Page 8

As soon as the sun goes down, I feign a yawn and say I’m tired. I’m not. Not even a little, but I desperately want to fall asleep and wake up to find this is all a wild dream. But as the hours creep by, sleep refuses to come. I do all my tricks, focusing on my breathing, reciting a Shakespeare sonnet over and over, but nothing works. I don’t drift off, even for a second.

When I got sick as a kid, Mom would be the one to come into my room throughout the night, putting a hand on my forehead to make sure I was okay, but she disappeared into her bedroom not long after Dad arrived and has not come out. So it falls to Dad, then, who comes into my room over and over again. I pretend to sleep. I love my dad, but I want to wake up and have him just be regular Dad and me be regular .

I think of the prayer Mom taught us to recite before bed when we were kids: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

If I died, why didn’t anyone take my soul?

If I died, why I am here?

One time in catechism, Liam Heller asked Father Mercer if hell was really pitchforks and devils. “Worse,”

Father Mercer replied. “Think of your scariest nightmare. Come true. Forever. That’s hell.”

Could I have landed in hell? I know I did not-great things. I lied. I gossiped. I was not always nice to other people, but I thought I had time to remedy that, to confess and become a better person.

What were the seven deadly sins? I go down the list: pride, greed, wrath, lust.

Lust.

Am I in hell because I had premarital sex?

“Calvin!”

I cry, jolting up in bed.

“Will you wait for me?”

Calvin asked when he was considering joining the army to pay for college.

“I’ll wait for you forever,”

I told him.

I shiver from the cold even though I have the duvet and two extra blankets. Light peeks through the tiny holes in the blackout shades, evidence of Mr. Fluff’s claw art. I pat my bed the way that used to summon him from his hiding place in my closet. I need him to climb on my chest and purr, sending that warm feeling through me.

“Mr. Fluff?”

I whisper, tapping the bed again, but nothing happens. I do the math. Seven years. The cat was already old. When Dad comes in again, I don’t bother pretending to sleep. “When did Mr. Fluff die?” I ask him.

He flips on the bedroom light. “About four or five years ago.”

He walks toward me, his hair a staticky mess, the gold of his hazel eyes shot through with red. “Did you sleep well?”

“Like a log,”

I lie. “Did you?”

“Not a wink,”

he says. “I watched you almost all night. Just like when you were a baby. I kept thinking if I fell asleep I’d wake up and you’d be gone.”

I don’t tell Dad I had the same idea, only mine was a hope that I’d wake to find all this a dream. “I’m here,”

I say weakly, shivering again.

“Are you cold?” Dad asks.

“A little,”

I admit. I don’t want to tell him how truly cold I am. What if he wants to do something like take my temperature? What if it comes out not 98.6 but 88.2 or 64.7 or so cold the thermometer won’t even register?

“Let’s get some breakfast in you,” he says.

“Okay.”

I follow Dad into the living room. It’s dim, the shades are drawn, and there are blankets and a pillow on the couch. I guess he didn’t want to keep Mom up last night with his vigil.

Missy springs up from the table when she sees me and gathers me in a hug. I can feel the pressure of it, but not the heat of her body. “I can’t believe you’re here,”

she says. “Really here. I’m so happy.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s still in her room,”

Dad says. “She’s having a hard time processing this.” He goes to the pantry and starts rooting around. “Your death hit her really hard.”

“Yeah, I can tell by how happy she was to see me again.”

“She doesn’t believe it’s you,”

Missy says.

“I get it. But hello, who else am I?”

“Miracles can be hard to accept,”

Dad replies. “People didn’t believe it when Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead.”

“You’re quoting scripture?”

I ask. “Aren’t you supposed to be an atheist?”

“I was. Until yesterday.”

Dad turns back to the pantry. “What are you craving? Pancakes. Chocolate cake. Coffee. Do you drink coffee?”

I never drank coffee. It felt like such a trick to me how the aroma was so delicious and the taste so bitter. There’s a pot on, but when I breathe in, I can’t even smell it.

“Can we turn up the heat?”

“I can do better than that. I’ll build you a nice fire.”

Dad turns to Missy. “Do we still have firewood?”

“Out back, under the tarp.”

Dad looks at me, smiling. “I’ll build you a blaze. Get you nice and warm.”

While Dad goes rooting through the yard, Missy goes to the hall closet, pulling down one of the boxes I’d mistaken for college gear. “I thought you might want to see some of the other things that were written about you after you died. If that’s not too morbid.”

“Depends. Did people say nice things?”

“Super nice,” she says.

“Then I definitely want to see.”

“I figured. It’s like the dream, isn’t it? Getting to hear people eulogize you.”

“Maybe that was your dream, but you were always weird.”

It’s not the first time I’ve called my sister that, and before, she’d get all shrivel-faced and upset, but now she just laughs as she rips the tape off one of the boxes and lifts the flaps. “It smells like you.”

“Really? I have a smell?”

“Everyone has a smell,”

she says. “Mom smells like lavender. Dad smells like cement and spearmint. And you smell like, well, like you.” She inhales the box. “You probably can’t smell it because it’s you.”

Maybe. Or maybe I can’t smell it because I can’t smell. I take another breath. I know our house smelled like something. When I would come home from camp after the summer, it always hit me. But now? I get nothing.

I peer inside the box. It’s a hodgepodge of school things: a poem I won a prize for in fourth grade, a play I wrote sophomore year, the clay handprints I made in kindergarten, and other random homework assignments. I can’t believe they saved all this. But maybe what’s clutter when you’re alive becomes treasure when you’re not.

Missy pulls down another box. It’s full of my personal keepsakes: the scrapbook Casey and Alexa made for my sweet sixteen. A calligraphy print of , transliterated into Chinese, from Aunt Pauline. A program from Sweet Charity when I played Nickie Pignatelli. The envelope where I put the dried corsage Calvin got me for junior prom. High school yearbooks, including the one from senior year, which I haven’t seen before. Yearbooks are handed out the last week of school. Seniors get theirs a few days before everyone else, and it’s a ritual to spend the last two days of school rehearsing for graduation and then loafing in the quad, signing one another’s books. There’s always lots of hugging and crying. If you aren’t a senior, you watch the spectacle with envy (no classes, all that drama) and anticipation (one day it will be your turn).

I expect my yearbook to be blank, because I wasn’t there for graduation, but when I flip through the pages, there are more messages than in any of my previous yearbooks. It’s not like I was unpopular. I had lots of friends, but I’d never infiltrated the top tier with girls like Odessa Lumley, who drew a giant broken heart in my yearbook and wrote: Miss you so much each and every day.

“It was too late to put your memorial in this yearbook,”

Missy says. “So they added it to next year’s. Want to see?”

Missy reaches for another yearbook, the one that came out during what should have been my first year of college. Opposite the back cover is a full-page spread of a mural, with rainbows and clouds and angels. There’s a quote but it’s too small to make out.

“It’s from Virginia Woolf,”

Missy says.

“Ugh. We read To the Lighthouse in English lit. I hated it.”

“I liked it,”

Missy says.

“Of course you did. What did the quote say?”

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

“Morbid much?” I joke.

“There was debate about it being cruel or whatever, but Mr. King—remember him?—said it meant that often we don’t appreciate our own lives until someone else loses theirs and to honor you we should live to the fullest.”

“Glad to be of service.”

I peer at the photo. “Where is this?”

“In the breezeway, near the black box theater,”

Missy says. “My locker’s right there so I see you every day.”

“God. You go to Kennedy. How weird is that?”

“Compared to what?”

Missy deadpans.

“Ha.”

I pause to look at my sister. “You’re funny. When did you become funny?”

“I always was funny. You just never noticed because you had a stick up your butt.”

I pause to look at my backside. “It appears to have disappeared with my death.”

“Ha!”

Missy says. “You’re funny now, too.”

I flip through the senior yearbook, looking for a message, or more like a drawing, from Calvin, but I don’t see one. I scan for pictures of us—there were tons in junior year—but I only see a group shot of him, me, Alexa, and Casey.

I riffle through the box. “Where’s my sophomore yearbook?”

“Here,”

Missy replies, handing me another one.

“That’s freshman year. Where’s my sophomore year?”

“They all should be in here,”

Missy says.

“It’s not.”

I start to fling things out of the box. “Where is it?”

“Calm down. It’s right here,”

Missy says, handing it to me.

I need to see it. Calvin. I flip to the page where it should be. The page that goes from H through M, near his picture. That’s where he’d drawn it. That’s where he’d started it.