“Look at you,” I said, feeling almost maternal over the boy, like it was his first day of kindergarten and I wasn’t ready to send him out into the cruel world.
“I know. They should parade me down a runway like this.”
Better than being sent to a grave. The next suit I see him in won’t be like this.
“I’m scared,” I whispered, and Ashlinn left his side to wrap an arm around my shoulders.
“But you’re also brave. Be there for your mother. We’ll be looking out for you.”
The splashing water drowned out any bird call or rustling leaves, yet I could hear her voice perfectly.
“Do you trust me?” she asked, as if the answer weren’t obvious.
“More than anything.”
Ashlinn took my hand in hers and began backing up toward the edge of the cliff. I assumed she would stop before reaching the brink, but instead she kept pulling me along before blindly teetering back and stepping off.
There was no trepidation or shock in her eyes the whole time, as we fell together. The air was rushing around like a million hair dryers set on high, and there was no sight or sound. The only feeling was the anchors of her hands in mine.
And before we could hit the ground, Ashlinn caught me.
THREE DAYS
passed and ended with a funeral. I had procrastinated on preparing for Reeves’s death, not that there was much anyone could do to brace themselves for mortality, and when I found myself sitting on my bedroom floor after the news came from Mother, it felt like all my insides had been scraped out. I was hollow.
When Dad died I had wept for days, extending into long months, but now I was floating. Like an out-of-body experience. Someone needed to reassure me that everything was, in fact, okay, because it sure didn’t feel that way. Mother’s universe had collapsed, and that was reason enough to grieve.
The doctors said Reeves’s heart just gave out, that they didn’t know what went wrong. There wasn’t any sign of secondary infection. I held my mother on the couch through violent tears, and her body was a tortured animal in my arms. She must have had such different expectations for the way her life would turn out; whatever dreams had been spun for her in her youth probably held such promise, but this was where she ended up. One lost year starting with becoming a widow and ending with losing a son. There would be no coming back from this, and I was little comfort in my own broken state. Together, perhaps, we’d make a presentable human and pick up each other’s pieces, as shattered and in need of rearranging as they were.
The funeral came quickly. I’m not sure why I expected seeing him laid out in that setting to not be all that different from viewing his comatose form, because they were in no way alike. Someone had obviously been paid rather well to groom him and try to restore something lifelike to his skin.
They had failed.
Ellie came with her mother, who signed the guest book for both of them, and all three of us were wearing the exact same outfits we had worn to Dad’s funeral last year. Like every other person who came, old school friends of Reeves, distant relatives, and so on, Ellie told me how profoundly sorry she was with glistening, pink eyes. Her mouth was as straight as the lines going up the back of her black tights, and she might have been more beside herself than I was.
As the pastor spoke in mellow tones about Reeves being in a better place, I looked up toward the ceiling, finally grateful, wondering if anyone realized how true those words were. Not that I was completely positive of their validity, a part of me still wondering if the whole thing had been a delusion. Some sort of sick way to cope with losing both him and Ashlinn, but there was no way my imagination could have made up such a perfect recreation of my brother. Even if I never saw him in person again, I could be happy knowing he was free.
No one slept that night. Or, at least, no one in my house. In her bedroom Mother was trying to muffle her sobs but the sharp intakes of breath still drifted down the hall. A better daughter might have gone in there to comfort her, but there was nothing to say. Some unimaginable pains have to be endured alone. I just feared for her sanity after I headed off to college. The wounds might never heal, but that doesn’t mean we’d stop putting Band-Aids on top, and I wasn’t sure if she could do that alone.
The hours ticked by, and my ceiling got less exciting by the second, so I crawled over to my closet with a flashlight, trying to avoid the creaky parts of my floor, and pulled out the book of fairy tales. It was splayed open like a squashed insect in the corner with my license. Many of the pages were bent in on themselves. Sitting in the doorway to our kingdom, I opened to the tale of the sandman and read it, imagining my brother as the main character. He had been hearing his own life story without even realizing it. Now that’s celebrity preceding someone to the extreme.
That was how I spent the hours after my brother was lowered into the ground: reading words meant for children and dabbling in being an insomniac.
I never did sleep that night, but my mother managed to drift off sometime, probably on top of a soaked pillow. Around midnight the audible sobbing stopped, but who knows how much longer she lay awake. Maybe some comfort was waiting in her dreams, though.
The next morning as she slept off a bit of her grief, I tiptoed past her door and headed downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast. Our milk had expired the previous day, so I poured cereal and sat down with it dry, not really intending to eat anything but satisfied to have gone through the motions of normality. My unwatered garden watched as I pretended to eat, and I stared back exhaustedly. It desperately needed to be tended to.
Just as I considered going outside to try and resurrect the carnations, my cell phone began ringing on the table.
Ellie.
I pressed the green button to talk.
“What?” I hissed angrily, hoping the noise hadn’t woken Mother. Did this girl realize what we were dealing with? She had been at the funeral not twenty hours before.
“Your girlfriend is in my fucking house! I think she broke into my room. I mean, sorry about the timing, but this isn’t cool.” She sounded completely out of her mind and was breathing like she was calling from a treadmill.
Holy crap.
“Don’t call the police,” I rushed to say as I ran to grab some paper and my purse. Ashlinn was here.
“That’s all you have to say? Don’t call the fucking police? Of course I didn’t call them. I called you, dammit. Why the hell did you say that? Has she been on the run or something? Holy crap, you dated a murderer. She runs a drug cartel.”
“No she doesn’t, I promise. Where is she?” I uncapped the pen and began to write a note to Mother.
“In my bedroom. She was standing at the end of my bed wearing nothing but my goddamn sweater and saying how there’s an explanation blah blah blah. I got out of there and locked the door as quick as I could. You are damn lucky my parents are heavy sleepers and my room is in the basement.”
With the phone jammed between my face and shoulder, I scrawled how I was going to Ellie’s but prayed that Mother wouldn’t wake up before my return. To find one child missing the day after the other’s funeral was beyond my imagining, but there was no time to think up a better plan. Ashlinn was human, Ellie was a catastrophe, and I was wasting moments. I left the paper on the kitchen table and went out the front door, which I opened so slowly it barely creaked. The second it was shut, I broke into a sprint down the sidewalk.
“I’m on my way now but can’t guarantee how fast I’ll be able to run this. Don’t worry, she wasn’t really breaking and entering.”
I hope. What was Ashlinn trying to pull here?
“You can go back into your room.”
“No way, not until you’re here. This kind of shit doesn’t happen every day. I could have easily thrown my lamp at her and caused major damage. I thought you said she was gone!”
“Yeah, well, apparently she’s back now. I thought it might happen soon but not like this. Sorry.”
“Oh are you? Well, if you know so much, mind telling me why the hell your long-lost girlfriend is half-naked in my bedroom at seven in the morning?” Ellie was shouting, and I worried about her parents. She had said they were heavy sleepers, but this made it seem like they could sleep through a brass band marching. If only I could give her an honest answer for all this, but that idea had fizzled and died the last time I tried it.
Wait
, I thought back to what Ellie just said,
half-naked?
Ashlinn was going to have so much explaining to do when I got there.
After Ellie was an appropriate distance away, of course.
I guess warning me she was about to pull this stunt would have made things too easy.
“What were you dreaming of?” I asked, turning the corner. Empty roads made the run easier not only because there was no waiting at intersections, but also because it meant no one would think I’d gone off the deep end and call the police. It was just a matter of not tripping over the mountainous cracks in our sidewalk.
“How the hell do you know I was dreaming? This can’t be relevant.”
“Could be.”
“I was dreaming of her, and now I know why! I swear she’s become a recurring nightmare or something. We were talking about you, thanks a lot, on the Golden Gate Bridge, of all places. There were seagulls. It really shouldn’t be all that shocking that I dreamed of someone who was in the same goddamn room as me. Are you almost here? There’s no noise coming from down there, and it’s freaking me out.”
“Less than a minute away. I’m serious, she isn’t some sort of wild animal you have to listen up at the door for. You really can talk to her; you’ve done it before.”
Her driveway came into view, and I used the last of my energy running double time toward it. My forehead and chin were turning tacky with sweat.
“I’m gonna wait for you. She must have come in through the little windows or something.”
I made a noncommittal sound in response and told her to let me in the house, which I was standing in front of. It would be better to not wake her parents with the doorbell. Ellie hung up immediately and not two seconds later had the front door wide open.
She was wearing bright yellow pajama pants, unlike any of the dark clothes I normally saw her in, with hair flattened completely against one side of her head. Without speaking she grabbed my hand and dragged me inside toward the basement and gestured at it angrily, glaring at me as if the whole thing was my fault. Thinking back, it might have been. I unlocked the door and walked halfway down the carpeted stairs.
“Ashlinn?” I called out hopefully into the darkness.
“Victoria!”
It had been far too long since I last heard that voice in person.
She rushed over to the bottom of the stairs, and before I could even make my way down toward her outline, she raced up to me. A pair of awkwardly fitting gym shorts had been added to the sweater Ellie had already told me she was wearing, but there was no time to process her attire. Ashlinn plowed into me, making us both fall back onto the staircase and skid down a step or two.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, running my fingers over her hair, “you really are here. This is real. You are my girlfriend and you’re here and now I can tell everyone.”
It was time to get it out. I took a deep breath and looked her dead in the eyes. “I love you, Ashlinn.”
She flashed me her white teeth, unsurprised, and I felt weightless instead of empty. “Indeed. And now we can do this as much as we want,” she said, nuzzling into me. The stairs were starting to dig into my contorted back and rug burn was inevitable, but that was easily ignored until a throat was cleared above us.
“I brought you here to get her out of my house, and now you’re cuddling on the stairs. Have I missed something?”
Ellie seemed unmoved by whatever grandiose declarations had just occurred and was standing livid in the doorway, which I could see upside down when I tilted my head back. Ashlinn began climbing off me gracelessly in the small space.
“Sorry I scared you so much. Let me try to explain.”
Ellie nodded, her expression carved out of marble. “Okay, but not in this house. We’re going for a walk.”
We clambered up the stairs as Ellie left a note for her parents much like the one I’d left for mine and led us out the door. Before we even got off her property or could begin discussing the incident, Ellie asked me how I was doing. It was sweet that after the morning she had, she was still worried about how I was coping with Reeves’s passing. Maybe that would excuse one of her previous dick moves. I tried to put into words how surprisingly okay I was, and she accepted my answer with a grain of salt.
The sidewalk offered us miles of discussion space, and the three of us must have looked like quite a group. All in pajamas and some without shoes. Ellie began her well-deserved cross-examination, and I braced myself. Lying wasn’t my forte, nor Ashlinn’s or Ellie’s either.
“Why did you break into my house?”
“I was lost,” Ashlinn began, and it was an obviously rehearsed and poorly constructed fib. I wondered how long she had been in that basement. “I wanted to go to Victoria’s place but couldn’t find my way, and yours seemed like the next best bet.”
Even though her words came slowly, I couldn’t help but cheer her on in my mind. This was better than anything I could have thought up.
“How the hell do you even know where I live?”
Ashlinn looked even more tripped up but rescued her story by saying, “I saw The Hovercraft in the driveway.”
Ellie stopped walking. “So you’re trying to tell me you were walking around town naked so early in the morning it’s practically night and thought it’d be a good idea to—what? Crawl in through my tiny excuse for a window so you could use me to find your girlfriend? Does no one else realize how insane that is?”
We both stared at Ellie. She had a point.
“I wasn’t having a very good night,” Ashlinn tried, although the statement came out more like a question.
“Yeah, well neither was she I imagine,” Ellie responded, pointing in my direction but still focused on Ashlinn. “You weren’t even at the funeral. What kind of girlfriend are you?”