Page 80 of Spectacular Things

Ten Years

The night before their operations, Cricket waits impatiently in front of the teakettle. Oliver removes two bottles of Martinelli’s from the refrigerator and tells her that they need to get going.

“You’re not the boss of me,” Cricket chides.

“You can only consume fluids until midnight.” He taps his watch. It’s almost eleven p.m.

Mia drops a large cardboard box full of sequined dresses in the middle of the living room floor. “We should go in the next five minutes,” she says. “We don’t want to be late.”

The kettle whistles just as Sloane appears from the basement with a stack of towels, still warm from the dryer. “I think you need a bottle opener for those,” she tells Oliver, who is struggling to twist off the caps of the sparkling apple cider.

Mia helps Cricket pour the boiling water from the teakettle into two hot-water bottles. They then wedge the bottles into the stack of folded towels. It’s exactly what their mom used to do for them.

It is no coincidence that the Lowe sisters booked their kidney surgeries for the day after their mother’s ten-year anniversary. Tonight, they honor her, and tomorrow, they reset their own lives to move forward.

Sloane and Oliver are hanging back with the sleeping Betty, and so it is just the two sisters who walk down to the ocean under a sky that glitters almost as much as they do—they wear sequins from head to toe.

“Hey,” Mia says as they approach the beach. “Thank you for doing this.”

“It was my idea!” Cricket feels compelled to point out.

“Not tonight, ding-dong,” Mia says. “Tomorrow.”

They set down their bags in the cold sand. Cricket digs out her portable speaker and presses Play before daring to look at her sister’s face in the moonlight. It’s the first song off their mother’s high school warm-up playlist.

“Get Lowe,” Mia sings along.

“Fly high!” Cricket booms, mimicking the backup singer’s deep bass.

“Ready?” Mia asks.

“Always.”

The sisters scream as they forge ahead, voices banging against the waves and rocks. They get low to fly high and they risk death to celebrate being alive.

Diving in, the freezing cold lifts them to a higher plane of consciousness, which is how they know she’s not a mirage.

They’ve never experienced such clearheaded thinking or superb vision as when their mother appears just after midnight, barefoot and way down the beach, past the jetty where she held their morning training sessions.

It’s the first time the sisters see her together, but it will not be the last.