingers through my hair, felt them catch at the knots. ‘I haven’t been brushing,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Keep the bluebird, my sweet,’ she whispered. ‘It’s yours.’
‘Think of me sometimes,’ she said, ‘when I’m gone.’
Beside me, her screen whirred to life. And there she was, as if I had conjured her up. Jolty and pixels, a bright-orange jumpsuit, but definitely her.
‘Mama,’ I whispered. I reached out to not-touch her face on the screen. ‘How did you know we were back?’
‘Hey, chicken,’ she whispered. ‘How’s tricks?’
Summer
Just when I was starting to get light-headed—I
mean seriously dopey—and wheezing all tightly, like the pumping sound of a fly-spray can, I heard it: stones being ripped away. And not one or two, I mean whole sections being pulled apart, tumbling over each other to the ground. I knew immediately who was doing it, the only one strong enough: that mother-flipping bear.
He was back, Edward, and he was about to be my knight in shining armour, and I would be indebted to him for this rescue—would absolutely have to put up with his presence forever and always—and I wondered if it wasn’t too late to make myself asphyxiate to avoid that horrifying fate. Then I almost spewed up from my own lack of gratitude, and all those feelings came back: jealousy and loneliness and sad, sweet rage. It felt as if I were pushing my thumb against a bruise.
Winter
The orange of her suit was so merry, so bright.
She said, ‘Winter, I don’t have much time but I need you to listen, because I might not have a chance to say these things again.
‘Winter, when you are walking behind someone and they are going too slowly, it won’t hurt their feelings if you want to overtake them.’
She said, ‘When you know someone is home but they haven’t answered the door, it’s not rude to knock again—louder, the next time.’
She said, ‘If you’re at a market, you don’t need to spend all your money at the stalls that nobody visits because you feel bad for them. That isn’t your fault.’
I rested my cheek against the computer. It felt warm. She felt close.
It didn’t seem right that Summer was missing it.
‘Winter?’ my mother said sharply.
I opened my eyes.
She said, ‘Don’t hide behind kindness. Behind anyone. One day you’ll disappear.’
‘Mama,’ I whispered. ‘Come back. Come home.’
I could hear her swallow. ‘Winter,’ she wheezed, her voice suddenly hoarse. ‘The ending is not the story. Promise me you will remember that. The ending is not—’