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Dad calls a family meeting.

Mom makes tea. Melissa pops popcorn. We all gather on the couch like this is any other discussion to talk about slacking off on chores or treating one another with more respect. It’s like nothing has changed.

But everything has changed.

Dad clears his throat. “I cannot pretend to understand how it is you are here with us, , but I have decided it’s not for me to question.”

Dad looks at Mom with a familiar tenderness. “Your mother always said God works in mysterious ways. I should’ve trusted you.”

“How could you when I couldn’t trust myself?”

Mom replies. “And none of that matters now. What matters is that we’re here. Together. How that is, why that is, we may never understand.”

“That’s what makes it a miracle. Your mother always said both of you girls were miracles. So maybe neither of us should be surprised that we’ve been bestowed with another one,”

Dad says, reaching for Mom’s hand. This time she does not shake it off.

“We may never agree on how or why you are here but we agree on one very important thing,”

Mom says. “We have to protect .”

“How?” I ask.

“By leaving.”

It makes sense. Whatever I am, I no longer fit into the mold of my old life. I have to go away, start life somewhere new, as someone new. My family could come visit me. Dina could come visit me. But no one else would ever have to know. I mean, maybe I’m not even the only one. Maybe there’s a whole bunch of dead people who’ve come back on the down-low, like in some kind of witness-protection program.

“When do I go?”

I ask. “Where do I go?”

“Not you,”

Mom replies. “Us.”

“The whole family,”

Dad agrees.

“Where?”

Melissa asks.

“As far away as possible,” Mom says.

“Where no one knows us,” Dad adds.

“But what about . . .”

Melissa trails off. She takes several deep breaths, like she’s trying to calm herself. But I think I know what she wants to say. What about me? What about the girl I am in love with?

“I know it will be hard with Lenny,”

Mom says. “But you’re about to graduate and start a new life anyhow.”

“And you’re young,”

Dad adds. “You’ll meet someone else.”

“How can you say that?”

I cry. “You two met when you were only a few years older than Melissa is now. Maybe Lenny is the love of her life. I won’t let you ruin it on my behalf.” I turn to Melissa. “I won’t let them do that to you! I’m sorry I wasn’t a better big sister before, but I’m going to change that now.” I turn back to Mom and Dad. “Send me away. Let Melissa have her life.”

“How can I do that?”

Mom asks. “Maybe it’s selfish but I can’t lose either one of you now. Melissa understands that.”

Does she? My sister has folded herself into a ball, hands clasped around her knees, as if trying to make herself invisible, but I see her body quaking. I rush to her and encircle her in my arms, holding her tight as I can, refusing to let another thing break apart because of me. I thought I knew love before. I talked about it all the time with Calvin, but what I feel now for my sister is a tidal wave, taking over my entire body, a different kind of love than anything I’ve ever experienced. I wish I could’ve protected her better when she was younger. She claims I did after I died. And I’ll be damned if that’s going to stop because I came back.

“I refuse to let this happen,”

I tell Mom and Dad. “You can go back and forth between here and wherever you want to send me. You can take turns, like how divorced parents share custody.”

“But then we’d have to be apart from each other,”

Dad says. “And there’s already been too much of that.”

He looks at Mom, who nods at him, a tiny gesture, but it’s enough. They are going to try again. It was one of the things I wanted, one of the rifts I needed to mend, but not like this. Not at Melissa’s expense.

“‘Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more,’”

Melissa says in a quiet voice.

“Huh?” I ask.

“The Virginia Woolf quote from your yearbook,”

she says between juddering breaths. “It means you have to lose something to value something else.” She swipes her sleeve across her red-rimmed eyes. “And maybe it means I have to lose Lenny.”

“No!”

I cry. “That’s not what it means!”

“I think it does,”

she says, her quaking subsiding, and like Mom before, I can see her posture change as she comes to peace with the decision. “It doesn’t have to be forever. But it does have to be for now.”

Dad kisses the top of her blue-haired head. “Thank you, Melissa.”

Mom takes her hand. “We’ll make it up to you. Anything you want.”

And so it’s decided. Without me. In spite of me. Because of me.

I don’t deserve Melissa. I never did. But I will spend whatever days I have left living up to this sister of mine.

Melissa smiles through watery tears. “For a start, how about that dog you promised?”

Arnold

Five Years Before

During his third summer of driving Arnold King discovered the pet shelter. It was two towns over. How many times had he driven past the place, ignoring the sign out front exhorting him to “Paws for Love”?

He pulled his car into the driveway. Over the years, friends had recommended he get some sort of pet, assuming he needed to assuage his loneliness, but he never felt the urge. That wasn’t why he stopped. He stopped because it was a new place and stopping was what he did now. When he opened the door and was walloped with a most acrid smell of wet fur and ammonia, he nearly turned around.

But before he could, a woman said, “Welcome.”

Not wanting to be rude, he walked into the shelter and shut the door behind him. The woman, about his age with a wild mass of curly silver hair, was holding a kitten in one hand and cleaning a litter box with the other. “Let me know if I can introduce you to anyone.”

He’d been charmed by that. Introduce you.

The door opened again. In came a woman. She was familiar but so were many people around here, a byproduct of having taught one hundred-plus students a year for decades.

“Ah, you’ve come back for Barley,”

the older woman said.

“I have,”

the younger woman replied in a tremulous voice. “Thank you for all your patience, Nancy.”

“Picking out a new family member is a process.”

She turned to Arnold and handed him the kitten. “Here, hold her for a second.”

“But I . . .”

Arnold began, but she was gone before he could tell her he was not much of an animal person. The kitten also didn’t appear to get the memo, as she inserted herself into the crook of his wrist and began purring with a muscle-car motor.

The older woman, Nancy, returned with a small wiry-haired gray dog on a leash. When he saw Arnold, he barked and jumped on his hind legs. The cat in his arms looked up for a second and then promptly went back to her nap.

“No, Barley,”

Nancy said. “He’s not your new human. She is. This is Gloria and she’s going to take you home.” She led the impish mutt toward Gloria, who crouched down to scratch him behind the ears. Then she began to cry.

Out of nowhere, Nancy produced a crisp blue handkerchief and gave it to the crying woman. “It’s all right.”

As Gloria dabbed her eyes, the dog wandered over to Arnold and wound its leash around his legs until he was immobilized, with a weeping woman to his right and a kitten in his arms. This was not a scenario he’d ever imagined himself in.

“I promised my daughter a dog,”

Gloria was saying, “and I couldn’t handle a puppy but an older dog might . . .” At that, a fresh round of tears poured from her eyes. “It’s just, I lost Mr. Fluff not long ago and you saw how hard that was on me.”

“I did,”

Nancy said, putting her hand on Gloria’s wrist. “It’s okay.”

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“Not at all! I know how painful it is to lose something so precious to you,”

Nancy said, her voice soft, her expression knowing.

“I just don’t know if I can do it again. I don’t know if I can handle that loss again.”

She directed this, for some reason, to Arnold.

Suddenly he recognized her, remembering her from parent-teacher conferences. And from the funeral.

“I understand,”

he said, even though how could he? One benefit of being single, childless, petless, was that you didn’t open yourself up to that kind of loss.

“I feel so terrible,”

she cried. “What will happen to the dog if I don’t take him? He won’t go to the pound, will he?”

Arnold very nearly volunteered to adopt him but before he could, Nancy said, “Don’t worry. Another family has already inquired about him so I think he’ll get scooped right up.”

Arnold, who was not an animal person, nevertheless suffered a wave of disappointment.

After Gloria left, the air in the shelter seemed to have changed. Alone facing Nancy, holding the kitten, Arnold felt awkward, tongue-tied, and so very young.

“She took your handkerchief,” he said.

“Oh, I keep a stack of them. Tears happen here more often than you would think.”

She gestured for Arnold to hand the kitten back. As soon as he did, the spot where she’d been nestling felt much colder.

“I would think adopting a pet is a happy occasion,” he said.

“It often is, but sometimes it’s bittersweet,”

Nancy said, depositing the kitten back into the cage, where she did three clockwise circles before lying down in a ball. “Some people adopt pets to fill the void of some other loss.” She bent down to scratch Barley between his ears, while his tail beat a staccato rhythm against a shelf. “I started volunteering here for the same reason.”

“Your husband?”

Arnold asked perversely, hopeful that she was a widow.

“Oh, Tom died twenty years ago. My son, Jeremy. He didn’t die. He disappeared. Which is harder.”

“I can only imagine.”

“Sorry, that’s a lot to unload on you.”

“I don’t mind.”

And though Arnold had cultivated a life to avoid people unloading on him, this was true. He was happy for this woman to tell him anything she wanted to.

“So does this guy really have another family who wants him?” he asked.

“Oh, Barley. My old-man mutt sweetheart. He’s been here a while. Not a lot of takers, but I’ve been wanting to bring him home, and I think this was just the push I needed. All was meant to be in the end.”

Paws for Love. That’s what the sign had said. Arnold generally disliked sentimentality as much as he did puns, and he certainly did not believe in anything like fate, but in that moment he had a vision of Nancy on a couch, reading a book, and him next to her grading papers. Barley on a pillow at their feet, the kitten, now a cat, they would name Lady, in his lap. He could see it so clearly—this life so different from the one he’d known. It was right there.

“Nancy,”

he said. “I hope this doesn’t sound hasty, but I would like to adopt that kitten and I would like to take you to dinner.”

The look on Nancy’s face was one of pure shock, as if she had not expected the day to go that way. Then again, neither had he. But in the last three summers, he’d trusted the road to take him where he needed to go. And it had taken him here.

“I’ll need you to fill out an application and provide references.”

She handed him a sheaf of paperwork. “And we’re closing soon so you probably can’t collect the kitten until tomorrow.”

She’d sidestepped the dinner invitation. He wasn’t surprised. A sixty-six-year-old bachelor. Not much of a catch. She didn’t even know his name.

That vision, though—it had been so strong. He took out his marking pen and clicked it open. He would go through with the adoption, if not the dinner. He filled out the application, listed two references. Handed it back to her.

She peered at it. “Thank you, Arnold.”

She put the papers down. “As for dinner, I’ll need to get Barley settled at home tonight, but why don’t you let me cook you dinner tomorrow night after you collect the kitten. You can even bring her if you want. I have some old cat bowls and a litter box you can have. And she’s quite fond of dogs.”

The vision struck Arnold again. It would happen. It was already happening. He had paused for love. And love had paused back.

What a wondrous place this world could be.