“Maddy, please.” I heard the plea in Mom’s voice, knew that if I looked up, I’d see tears to match. “I’ve lost your sister. I can’t lose you, too.”
I don’t know what possessed me to say it. Perhaps I was looking for a way to tell them the truth without having to admit it, without the risk of them actually understanding what I was saying. Without giving a second thought to my words, I raised my eyes to meet my mother’s and said, “I’m already gone. I died that night on the side of that road with my sister.”
24
I walked the two miles to the cemetery. To my sister’s grave. To my grave. It was cold and starting to rain. I’d left my coat at home on the kitchen chair, but none of that mattered. I didn’t feel it—not the sting of the rain as it turned to ice or my hands shaking as they hung limply by my side. I kept walking, oblivious to everything.
I knew where the marker was. It was buried five rows deep amid a couple hundred other stones. They laid it yesterday. My parents asked if I wanted to go with them to see it last night, but I didn’t. There was something about seeing my name carved into granite that I didn’t think I was quite ready to handle.
But I hadn’t come here today for visual proof of what I had done, of the finality of the lie I had spun. I’d come to talk to the sister whose life I was trying desperately to figure out.
“Hey.” I ran my hand across the smooth stone, taking with it a puddle of water. I studied it for a second, watched the drops roll off my fingers and onto the ground. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was cold and wet, if she had been cold and wet the night the paramedics pulled her from the heated car and into the dark night.
I looked at the ground, my eyes following the line of the grass. They’d put it back in place, like a carpet they’d unrolled, but it was dying, brown and brittle. The lines where they’d peeled back the original sod gaped, as if it was retreating into itself, as if the grass had tried and failed miserably at reseeding itself.
Kind of like me.
“It’s raining again,” I said as I sank to the ground. The wet grass soaked the legs of my jeans. I watched, mesmerized as the light blue faded to dark, the edges inching out until I could feel the cold settling into my bones. Only then, when a violent chill had me moving to my heels, did I speak again. “It seems like it’s always raining when I see you. Always cold.”
I hadn’t been here since the day of her burial. I had refused each morning when Mom asked me if I wanted to go. She thought it might make things easier, that perhaps it would bring me some closure. Closure wasn’t what I needed. Advice was.
“I went to school today. Alex is great. He’s helping me figure my way around the stares,” I said, leaving out the part about him trying to kiss me the night before. Dead or not, I wasn’t quite sure how to bring up that topic with my sister.
“I still don’t get why you hang out with Jenna, though. She’s selfish and mean, and I don’t think she even likes you. I’m quite sure she’s actually working behind your back to screw you over,” I said as if Maddy was sitting right there next to me, as if we were having a conversation about something as mundane as what flavor cake we were going to have on our eighteenth birthday. “Alex told me that her parents are going to lose the house and her brother had to drop out of school to get a job. That kind of sucks for him.”
I swallowed the tinge of pity I felt for Jenna. I didn’t want to understand her behavior. I had no intention of forgiving her for years’ worth of snide remarks and intentional cruelty. Family problems aside, she was still mean and selfish.