Page 10

When the fire is built, Missy packs up the boxes but I hang on to the sophomore yearbook, my finger tabbed to the page with Calvin’s portrait and the sketch he drew of me.

“I made a real inferno for you, ,”

Dad says, nudging the logs with the poker.

And he did. Five logs are blazing but they don’t warm me at all. One pops, sending a flurry of sparks, a few landing on my bare arm, but I feel nothing, and there’s no mark. Still, I rub it like there is, so Dad and Missy don’t think that I came back different, or defective, and start screaming like Mom.

We all sit there in silence, no one sure of what to say. To be fair, even if I hadn’t died, this kind of forced togetherness would’ve felt awkward.

“So?”

I ask after an interminable five minutes. “Now what?”

“Now this,”

Dad says. “I could sit here with you for seven years to make up for the lost time.”

“I think it would get boring after a year, or even an hour.”

I turn to my sister. “And don’t you have school?”

“I’m taking a day off from school and work, so I’m free. What do you want to do?”

I rub the top of the yearbook. I didn’t even see Calvin’s cute sketch until the night before I left to be a counselor at camp for the summer, when it was too late to do anything about it. I missed him all summer, even though I hardly knew him. Suddenly, I miss him now.

“I want to see Calvin.”

Dad and Missy exchange a look.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Dad says.

“Why? Because of the age difference?”

Calvin would be twenty-five now. But supposedly I’m twenty-four, and besides, how can that matter?

“For lots of reasons,”

Dad says, shooting Missy another look.

“What reasons?”

No one answers.

“Ohmygod, did he die, too?”

I like to think that if he had, I would’ve known. That he’d have found me. When Gammy died, Mom didn’t cry. She said she’d see her again in heaven. She believed it. And so I believed it. But I didn’t see Gammy, either. Or if I did, I don’t remember. Or maybe I never went to heaven. I’m still not positive I’m not in hell now.

The fire crackles.

“No,”

Missy says. “He’s still alive. He’s just different.”

“Melissa,”

Dad admonishes.

“Does he live here?”

“Yes,”

Missy says, and when Dad starts to interrupt her, she cuts him off. “Sorry, Dad, it’s her right to know,” she says before turning back to me. “He works at the Bitter End.”

“That dive bar downtown?”

I’m trying to understand why Calvin is working there. “Did he finish business school? Is he, like, managing it?”

No one says anything and now I’m starting to get pissed. I know my parents think Calvin and I are—or were—too young to be so serious, but we had a plan. We’d go to the same college, get married after graduation, like my parents did. Then he’d support me while I got my teaching degree and I’d support us when he was in business school, and after that we’d be rich. Their disapproval was so hypocritical. Mom and Dad met in college. We met in high school. What difference do a few years make if you love someone and they love you? And now it’s been seven years. Enough time wasted.

“I want to see him!”

“I don’t think that’s wise,” Dad says.

“Well, if I’ve really been dead seven years, then I’m twenty-four now and I’m legally an adult and can do what I want.”

“I believe we have exited the realm of legal technicalities,”

Dad says. “And you shouldn’t see him.”

“Why, is he married?”

It seems inconceivable that he could be with anyone else, but then again a lot’s seeming inconceivable right now.

“Not that I know of,”

Missy says.

I exhale. “Then what is it?”

Another log explodes, sending sparks up the mantel, which was where Mom and Dad’s wedding portrait always hung. I loved that picture, not because it was such a great photo; it’s not. Mom looks tired and Dad’s tie is crooked. But they were so young, at the beginning of everything, and they stayed in love. You could see it in the ways they touched each other’s arms as they were doing something so normal, like passing the parmesan cheese. This was what I wanted with Calvin. It made no sense that they didn’t approve of him.

But the portrait isn’t there. And the pile of bedding is still on the couch. Mom and Dad hated sleeping apart. Even when Dad had pneumonia and was up hacking at night for weeks or when Mom was up until two a.m. studying for her boards, they refused to sleep separately. And now they are.

Dad puts the poker back and brushes the ash off his hands. That’s when I notice he’s not wearing his wedding band. I’ve never once seen either him or Mom without their rings. Missy and I used to try to get them to take them off so we could read the secret inscription inside but they said that was between them. “And the jeweler,”

Mom would say, and they’d trade one of their conspiratorial smiles.

I think of how Mom looked, haggard and old and changed in a way that I only now fully appreciate. It’s not just the gray hairs and wrinkles that make her face look like a napkin ironed wrong. When she was with my father, it was always like there was a light glowing behind her eyes, bright when he was around, dimmer when he had to go to some convention or work late. Yesterday, the light was out.

And now I see it. Mom and Dad. They’re not together anymore.