And so she had not told Fiona, had not even spoken to Fiona until now. Rachel had thought na?vely that somehow Helen’s death would overrule everything, that something of this magnitude would erase the less tragic things that had happened to herself. But as she walked down the stairs in Fiona’s house, Rachel realized that Helen’s death only compounded the pain. It was the greatest loss to heap on top of an already broken summer.
Downstairs, Denise was carrying a bowl of pretzels into the living room. Rachel stood in the open doorframe and peered into the room: men, including Mr. Larkin, sitting on the couches and watching baseball, silently, each one with a bottle of beer in hand. Mr. Larkin, in a reclining leather chair, was watching the game but not watching it, his legs up and both hands holding the beer tightly and his gaze fixed, also tightly, on the vivid moving images ahead, as if he was looking at something inside the TV, or behind it, which no one else in the room could see.
A week after Helen’s funeral, an envelope was delivered to the Larkin home, addressed to Fiona. It was a manila envelope postmarked from York, England, with Mo’s name and return address written in the upper left corner; there was a letter inside, along with another envelope addressed to Helen at camp. Fiona looked at the letter in the manila envelope first. It was typed on a piece of computer paper.
Dear Fiona,
This came to camp the day Helen died. I took it back to England with me and have been holding on to it for the past few weeks, afraid to let it go, like if I put it in the mail, then the last vestiges of her would be gone from me. She was only in my section for eight weeks, along with thirty other girls, so I hardly feel like it’s my right to say I miss her or that she was any sort of “part” of me at all. She wasn’t, not before she died. It would be a disservice to you to pretend otherwise. But I want you to know that her smile has stuck with me, the way it was always coming out so girlish and easy, like she held some perennial secret to happiness that we forget about when we grow up.
Fiona stopped reading there and opened the smaller envelope, which was postmarked from Sacramento, though there was no return address.
Yo, Helen!
I called your house, and your mom gave me this address. I knew you were at your favorite place—CAMP! So I just wanted to say what’s up. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a real letter! Too bad you guys don’t have email there.
Anyway, sorry I’m sending this so late in the summer. I know I’ve been quiet a couple months. Josh got in trouble, so we picked up and hit the road. We’re in California, but I’m not really supposed to tell people that. You can keep it a secret, right? I will say there are some hotties in my new town. I hang out at the public pool in a bikini every day, and let’s say I’ve become “friendly” with some high schoolers. LOL.
What’s going on in YOUR love life? Did you get your period yet? Write me back! Hope you’re having fun in the woods, you weirdo.
Love, Marla
They had a second memorial service at camp, at the lake, a month after Helen’s death. It wasn’t the Larkins’ idea. Jack had suggested it in a phone call to the family, using words like “grieving” and “closure.” Fiona’s father was adamant about never returning to camp again, and her mother had lost all ability to argue, to make decisions, to even speak more than was absolutely necessary. She stayed in bed, and Liam—the only one in the family for whom moving was easier than staying still—brought her a plate of scrambled eggs and toast with butter and blackberry jam every morning. Amy would not touch it, and eventually, starved himself, Liam would eat the cold eggs while leaning against the kitchen counter before figuring out his next task.
It was congenital heart disease, they learned from the autopsy, something so random and unavoidable that it caused undue amounts of torture. They couldn’t have known, Helen’s pediatrician told them when he called to console the family, voice wobbly and full of unease, as if he’d never had to make a call of quite this magnitude. The occasional fainting was a warning sign, yes, but they’d tested and found she had low blood sugar years earlier, and that had been enough to explain it. How could they have known that it might have been something additional, something so rare and deadly that no one would have dared to imagine it?
They wanted desperately to blame him, to have someone to blame. But it was a genetic defect that could happen to you or me or anyone we know, he assured them, and they believed him: There was no one to blame even if they tried. And so the pain had no outlet, had nowhere to go, and each member of the Larkin family recoiled and looked inward as if they might, somewhere inside themselves, find the seed of the tragedy.
For the parents, it was easy: A genetic defect meant they had somehow failed her with their very core, their very DNA. Someone down the line, in one of their families, was not supposed to have procreated with someone else. Maybe, Amy reasoned, they had been too old by the time they’d had Helen. She was a mistake, after all. Or maybe, Amy’s thoughts spiraled, this was proof that she and John hadn’t been meant to procreate at all; maybe they were the ones who weren’t supposed to procreate.
It was Fiona who had thought a second memorial at the camp would be good. She had not spoken at the first service, partly because it had been too early for her to process anything and partly because she hadn’t felt she had anything worthwhile to say. It was, she knew, a terribly wrong thought to have, that she didn’t have anything good to say at her own sister’s funeral, and so she had pushed it away. But as their aunt spoke, and then Liam, and then—astonishingly—their father, she found that she was not crying. What was wrong with her? She felt a heavy, impenetrable sorrow, but it didn’t feel like her own; it felt like an extension of her parents’ sorrow. Seeing her otherwise healthy mother now need help walking everywhere she went: That was where the real sorrow came from.
Fiona’s sister—her beautiful little sister, who had once made Fiona into a forgettable, petty middle sibling—was gone. Fiona was the youngest now, and the change was swift. Immediately, she was no longer forgettable or petty; instead, she experienced the attention lavished on a girl who had just lost her only sister, and in a perverse way, she accepted it. She had, without having done anything, become a sort of elevated figure: the girl, the poor girl, who had gone from middle to youngest sibling. She was pitied; she was put on a sad pedestal. And she was more loved. Was this the most horrible thing in the world, to acknowledge that she didn’t hate this attention? She believed that it was.
And so, camp: Maybe she could feel there, finally. Maybe she could cry there, be less selfish there. If any place could bring it out of her, that would be it.
So she convinced them, using the same words Jack had. Helen would have wanted it that way, she told them. There was no place she had loved more. And ultimately, everyone was too tired to argue with her.