The Sky Above Us

by Natalie Lund

  The Shane-in-the-box is puffy—except for his arms, which even under a suit, look bony. The makeup is caked so that you cannot see his pores, lines, or scars. A sort of ironic return to babyhood. There’s something strange clumping his eyelashes, and I want to lean closer, but a sharp “hey” reminds me of my job.

  “Megan,” I say, spinning away from Shane.

  “Isabela,” she says, wary.

  “You’re my sister now. That’s how it works, right? You lost a brother. I lost a brother. Simple transitive property.”

  I expect Meg to say something snotty, to get back to her task of clearing Cass away, but the next thing I know, she’s hugging me, and it feels like the sisterhood I’ve invented is real. We get each other. If someone had done to Israel what Cass did to Shane, I would have fought the person back from the funeral too.

  Over her shoulder, I see Cass in Shane’s father’s arms. He’s patting her back and murmuring something into her hair. It must be kind, whatever he says, because she rests her cheek on his chest. He has comforted so many teenagers today that his white shirt is smudged and streaked with makeup. That strange canvas of grief guts me, and I realize I’m bawling into Meg’s neck.

  No saint did this.

  I was in the water shouting his name. Israel. Israel. Israel. Not only with my voice, but with my entire body.

  And he didn’t answer.

  He still hasn’t answered.

  All I know is that he’s not gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IZZY

  Four days after

  I WAKE WITH the sun creeping through the cracks in my blinds. It’s still strange to wake under my blankets in bed instead of sprawled on a rug. Or tripped on by my brother. This has to be how everyone else feels, how Israel and I should have been feeling all along.

  Of course I never thought I’d be waking up to go to my brother’s funeral. If I ever let myself think about our eventual deaths at all—and that’s a big if—I imagined we’d blink out of existence at the same time: twin lights.

  But here we are. No, here I am.

  I guess I should put on a dress and do my hair and prepare to perform sisterly grief like Meg. That is the proper, endorsed behavior.

  I let out Luna and wander back upstairs, stopping outside Israel’s door. I’ve woken up pressed against it so many times, the wood warmed by my body. I put my hand on where I imagine its heart would be, if it had a heart, but, unsurprisingly, the door is cold.

  It’s the first time I’ve been inside his room since before he disappeared. The police searched it after the crash, but clearly they missed something. Something that would explain what I heard that night Shane and Nate were over.

  I’d just brushed my teeth when I walked by Israel’s room. The door was open—mom’s rules—but Nate, Shane, and Israel were inside talking quietly, which was what caught my attention in the first place. They were never quiet.

  “—said we need more hours before a solo flight,” Shane said.

  “He just wants more money,” Nate said.

  “It’s also illegal,” Shane said.

  “When has that stopped us before?” Israel asked. He spotted me, meeting my eyes with an expression I couldn’t read. I gave him the privacy he was always begging me for and didn’t think anything about the incident until I woke to the plane engine and put two and two together.

  Israel is impeccably neat. There aren’t piles of clothing on his desk chair or bed like in my room, or shoes littering the carpet. But the investigators left everything askew: all the drawers slightly ajar, undershirts, charger cords, and papers poking from them. I pull the closet door open and am hit by the smell of him—freshly mown grass and citrus. Tears spring to my eyes.

  “Fuck you,” I say to the hanging clothes. “Fuck you,” to the shoes lined neatly on the shelves.

  His backpack is hanging on a hook near the closet mirror. I fish inside, but it has been emptied, either by the police or by Israel himself. Not that he carried much except a few notebooks and his iPad.

  I spin around. He was always on the iPad, and I don’t remember seeing the police with it.

  Our mom is a bit of a snoop, so if it wasn’t with him, he usually kept it hidden.

  I know where. I kneel on the floor beside his closet and twist the screws off the vent. They turn without a screwdriver because he opens and closes it constantly. An attentive investigator would have probably noticed the lack of dust, but our island police aren’t exactly sharp. They mostly respond to noise complaints and drunk drivers.

  Bingo. His iPad, in its blue cover, is on top of the shoebox where he keeps binoculars, a tin for butts, a lighter, and a few packs of cigarettes. He’d bring the shoebox onto the roof to smoke alone if he’d had a bad day.

  I’d call today a bad fucking day.

  I grab the box and the tablet, wrench open his window, and climb onto the roof.

  It’s early but the gray shingles are already hot. I sit anyway, feeling the burn on the backs of my thighs. From the roof, you can see past the vacation homes to the slate strip of sand. The water almost looks blue from this distance instead of a motley brownish green.

  Sometimes, if Israel was in one of his better moods, we would sit out here together—me always on the left, so my right side was against him. It’s how we came into existence, how we were supposed to be. We had the binoculars so we could see the beach, but really, we spied on neighbors and made up stories about their lives. As far as we were concerned, Magdalena Centeno had a secret lover who was ten years younger; her grown daughter, Dolores, was selling dulces to support her magician hobby; and Magdalena’s husband, Arturo, was obsessed with Japanese game shows.

  These moments were rare because Israel had a way of protecting himself that reminded me of an armadillo rolling into a ball. The more you poked, the more tightly armored he’d become. What was he protecting anyway?

  “Bela?” I hear my dad calling from the hallway. He’s only home because today is the day.

  I wake up the iPad, but it’s locked. I try our birthday forward and backward. The street address of this house. Of our last house. His last few soccer jersey numbers. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

  “Bela, ya nos vamos.” We’re leaving.

  Israel always loved using the numbers on a telephone to spell out codes for me to crack. Other twins had secret languages; we had number codes. Well, he did. It was a fairly one-sided game.

  4-3-8 2-6-6-5-4-3 was get cookie.

  3-6-6-8 8-3-5-5 6-6-6 was don’t tell Mom.

  I try 5-8-6-2. Luna.

  The iPad lock screen shifts to the home screen with his apps.

  I tap open his social media apps, ignoring the notifications because I know I’ll just find sob stories by people who’ve hardly ever spoken to him—and go to the direct messages. There are a few between him and the sophomore he liked—flirtatious winky faces and sexy selfies. If this had been a week ago, I probably would have spent all my time reading these messages and teasing him mercilessly. Today I open his texts with Nate and Shane instead.

  A text from Shane a day before the crash: We on?

  On, my brother responded.

  On, Nate said.

  I wonder if any of them had any doubts when they typed those two letters, if they understood—truly—what they were about to do. If not, what did they think was going to happen?

  Before those messages, there’s a lot of back-and-forth about times, rides, the keg for the party. My heart thumps when I spot a YouTube video Shane sent with a plane as its thumbnail, but it’s just a how-to video about attaching a tow bar—whatever that is.

  “Obviously, you figured out how to steal a plane. But why?” I mutter out loud.

  “¿Isabela, dónde estás?” My dad is knocking on my door now, wondering where I am. If he opens it, he won’t think to look on the roof. He’
ll have to go into Israel’s room to see the open window, and who knows when he’ll get up the courage to venture in.

  I keep scrolling, scanning as quickly as I can. I stop when I get to messages from the end of the school year, my brother apologizing to Nate. There’s nothing about dolphins or my brother’s dream. Nothing that answers my why.

  I open his email. Mostly, it’s ads for a shoe store and a music platform. But there’s a thread that he flagged with the subject line Research Question. The final email, sent a month before the crash, is to someone named Peter Ryerson.

  Peter, The truth is that I think I’m him—your father

  “What are you doing?” My dad leans out Israel’s window. “It’s dangerous. Te vas a caer.” You’re going to fall. My heart is hammering, but my feet are steady. I snap the cover closed and slide the iPad under the box, trying to be casual so he won’t think anything of it. He’s wearing a suit I’ve never seen before and his mustache is neatly trimmed and combed. “We have to go, Isabela. Ni siquiera te has vestido.” You’re not even dressed.

  I look toward the ocean again before climbing back through the window. Israel reached out to the boy from his dreams a month before he plunged into the water and reemerged gray and glistening? It has to be connected, and I will figure out how.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CASS

  Four days after

  I WAKE UP early the morning of Israel’s funeral and walk south to the subdivision of beach houses Shane and I broke into when they were being built. Their colors—peach, sea foam, periwinkle, and yellow—say fun is had here. I try to map them on my memory. The peach, I think, is the one Shane peed in when it was simply a frame. Now there’s cheap furniture decorated with pineapples on the porch.

  I climb the stairs and press my face to the windows. It looks empty. I’m not sure what I expect to see—a younger Shane, I suppose, with blond hair buzzed to duck fuzz, Gumby limbs.

  The door is locked, but a careless renter left a window open, and, with one push, the screen pops out. In my mind, time rewinds as soon as I step inside—I remember the angry pimples that marched across my forehead and the pulsing warmth of horniness in my groin. But I am still my older self, and the house is warm and stuffy. There are remnants of people: a pair of sunglasses in a basket on the coffee table, a bottle of sunscreen on a shelf by the door, the lingering smell of cleaning products from a recent housekeeper visit.

  I stop in the kitchen, looking for Shane, as though he’ll be there pretending to cook and making shushing sounds with his lips that were intended to be the sizzle of a pan.

  I slide open the door to the back balcony. You can see the ocean from here, a wall of gray green beneath a cloudy sky. I lean against the railing. Izzy believes their souls are still out there, that the bodies dragged from the ocean were empty shells. I’ve never believed we’re anything but fragile clumps of matter. My father is the soul-believing one in our household, and we only go to church if he’s home, part of my mother’s quest to pretend we’re a happy family.

  I try the master bedroom next, but it, too, is empty. We dry humped here—before we understood what, really, our bodies were telling us to do. It was movement that felt good, pressure from his knee, hips, the center seam of my jeans.

  I circle the room, trailing my fingers, as though I can feel the studs. Here must be where he peed. Where his DNA still lingers. Two sharp kicks and I’m through the drywall. I peel it back until I can see the blond wood beneath. It looks the same. Unaged. Like nothing has happened. Like I haven’t grown taller. Haven’t fallen in love. Haven’t lost my virginity. Haven’t become captain of the volleyball team. Haven’t taken the SATs. Haven’t broken Shane’s heart. Haven’t attended his funeral.

  I feel like I can’t breathe, but I hear myself sucking in air—large yawning sounds. I sink down, forehead pressed against the torn wall. I could break it all away, return the house to its bones, but time will not unroll. Shane will not come back to life. I will not become the girl I was.

  * * *

  • • •

  Back at home, I stand in front of my mirror half in my dress, my shoulders and chest still bare. Mom bought me one black dress for all three funerals. It’s elegant and silky with geometric seaming at the waist, but pulling it on after yesterday makes me ill. It smells like foundation and potpourri and sweat. Like the second worst day of my life.

  Mom comes in to zip me up.

  “I don’t want to wear it,” I tell her.

  “I don’t know that you have anything else appropriate, Cassie.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Okay, it doesn’t matter what you wear.” She wipes a smudge—drywall dust—off my cheek and rests her head on my shoulder, wrapping her arms around my waist. We both look at ourselves in the mirror. Except for our noses, which are wide at the bridge and round at the tip, we don’t look related. She is big-hipped, blond, and freckled. I have the height, angular face, and green-and-yellow-flecked eyes of my father.

  “I wish he could be here with you right now,” she says, and for a moment I think she means Shane, but she’s talking about my dad. She thinks it’s her fault he isn’t. This—I realize—is how we’re alike. We can’t forgive ourselves; we don’t think we deserve it.

  I wiggle out of her embrace and open my closet. I have two other dresses: one white with swirls of orange flowers and the other leopard print. I pick the leopard print.

  My mom retrieves a black cardigan from her closet, but when I pull it on, my eyes burn with tears. I feel so stupid crying about what I’m wearing when Shane is gone. When I’m about to go to my second-ever funeral.

  “We don’t have to go, Cassie,” she says.

  “I do for Izzy. You know that.”

  “It’s okay to give yourself space,” she says. “You can’t be everything for everyone.”

  She’s right about that. I can’t be anything for anyone, let alone for myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The church smells like stale incense and onionskin pages. On the walls, they’ve mounted several stained glass windows rescued from the old cathedral that flooded in a hurricane. Each panel depicts the stations of the cross and crucifixion, in all its gory glory. Somber, loud organ music makes everything hum.

  I think everyone is going to stare at my leopard print, but then I spot Izzy, seated in the first pew, legs crossed, bouncing her foot. She’s dressed in leggings, a crop shirt I’ve seen her wear to the beach, and leather strappy sandals. Her hair is uncharacteristically greasy and swept into a loose bun on top of her head.

  Her mom kneels beside the casket, head bowed, shoulders rising and lowering in quick shudders like she’s crying. Her hair is just as greasy as Izzy’s, but she’s actually in a dress. Her dad, dressed in a black suit, greets visitors at the door. I’ve never seen him dressed up before, and he appears uncomfortable, tugging at his sleeves over and over like they’re too short.

  Mom nudges me toward him.

  “Mr. Castillo,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

  He looks as though he can’t remember who I am, even though I’ve been to their house a million times. Without a word, he shakes my hand and my mother’s before moving to the next person.

  I round the pew and sit next to Izzy; my mom slides into a row several back from ours.

  “Hey.”

  “Oh hey,” Izzy says cheerily, like it’s a normal day. “Can you believe this?” She gestures at the filling pews and the altar where her brother’s profile is visible above the lip of the casket.

  “I can’t,” I say. “Your dad seems like he’s taking it hard.”

  “I’m surprised he’s not working,” she says. “Have you gone yet?” She nods toward Israel. A few visitors stand beside her mother, clasping their hands and bowing their heads.

  I shake my head.

 
“Don’t bother. It doesn’t even look like him.”

  I allow myself a quick glance, which was longer than I could look at Shane. Israel’s skin is waxy, and his face is bloated. She’s right. It doesn’t look like him.

  “I refuse to play funeral when he’s still out there,” she says.

  So she isn’t any closer to believing he’s dead—even faced with a body that medical professionals and her family have identified as her brother. It pisses me off again. If she doesn’t believe he’s dead, she certainly doesn’t believe Shane is dead, which is why she can’t see how much pain she caused me when she dragged me to the ocean to look at dolphins and to see Janie about getting her dad’s boat.

  When the funeral begins, my mother beckons me to join her. The service is in English and Spanish, so it takes double the time. At some point during the long service, the priest invites Israel’s dad to the lectern. He tells a story of Israel sticking up for Shane during a soccer game when he got carded. Israel was honorable, he says. Israel was kind and loyal. His face remains immobile, but his voice cracks at his son’s name. If my heart weren’t already broken, this would do it.

  When he returns to his seat, Izzy stands, and I can hear a collective intake of breath as people realize she’s not wearing funeral clothes.

  “Bela, Bela,” her mom calls softly, but Izzy marches to the lectern.

  “Israel isn’t honorable, kind, or loyal,” she says into the mic. “He’s an asshole.”

  Her mother makes a sound like a surprised bird.

  “But that”—Izzy points at the coffin—“is not him.”

  With that, her father mounts the steps to the lectern and grabs her by the elbow. She allows herself to be guided down the steps and the aisle. She winks at me as she passes.

  The priest resumes the service like this happens all the time, but people are whispering: What did she just say? Poor girl. She shouldn’t have come. She needs to talk to someone.