Page 35 of Spectacular Things
The Worst Kind of Anniversary
In lockdown, there’s no hiding behind busy schedules or routine.
The Lowes’ shared Google calendar is just a grid of vacant real estate, and in the absence of distraction, they’ve learned that the gut punches of grief hit hardest when they least expect them, and the only way to survive the pain and anger is to surrender toit.
So theydo.
Masked up at the grocery store, Mia and Cricket cry openly when they confront Liz’s favorite spicy mustard.
They yell at the sky on morning beach walks and curse every silver SUV on the road.
They say, “I miss her,” at least once during every meal and think it to themselves too many times during an episode of Friends to keep count.
And yet, even in quarantine, time still manages to rip Mia and Cricket away from their mother like muscle tearing from the bone. They have been unwilling participants in the forward march of minutes, sickened by how the months seem to pick up speed, even as they remain frozen in place.
“How is this real?” Cricket asks in the kitchen on the morning of November ninth.
“One year without her,” Mia says, searching the kitchen cabinets for the coffee filters she just bought.
The shock of the trauma has lifted, and in its place anger, depression, and profound sorrow have surged.
In the days leading up to the worst kind of anniversary, Cricket and Mia have both felt themselves getting pulled under by a riptide of resentment: Why her?
Why them? Everyone is so scared of this virus, but we already lost everything.
“But how?” Cricket asks. “How has it been a year?”
“All the grief books say it’s supposed to hurt less from now on,” Mia says, relieved to find the filters and choosing not to reprimand Cricket for putting them under the sink with the cleaning supplies.
Instead, she measures coffee beans for the grinder and looks out the window to see if she needs to grab her raincoat.
A gray, overcast sky promises another wet day—the kind of damp cold that penetrates bones, making it impossible to keep warm. Appropriate grieving weather.
“Give it one full year,” Mia says, quoting from one of the dozen books she borrowed from the library. “Go through all the holidays, birthdays, and voilà, it won’t hurt as much as the first time around.”
“The grief books didn’t know Mom,” Cricket says as she plucks the last two eggs from the carton and sticks the empty container back in the fridge.
After the funeral, it was like Mia and Cricket were forced onto the Gravitron—that terrible carnival ride—and have been stuck on it ever since. Life has become a circular blur of centrifugal force that lasts forever and is apathetic to their screams.
The truth is, Mia and Cricket don’t want to move on, but the more they fixate on the clock, the faster it moves away from the moment where they need to stay.
They want to remain right there, with their mom, in the center of the open wound, because the pain is entwined with the love, and the love is what conjures the stories and the jokes and that one time Liz went on a date with a ref because he asked her out just before the Stallions’ first playoff game so it seemed like bad luck to say no.
When the Stallions won the tournament, Coach awarded Liz her own trophy.
For your sacrifice, he’d said with a deep bow during the team’s end-of-season banquet.
“How am I supposed to Zoom like this?” Cricket asks, her face blotchy, her eyes swollen and red.
“You don’t have to,” Mia says. “I can email Ms. Hayes.”
“No.” Cricket rests her forehead on the kitchen counter. “I have to go.”
“I was thinking—would you want to do a New Year’s Eve party tonight?” Mia posits tentatively. “And a polar plunge?”
Cricket looks up at her with surprise. “You want to reset from Mom?”
“No,” Mia says, pressing the button to start the coffee machine with unnecessary force. “I want to establish a ritual with you, in honor of her, to help us both get through today, and all the November ninths in the future.”
“There’s no resetting from Mom,” Cricket says with an indignant sniff. She stands up, a pink half-moon on her forehead from the counter. “There’s no restarting.”
Mia crosses the kitchen to hug her sister. “I agree, but I think she’d like us having a tradition with her, and with each other—unless you have a better idea?”
“I don’t want to have any ideas,” Cricket mutters. “I just want her back.” Her body starts to convulse in Mia’s arms.
“The books say you don’t move on from grief,” Mia murmurs in Cricket’s ear. This only makes her sister cry harder. “They say that, to accommodate all the love and loss and loneliness, your heart has to grow bigger.”
“But I don’t want a bigger heart,” Cricket whimpers into Mia’s shoulder. “I want to have a normal-sized heart and for her to be right here.”
That night, as she wriggles into her swimsuit for the midnight polar plunge, Mia thinks back to all the past New Year’s Eves with her mom.
She can already feel the freezing sand between her toes, the surprising weight of those sequined dresses her mom liked to rescue from Goodwill.
All those times she took for granted, or even complained, as they walked toward the ocean, bathed in turquoise sparkles and ivory moonlight.
“Ready, set, go!” Cricket shouts, and as they race to the sea, they yell the opening lines of “Get Low, Fly High.” When the water hits their ankles, then above their knees, Cricket curses up a storm of holy fucking hell s that zing around them in echoes, making them laugh through chattering teeth.
Their mother hated when they cursed, but they hate that she’s dead, and that this ocean is ice cold, and that this New Year’s Eve polar plunge was Liz’s idea of a good time.
“Why couldn’t she just bake cookies like a normal mom?
” Cricket yells to her sister, who cackles with her head back, the luminous white flesh of her neck offered up to the stars.
Mia emerges from the Atlantic and the November air feels like a million beestings, like wrestling a rosebush.
But there is Cricket jumping like a lunatic in the sand and insisting they do this every year, that she can feel their mom’s energy coursing through her veins.
“Be positive, Mia!” Cricket shouts with her arms outstretched like a cheerleader, impersonating the woman they miss most. “Be! Fucking! Positive!”