Page 1 of As the Rain Falls (Sainte Madeleine #1)

LUCIA'S BIRTHDAY CAKE

Beckett

It’s the kitchen tiles that get me the most.

Our mother renovated the kitchen back when I was still in middle school. Susan Evans thought the house needed a pop of color to bring in the warmth our family seemed to lack.

I remember it as the kind of project rich wives of boring businessmen take on in the hopes of fighting the early signs of what later becomes chronic depression. All my earliest childhood memories disappeared after she disposed of the old chipped marble.

My sister was different; she jumped right into it.

Lucia was creative; she really enjoyed DIY projects.

I personally didn’t really see the point of it back then, but she’d spend hours browsing on the Internet, looking for inspirations, cropping out pictures of fancy magazines, and visiting antique shops hidden in our town.

The inside of a house matters, Becks.

No one likes to live in some kind of dumpster.

The end result turned our minimal decor into something more rustic, but I guess that was the whole charm.

Lucia insisted on replacing our simple white cabinets with some fancy woodwork and Mediterranean yellow tiles.

She couldn’t wait to see how the color would fade over the years from overuse, but the furniture never got to turn old.

Mom moved back to England soon after we buried Lucia.Only a week after her death, actually.Nobody really uses the kitchen anymore.

I wasn’t surprised.

I wasn’t surprised at all.

Susan was never one to care very much, and I wouldn’t describe her as sentimental about her children by any means.

She tried at first, but deep down she never cared about being a mother.

I felt like she always kept us at arm’s length, both literally and figuratively, sometimes watching us from afar with a weary look of contempt or disgust.

I cling to the idea that there is more to the story.

After all, her hatred can’t be all that—just hate.

Maybe Mom cared about having a daughter and a son, but some things got in the way.

Maybe losing my sister was more than she could handle.

Maybe I look too much like Lou. People often thought we were twins, and a child is never more your child than the moment after you lose them, right? Maybe she didn’t like that, either.

But really, I often wonder if the kitchen tiles did it. If the bright pop of color made her change her mind about staying.It does to me.I often get the urge to pack my bags and leave too.

Yellow makes my skin itch.

The hands of the clock hanging on the wall move excruciatingly slowly, but I blink fast to stay awake. I have this urge to take a long nap growing inside of me, but my dreams are never soothing these days. I don’t like to close my eyes anymore.

With Lucia’s favorite birthday cake in one hand and the lighter in the other, I can barely keep myself from falling asleep. It’s a strawberry cake with marshmallow frosting on top, a recipe so sickeningly sweet that I can’t manage to eat more than a few bites.

My sister loved this cake. She also loved birthday parties and celebrations, going out with her friends, and coming home too late.

Bright colors, camping in the mountains, and jumping over my bed.

Planets, drawing, and cooking savory food with me on the weekends.

Gossiping about people, debating whether religion and politics are essentially always different things or not, and wearing expensive headbands.

It feels stupid to be making a big deal out of this.

I’m just worried her feelings might get hurt if I don’t do any type of partying at all.

You’re in denial and trying to keep her alive.

Maybe the Internet is right.

Maybe I am in denial.

Maybe this is some kind of compulsive repetitive ritual I need to get out of my system before moving on.

Why not blow out the candle when the clock hits twelve?

As cliché as it might sound, I was never good with emotions growing up. Unless I felt overwhelmed enough to get in my head and have a meltdown, which in itself implied a severe lack of self-awareness, they were all pretty much the same to me: loud and devastating.

As far as I knew, life was happening. I was watching the show from the sidelines, hoping to get my timing just right.

I was never as good as the other kids my age, though, and the difference was fairly obvious to them and to me.

No matter how hard I tried, all I could see ahead of me was how I failed compared to others, a point of view so restrictive and destructive that only my sister’s unpredictable death managed to break the spell.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think of death or dying before Lucia. I thought about death a lot. Not because I was suicidal or something. I just… tried so hard to truly understand why people were so afraid of it. It seemed unavoidable to me.

I listened when others spoke; I was always that kind of kid, and they spoke of a certain emptiness, like a lost limb in a once perfectly abled body.

But I never felt grief when people I didn’t know enough about died.

Celebrities, public figures, even acquaintances…

Nothing seemed to faze me like it did faze others.

I understood grief theoretically more so than in practice.

Talks about grief were almost intellectually stimulating, but at the end of the day, it was something truly bad that happened to other people, especially the unlucky kind.

I’d listen and sit back feeling some kind of wonder, and I’d contemplate so deeply…

Two minutes now.

One hundred and twenty seconds.

I mean, what a joke, right?

Growing up hating the word “normal” but also so eagerly wanting to belong to it.

Looking back now, I was so desperate. Adapting myself, spending so much time and energy categorizing all the normal reactions I was supposed to have, supposed to feel, only to find out this kind of hurt can’t be faked. You either feel it, or you don’t.

Truth is, nobody warned me enough.Nobody warned me about the messiness losing Lucia would cause.It isn’t just a lost limb.It is the process of having a whole limb cut out.It is looking down and noticing, “I have no limb” exactly where a limb used to be.

And losing a limb never hurts, not immediately, because there is some adrenaline involved. The pain always happens later, in waves and phases, because losing a sister can be just as unnatural to someone as losing a thumb is.

You wake up and start to panic.

You stand in the middle of your kitchen or in her bedroom, knowing anxiety is ticking in your ears like a bomb.

You drive to her favorite fast-food restaurant thinking about taking her favorite meal home only to remember you now live alone. There’s no need to buy for two.

You stand at the beach where she almost drowned when you were seven and she was six, and the heat under your feet makes you feel a little nauseous because you don’t have to run after her anymore.

You can just stand still and breathe.

You hold her for the last time, watching blood gush out of the cut splitting her forehead in half.

She’s lifeless and boneless, and you start getting a headache at how fast it drips out.

Her limbs are completely broken, hanging on the sides like a marionette.

A body desecrated in the matter of seconds.

Oh, God.

Loving will cut you deep, especially if it goes wrong.

It will spill everywhere: the carpet, the floor, and the bed where she used to lie.

And the more you press your hands over the wound, the more blood comes out.

It leads to excruciating pain that makes you wish you could faint right on the spot.

The bleeding stops eventually, but you have to be very careful, very gentle with the wound, because that’s where your limb used to be a long time ago.

Please, kill me.

Please, just take me instead.

Please, don’t leave me all alone with these people who don’t know me.

Please, you’re the only person I know.

Please, you’re my blood.

Please, I’ll do better.

I’ll be kinder.

I’ll learn to be nicer.

You can teach me because I want to learn now.

Please, I don’t want to do this.

I don’t want to be alone.

And the worst thing is, you’re always going to forget about your thumb no longer being there.

You’re going to reach for the phone and realize you can’t grab it the way you used to.

You’re going to try to move and stay stuck thinking about your limb, your limb, your limb, and the horror fades into some kind of sick numbness once you remember that you’re alive while she is forever stuck at the age of seventeen because that’s how far she gets to go.

And yet, you?

Oh, you’re alive.

You’re all bones and muscles, and your heart is beating in your chest. You still have other limbs that make you whole. You still have places to be at a certain time, and people to meet, and money to make.

Good things will happen to you, bad things will probably follow, but that’s never really the problem. The real problem is how the world won’t stop spinning, and neither will you.

It will just keep going.

Again, and again, and again, until you learn how not to open the wound and how not to use the missing thumb.

I am becoming somebody else, someone with a lost limb.I might have a different mind, but I’m not immune to any of the absurdities of life, am I? In the end my differences aren’t making me any less of a human being.

A thought comes to mind.

You’re not making a lot of sense, Beckett.

When was the last time that you slept?

It’s midnight now.

October 16th.

“Happy birthday, Lou.”

She doesn’t answer back.

I blow out the candles, pressing my hands against my chest to get them to stop shaking. It gets worse when I get sad—the shaking—and there’s nothing and there’s nothing to hold onto now that she is gone. I’m completely alone in this house, and everything is tainted because Lucia is dead.

The thought becomes louder little by little, and I start…

I start stimming .

“Lucia is dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. She’s dead. Lucia is dead.”

The crickets living in the garden are softly singing in unison, their whispering barely doing anything to drown out the constant buzzing sounds coming from the refrigerator.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Sweat drips off my forehead, running cold against my cheek. I feel like I might pass out any second now.A fly lands over the pale yellow frosting, a flat note echoing until it abruptly stops.

“Lucia is dead.”

A beat later, the light goes out.