My sister died four years ago. She was ten.
When people hear about her dying so young, they always assume we spent her last days surrounded by oncologists and nurses. We didn’t. We didn’t even know they were her last days. She was the picture of health.
Cancer didn’t kill her. My father did.
I could have stopped it, but I didn’t.
So when you say you feel like the photographer, unable to do anything but watch, I think I know exactly what you mean.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’ve been sitting in the sunlight for two hours. It’s a popular day at the cemetery, and I’ve watched mourners come and go all afternoon.
I’ve read his letter seventeen times.
I read it again.
He lost his sister. I think back to the first letter, when he said, Me too.
He’s thought of looking me up. Well, my mother. Considering I’m practically staking out her grave to see if he shows up, I can’t exactly hold that against him.
He can use any search engine he wants; he won’t find much about me. She had already built her name as a photojournalist before she got married, so she sure wasn’t changing it. Googling “Zoe Thorne” isn’t going to lead anyone to Juliet Young. My last name isn’t even mentioned in the obituary.
Zoe is survived by her husband, Charles, and her daughter, Juliet.
Survived. This guy is right. The words we use to surround death are bizarre. Like we’re hiding something.
I guess the obituary wouldn’t read right if it said something like, Zoe died on the way home from the airport, after nine months on assignment in a war zone, leaving her husband, Charles, and her daughter, Juliet, with a Welcome Home cake that would sit in the refrigerator for a month before either of them could bear to throw it away.
So maybe we are hiding something.
Now I understand his inability to compare our pain. I’m an only child, so I can’t relate to losing a sibling. Since my mother died, my father and I seem to orbit separate planets of grief, barely interacting unless strictly necessary. That said, I’m pretty sure Dad’s not homicidal. He barely rates as conscious these days.
Cancer didn’t kill her. My father did.
Four years ago. I rack my brain, trying to remember anything that might have been in the news about a father killing his daughter. Four years ago, I was thirteen. Not exactly the type of story my dad would have shared at the dinner table, and Mom was a better source for world news—if she was even home. Mom could talk geopolitical warfare with heads of state, but local crime? Forget about it. Below her pay scale, she’d say.
Wait.
Four years ago, his sister was ten. That means she’d be fourteen now.
Is Letter Guy an older brother—or a younger one? Could I be exchanging letters with a twelve-year-old? Or someone in his early twenties?
Our conversations are too mature to be written by a twelve-year-old. His letter is written on notebook paper, just like mine. That says high school or college.
He writes in pencil, which makes me think high school. But I don’t know for sure.
Twenty feet away, an older man is laying roses at the base of a gravestone. Sunlight reflects off the plastic.
It’s a waste of money, because they mow this section on Tuesdays, and I’m pretty sure they chuck all the crap that people leave lying around. That’s why I’ve never left anything but letters.
They chuck all the crap.
The letters. The maintenance guy. What’s his name, Mr. Melendez?
Suddenly I feel exposed, even though it’s a Sunday afternoon and they never mow on Sundays.
And ick. He’s, like, forty.
It can’t be him. Right? It doesn’t feel like someone that much older. Besides, that age gap between a brother and sister would be unusual. Not impossible, but pretty rare.
The man with the roses is leaving. He may have noticed me here, but no one ever really looks at me. I never look at them, either. We’re all united by grief, and somehow divided by the same thing.
My sister died four years ago.
I’m such an idiot. Letter Guy is probably a visitor—and he all but told me how to find his sister’s grave. She has to be buried near here. How else would he have found my letters?
I start walking the rows of graves, spiraling outward, looking for headstones that are slightly weathered. A few times, the year of death is correct, but not the age or gender. The grass crunches beneath my feet as I walk, and I eventually reach the iron fence at the edge of the property. It’s late in the afternoon now, and everyone has gone home to dinner or families. I’m alone, and I’ve walked a radius of at least one hundred feet from my mother’s grave.
Well out of the range where a casual visitor could see a letter left under a rock at the base of a gravestone.
Hmm.
My cell phone vibrates against my thigh, and I fish it out of my pocket, expecting a message from Rowan.
No, my dad. He’s sent me a picture.
I frown. I can’t remember the last time he texted me. And a picture? I swipe my fingers across the screen to unlock the phone.
It’s the kitchen table. For a moment, I can’t make out what’s spread across it. Then it snaps into focus, and my heart stops beating.
Her photography gear. All of it.
He might as well have dug up her body and laid the skeleton on the kitchen table, then sent me a photo of that.
I can name every piece of equipment. If you show me one of her photos, I could probably tell you which camera she used. Her bags are hung from one of the chair backs, and I can smell the scent of the leather mixed with literal blood, sweat, and tears from her assignments. Every time she came home, I’d help her unpack, and the weight of those cameras and the smell of her bags are wrapped up tightly in those memories.
Every time except that last time.
I haven’t touched her bags since she died. I haven’t touched them.
Those are her things.