Page 31

Hadley died a year ago today.

My buzzing phone wakes me up before the sun. Texts from my friends, and one from Mom, light up the morning. They’re variations of each other: they love me, they’re sorry, they’re thinking of me. If I didn’t already know today’s date like the lines on my palms, I would now.

I copy and paste the same thank you to all of them, then limp to the kitchen. Blair’s door is closed, and her car is still in the driveway, so I pry open her door to check on her.

She’s wrapped in her comforter, sprawled out on the queen bed, her limbs peeking out in random places. She looks peaceful—untouched by the black cloak of today.

I want some of that peace. I crawl into bed beside her, listen to the soft sound of her sleeping.

I’m not sure I’ve slept at all until I check my phone; three hours have passed. I want to go back to sleep, but I know it won’t find me again. The fan in her room is too loud, my awake thoughts even louder.

There’s no going back to dreamland, so I peel myself from her bed and head to the kitchen. I turn the stove on. Four eggs meet the pan and two slices of bread meet the toaster.

There are no flowers in the vase on the island, so I head to the front yard. The flowers on the front porch are still dead, but I don’t need flowers. Not today. I pluck weeds from the yard for the vase.

Late-summer-singed dandelions, purple dead-nettles, white clovers. If you’re worthy of a windowsill, you’re worthy of being called more than just a weed.

The eggs are ready to flip. I break my yolk and leave Blair’s untouched. I jelly the toast, flip the eggs onto their plates, and arrange it on the first pan I find under the stove.

Today’s breakfast in bed isn’t as glamorous as the movies make it seem, but those people didn’t lose their only cousin. They didn’t wake up to a million reminders of a tragedy. They didn’t bear the pain of their heartbroken aunt.

Blair’s still sleeping when I open her door.

I set the tray down on her bedside table, pick my plate off to go eat in the living room.

“Quinn?” Her voice stops me before I make it to the door.

I turn around, suddenly aware of how I must look to her. No bra, last night’s messy bun spilling down my back, sleep still stuck to my face.

“Good morning.” My smile is guilty, but it makes Blair chuckle, so I’ll take feeling guilty for the rest of my life.

“Good morning. What are you doing up so early?”

I don’t tell her it’s almost noon. “I made you breakfast in bed.”

She sits up while I set the tray on her lap, sit at the foot of her bed.

“Oh my God, you used a cookie sheet.” She laughs, rubbing her eyes and brushing brown hair behind her ears.

“I didn’t know what else to use.”

“I love it.” Her fingers graze the yellow dandelion petals—former white, puffy wishes that made it to adulthood, but never got to be wished on. “I never understood why you two loved weeds so much.” She looks at me. “But I get it now.”

“Very windowsill-esque.” I smile and start in on my egg.

Blair follows suit. We sit in a silence only broken by the clink of metal on glass, the whir of the box fan in the window, some car doors slamming down the street.

“I’m going to see her today,” I say, then regret takes over.

Blair looks at me with a stale piece of toast in her hand. She stops chewing. Her face falls and leaves behind a look so grief-stricken that you’d think she’d only just heard the news of her daughter’s passing.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, you need to.” Her smile is so forced, so good at hiding pain that it might as well have been painted on a porcelain doll. A long pause follows, filled with a year of unspoken conversation. Blair finally speaks it. “The first year is the hardest, but we made it.”

When I look at her this time, I really see her. She survived a year without her daughter. She has a lifetime more to weather, but she’s stronger now. She’s proven it’s possible—that life rolls on after a fall that feels so much like the end.

I’ve been so focused on all the little things that have changed—the beat-down siding, cluttered living spaces, how little Blair existed this summer—but the same number of things were eerily untouched. We still ignore her room, walk past the dead flowers on the porch, pretend she’s not in the stars above us.

But my aunt is still here. She’s the same woman I hugged on the porch eight summers ago, who welcomed me into her beach house and has given me the best nine skies of my life. She’s the woman I’ve spent my life aspiring to be, the one I would do anything to see happy again.

“I’m so proud of you.”

She cocks her head, wrinkles her eyebrows. A special kind of shock overcomes her, like she can’t believe a single soul could be proud of her. She doesn’t see what I see, how strong she continues to be in a world that tried its hardest to break her.

I squeeze her hand. “You’ll always be her mom.”

She squeezes back. “I know.”

We look at each other over a forgotten breakfast. The glint in her brown eyes gives me a piece of her strength. Hadley is no longer a physical part of our lives. Since not one horoscope or fortune cookie or wish on a shooting star has changed that, I need to accept it as something more than a bad dream, something more than a year-old memory.

I need to stand on the shoreline, face the tsunami while it swallows me whole.

In the pier shop, I make a beeline for the baskets of shells that greet my fingertips every time I come. I find the dusty basket on the floor with the large purple cowries. Scorpio rests on top, but I dig to find Sagittarius. I buy both and head into the sunlight.

The drive to the cemetery on the mainland is slow. Scorpio and Sagittarius sit in the passenger seat, reeling over each crack in the road. My hands are firm around the steering wheel. My shoulders roll all the way back. My gulps land heavier past each rung on the causeway. The water glimmers on both sides of me, stretching for miles and stirring with the horizon in a hazy fog. I pretend the water below didn’t do this.

I rub Hadley’s blue heart pendant around my neck. Causeways and necklaces carry memories no matter how you swing it.

I park under a tree as old as the weathered headstones hiding in its shadows. I sit there for a bit, my forehead against my steering wheel, my thumb still reading Hadley’s necklace like a crystal ball. It decides it’s too late to back down now.

I need to do this.

I bring Sagittarius with me. My sandals scuff against the asphalt in defiance, but they soldier on, padding against the grass still wet in the shade. I slink around a lawn of phantom memories, almost step over some weeds growing in front of a bright marble headstone. Only touched by a year of beach weather, the engraving reads:

HADLEY REINHART

Touch the stars, baby girl.

I sit in front of Hadley’s headstone, hug my knees to my chest, rock against the ground that feels too freshly churned despite the weeds. A mason jar of white clovers rests before the headstone.

I let out a year’s worth of tears. The air does nothing to soothe me. It doesn’t bring Hadley back. It doesn’t make my reality any less real. She shouldn’t be down there, left to spend eternity in a dark, silent, dead home. Not while I’m up here. Not while the sun can still warm me and dry tears from my cheeks like just another patch of dew.

She deserved to feel the sun on her forever. She deserved to count the stars glowing for her every night.

She deserved to come back from the beach that day.

Why didn’t she come back from the beach that day?

Why did the ocean betray us?

Why couldn’t the ocean have taken me instead?

A long, constrained sob drains the rest of me. My eyes tremble close. My heart beats rampantly in my temples. A headache creeps up like a shadow. I close my eyes to let the tears stuck to my eyelashes trickle down and around my nose.

When I open my eyes, my vision is blurry with tears, so I wipe them with the back of my hand, see Sagittarius lying there. I must have dropped her. A purple centaur sits carved in the shell, wielding a bow and arrow.

The archer points its arrow at me. I glide my finger across the glossy top coat, begging it to let go of the arrow and puncture me with it.

It doesn’t let go.

She’ll never let go.

I scoop Hadley into my palm and place her next to a vase of daisies. I unclasp her necklace from my neck and wrap it around the jar, all of it glistening the same way in the sun.

But I know these things are not Hadley.

It’s just a gift shop shell. A jar of clovers. A blue heart necklace.

That’s all she is now.

“You deserved a rollercoaster.” My voice adjusts to the outside air, throat choking on words not even loud enough for me to hear.

My head pounds. My breathing levels out. The strengthening sun burns into my eyes, and I squint to kill the stinging. My shoulder throbs from the weight of my body. I’m sitting on the grass in front of Hadley’s headstone—on top of her patch of six-feet-deep soil, feeling every bit of the pain Hadley no longer can.

The irony finally hits me.

I’ve spent nine summers avoiding pain that’s only felt from the transfer of living nerves, the pain that comes after taking chances some never get the chance to take.

The pain that only comes from living.

Hadley was never afraid of pain and never let the possibility of pain keep her from living her nine years with no reserve.

She never let fear get in her way.

She chased bumblebees, threw herself down waterslides, lay in the aquarium tank dome, slept under the stars, and dreamt of soaring through outer space.

She never took her chance on Earth for granted and never would have thought twice about boarding her rollercoaster.

She was never afraid to live.

But I was.

The ghost that haunts me is the past.

I could have been as carefree as the clouds, danced with the soul of a child, let the water hold me, loved with a whole heart, kissed with no scope of the future.

But I didn’t, even though no amount of living hurts more than the numbness of death.