AFTER
September 2
Dear Dara, I’m home now. They finally let me out of the loony bin. It wasn’t that bad, actually, except for when Mom and Dad visited and stared at me like they were afraid if they tried to touch me I might shatter into dust. We had to do a family session and say a lot of affirmations, like I hear you and respect what you’re saying and I see how angry it must make you when I . . . etc. Aunt Jackie would have loved it.
The doctors were pretty nice, and I got to sleep a lot, and we did arts and crafts projects like we were five years old again. I had no idea how many things you could do with popsicle sticks.
Anyway. Dr. Lichme said that whenever I wanted to talk to you, I should write you a letter. So that’s what I’m doing now. Except that every time I sit down to write, I don’t even know where to begin. There’s so much I want to say. There’s so much I want to ask, too, even though I know you won’t answer.
So I’ll settle for the basics.
I’m sorry, Dara. I’m so, so sorry.
I miss you. Please come back.
Love,
Nick
September 26
“There.” Aunt Jackie thumps a palm against the last cardboard box—overstuffed, straining against the tape like fat against a too-tight belt, and marked in thick black letters Goodwill. She straightens up, brushing a stray bit of hair from her face with the inside of her wrist. “That looks better, doesn’t it?”
Dara’s room—Dara’s old room—is unrecognizable. It’s been years since I’ve seen the floor, now clean-swept and scented with Pine-Sol, beneath the carpet of litter and clothing obscuring it. The old rug is gone, bundled to the curb along with bags filled with stained and ripped jean shorts? broken sandals, faded underwear, and padded bras. The bedspread—a leopard print Dara bought with her own money after my mom refused to get it for her—has been replaced with a pretty floral pattern Aunt Jackie found in the linen closet. Even Dara’s clothes are packed away, most of them for donation; dozens of empty hangers swing, creaking, in her closet, as though pushed by a phantom hand.
Aunt Jackie puts an arm around me and gives me a squeeze. “Are you okay?”
I nod, too overwhelmed to speak. I’m not sure what I am anymore. Aunt Jackie offered to do the remainder of the packing herself, but Dr. Lichme thought it would be good for me to help. Besides, I wanted to see whether there was anything I could salvage; Dr. Lichme gave me a shoe box and told me I should fill it. For three days we’ve been wading through the swamp of Dara’s old belongings. At first I wanted to save everything—chewed-up pens, contact lenses, broken sunglasses—anything she’d touched or loved or handled. After filling up the shoe box in less than ten minutes, I trashed everything and started over.
In the end, I’ve kept only two things: her journal, and a small gold horseshoe necklace she liked to wear on special occasions. For luck, she always said.
The windows are open, admitting the September breeze: a month that smells like notepaper and pencil shavings, autumn leaves and car oil. A month that smells like progress, like moving on. Dad is moving in with Cheryl this weekend; tomorrow, I have a mandated date with Avery, Cheryl’s daughter. Mom is in California, visiting an old college friend, drinking wine in Sonoma and taking spin classes. Parker is off at college in New York, probably staying up late and making new friends and hooking up with pretty girls and forgetting all about me. Madeline Snow has started fourth grade—according to Sarah, she’s the darling of the whole school. FanLand is closing up for the season.
I’m the only one who hasn’t gone anywhere.
“Now there’s just one last thing . . .” Aunt Jackie moves away from me, extracting what looks like a bit of scraggly pubic hair from her purse. After a bit more fumbling, she produces a heavy silver Zippo and lights the whole bundle on fire. “Sage,” she explains as she revolves in a slow circle. “Purifying.” I hold my breath to keep from coughing, feeling the twin desires to laugh and cry. I wonder what Dara would have said. Can’t she just smoke some weed and be done with it? But Aunt Jackie looks so solemn, so intense, I can’t bring myself to say anything.
Finally she finishes walking the perimeter of the room and shakes the sage branches out the window, casting tiny embers onto the rose trellis, extinguishing the flames. “All done,” she says. She smiles, but her eyes are tight at the corners.
“Yeah.” I hug myself, inhale, and try to find Dara’s scent beneath the bitter stink of the sage, beneath the smell of September and a room newly scrubbed. But it’s gone.
Downstairs, Aunt Jackie makes us mugs of oolong tea. In the two weeks she’s been staying with us—“To help out,” she announced cheerfully, when she showed up on our porch with her long hair in braids, carrying an enormous set of misshapen luggage covered in various sewn patches, like some deranged version of Mary Poppins, “and to give your mom a break”—she has been slowly working the house from top to bottom, treating it like an animal in need of molting, from the new orientation of the living room (“your feng shui was all wrong”) to the sudden explosion of living plants in every corner (“much easier to breathe, right?”), to the refrigerator stocked with soy milk and fresh vegetables.
“So.” She slides into the window seat and draws her knees up to her chest, like Dara used to do. “Have you given any thought to what we talked about?”
Aunt Jackie suggested we try a séance. She said it might help me to speak directly to Dara, to tell her all the things I want to say, to apologize and ask her forgiveness. She swears by it, says she talks with Dara all the time that way. Aunt Jackie actually believes that Dara is hanging there on the other side of existence like some kind of ghostly scarf, pinned to a wall.
“I don’t think so,” I tell her. I don’t know what scares me more: the idea that I’ll hear her, or that I won’t. “Thanks, though.”
She reaches over and grabs my hand, squeezing. “She isn’t gone, you know,” she says, in a quieter voice. “She’ll never be gone.”
“I know,” I say. It’s just a different version of what everyone else will tell you; she’ll live on inside you. She’ll always be there. Except that she did live on inside me—she grew there, rooted like a flower, so gradually I didn’t notice. But now the roots have been torn out, the wild, beautiful flower pruned back, and I’m left with nothing but a hole.
The doorbell chimes. For one crazy second I think it might be Parker, even though that makes no sense. He’s miles away, at college, moving on like everyone else. Besides, he would never ring the doorbell.
“I’ll get it,” I say, just to have an excuse to do something, so Aunt Jackie will stop staring at me pityingly.
It isn’t Parker, of course, but Madeline and Sarah Snow.
The two sisters are dressed identically in plaid knee-length skirts and white button-downs, though Sarah’s shirt is unbuttoned to reveal a black tank top, and her hair is loose. Her parents, I know, put her in parochial school for her senior year—something about the evil effects of public school education. But she looks happy, at least.
“Sorry,” is the first thing she says, when Madeline bounds into my arms like an overeager puppy, nearly knocking me over. “Fund-raising. She wanted you to be first.”
“We’re selling cookies for my basketball team,” Madeline says, peeling away from me. It’s funny to think of Maddie—who’s small for her age, and scrawny as a newt—playing basketball. “Wanna buy some?”
“Sure,” I say, and can’t help but smile. Maddie has that kind of effect on people, with a face like a sunflower, all wide and open. The ten days she spent hiding out, sneaking around, worried Andre was coming after her, miraculously don’t seem to have traumatized her too badly. Mr. and Mrs. Snow aren’t taking any chances; Sarah told me they’ve put both their daughters into therapy, twice a week. “What kinds you got?”
Maddie rattles off a list—peanut butter, chocolate peanut butter, peanut brittle—while Sarah stands there, fiddling with the hem of her skirt, half smiling, never taking her eyes off her younger sister.
In the past month she and I have become friends, or kind of friends, or at least friendly. We’ve gone with Maddie back to FanLand, this time so she could show us, with a certain degree of pride, how she had managed to stay hidden for so long. I even went swimming at the Snow house, lying side by side on deck chairs with Sarah while Maddie showed off front flips from the diving board, and the Snow parents circled back and forth to check that we were okay, like planets compelled to orbit their daughters. Not that I blame them. Even now, their mom sits in the car, engine on, watching, as if both girls might vanish if she looks away.
“How’ve you been?” Sarah asks, once Maddie has assiduously marked down my order and then, obeying some eternal rhythm of her own, dashed back toward the car.
“You know. Same,” I say. “How about you?”
She nods, looking away, squinting against the light. “Same. I’m on house arrest, basically. And everyone at school treats me like I’m a freak.” She shrugs. “But it could be worse. Maddie could be—” She breaks off abruptly, as if suddenly aware of the implication of her words. It could be worse. I could be you. My sister could be dead. “Sorry,” she says, as red creeps into her cheeks.
“That’s okay,” I say, and I mean it. I’m happy Maddie made it home safely. I’m happy skeevy Andre is sitting in jail, waiting to get served. It feels like the only good thing that has happened since the accident.
Since Dara died.
“Let’s hang out again soon, okay?” When Sarah smiles, her whole face is transformed and she looks suddenly beautiful. “We can watch a movie at my house or something. You know, since I’m on lockdown.”
“I’d like that,” I say, and watch her move back toward her mom’s car. Maddie is already in the backseat. She presses her lips to the glass and blows out, making her face puff up, distorted. I laugh and wave, feel an unexpected pull of sadness. This, the Snows, the new friendship with Sarah—this is just the first of so many things I’ll never get to share with Dara.
“Who was that?” Back in the kitchen, Aunt Jackie is stacking apples, cucumbers, and beets on the counter, a sure sign that she’s about to threaten me with one of her famous “smoothies.”
“Just someone selling cookies for school,” I say. I don’t feel like fielding questions about the Snows, not today.
“Oh.” Aunt Jackie straightens up, blowing the long bangs out of her eyes. “I was hoping it might be that boy.”
“What boy?”
“John Parker.” She returns to rummaging in the fridge. “I still remember how he used to torture you when you were little. . . .”
“Parker. No one calls him John.” Even saying his name brings a familiar pain to my chest. I wonder if, even now, he’s forgetting me, forgetting us—the girl who died, the girl who went crazy—sifting us down through layers of new memories, new girls, new kisses, like sediment slowly compressed at the bottom of a riverbed. “He’s in New York.”
“No, he isn’t.” She’s stacking items from the refrigerator on the floor now: carrots, soy milk, tofu, vegan cheese. “I saw his mom at the grocery store this morning. Nice woman. Very calm energy—cerulean, really. Anyway, she told me he was home. Where is that ginger? I’m sure I bought some. . . .”
For a second, I’m too stunned by the news to speak. “He’s home?” I repeat dumbly. “What do you mean?”
She shoots me a quick, knowing look over her shoulder before returning to her search. “I don’t know. I assumed he came back for the weekend. Maybe he was homesick.”
Homesick. The ache in my chest, the space hollowed out by Dara and deepened, refined, when Parker left, is a kind of homesickness. And I realize: Parker was once home to me. A year ago, he would never have come home without telling me. Then again, a year ago he didn’t know I was crazy. I hadn’t gone crazy yet.
“There they are. Hiding behind the orange juice.” Aunt Jackie straightens up, brandishing a knob of ginger. “How about a smoothie?”
“Maybe in a little while.” My throat is so tight, I couldn’t choke down a sip of water. Parker is less than five minutes from me—two minutes, if I were to cut through the woods instead of going the long way—and yet as far away as he’s ever been.
We kissed this summer. He kissed me. But my memories from that time are distorted, like stills pulled from an ancient movie. I feel as if it all happened to someone else.
Aunt Jackie squints. “Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say, forcing a smile. “Just a little tired. I might go lie down for a while.”
She looks as if she doesn’t quite believe me. Luckily, she doesn’t press. “I’ll be here,” she says.
Upstairs, I head to Dara’s room—or what was once Dara’s room, and now will become a guest room, clean and impersonal and inoffensively decorated, with framed pictures of Monet prints hanging on walls painted Eggshell #12. Already, it looks much bigger than it ever did, both because it has been cleared of all of Dara’s things and also because Dara herself was so big, so alive and undeniable. Everything shrank around her.
And yet in only a few hours we’ve managed to erase her almost entirely. All of her things—bought, received, painstakingly selected; her tastes and preferences; all the random stuff accumulated over years—all of it sorted, trashed, or packed up in less than a day. How easily we get erased.
The air smells a little like burned sage. I tug the open window even farther and suck a deep breath of the clean air, the smell of summer turning slowly into fall—growth turning to mulch, the greens and blues faded by sun into amber tones.
As I stand there, listening to the wind sing through the withered leaves of the rosebushes, I notice a splash of vivid color in the lower branches of the oak tree, as though a child’s red balloon has become entangled there.
Red. My heart skips up to my throat. Not a balloon—a piece of fabric, knotted around a branch.
A flag.