Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  See, in order to get back to where she is on Asteroid B-612—their planet—he has to get bitten by a poisonous snake. Supposedly he gets back to his asteroid and his rose at the end, but honestly? I’m not really sure the Little Prince is alive—I think he has to let the snake kill him so he can leave Earth. I think the pilot is telling his story to keep his memory alive. Don’t take my word for that. I got a D in English last semester.

  But the reason this story is everything to me is because the Little Prince loves his rose so much that he’s willing to die for her. I want to be loved like that. I want a boy like him.

  Micah should have come. To the clinic. To be with me. He should have come. If there were a wave like the wave and we were on the beach, he’d probably run as fast as he could. Leave me behind when I slow down. He already said he’d do that, didn’t he? I can’t carry you.

  The sun spreads over me, and I close my eyes against the light. It hurts. So does the remembering.

  I am seven, and Mae and I are lying on either side of Mom on the pull-out bed in the living room at Gram and Papa’s house on the Cape. We are squished against each other, and I breathe in Mom’s faint rose scent, which reminds me exactly of Gram’s garden of wild beach roses. Mae and I each hold a flashlight so Mom can see the words in the book.

  “It is such a secret place,” Mom murmurs, “the land of tears.”

  I run my fingers over the illustration of the Little Prince’s abandoned rose, sticking to the side of his small planet, all by herself, with nothing to protect her but four thorns.

  Then Mom reads what has always been my favorite line from the book, which the rose says to the Little Prince when bragging about her thorns, which deep down she knows aren’t big enough to protect her, but she’s proud and she doesn’t want him to pity her and she doesn’t want to pity herself, so she says: “Let the tigers come with their claws!”

  I whisper the words into the silence of my room: “Let the tigers come with their claws.”

  It sounded better when the thorny rose said it in Mom’s voice. I open my eyes and look at the yoga mat I laid on my floor this morning, waiting, but she’s not there.

  “Come back,” I whisper. I guess Mom can’t hear me. Where she is.

  I pulled a card today from the tarot deck Mom bought me when I turned thirteen—Rider-Waite-Smith, the classic.

  I got Death. That skeleton riding on his horse, looking fucking satisfied with himself. Maybe the card is telling me she’s not coming back, ever again. Maybe it’s telling me that my parents aren’t the only thing in my life that has died.

  There is a knock on my door. I ignore it.

  Poor little rose with all her bravado, all that insecurity coiled up inside her petals. Doesn’t she know that trying to be strong never works?

  More knocking, louder this time. “Nah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The door creaks and I open my eyes when I can feel the heat of my sister over my face. She leans above me, her short, blond hair sticking up in every direction. Her blue eyes, a tropical blue like Malaysian water, stare into my green ones. She knows. I know she knows. My sister is the smartest girl under eighteen in the world. If she can figure out how to fly to the moon, she can figure out I’m currently on it.

  The late-afternoon sun cuts into the room so that her face is half light, half shadow. What goes on in there, in that head? Is it all math, or is she as confused as I am? I haven’t seen her cry, not once. But I know she’s sad. Yesterday, Mae forgot what the capital of Norway was. She was talking about stars in gutters and said the guy was from … and then her face scrunched up. It was the first time I saw my sister not know something. I guess sad hits people in different ways.

  “There’s food,” she says.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Are you nauseous?”

  Here we go. I expected a lecture. Instead, I get Dr. Mae, who has done so much research on my disease that Harvard will likely give her an honorary degree. Opiate abuse results in nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, loss of parents.

  “Not yet, Dr. Winters.”

  Mae looks down at me. “What did you take, and how much?”

  My sister. So good. It would never occur to her, like it did to me, to steal our dead father’s opiates.

  I lie, because I’m good at it, and because it never occurs to Mae to lie. She’s so smart, but kind of dumb, too.

  “Vicodin. I just had one pill left,” I say. “I hid it. For an emergency. That’s all I took. I promise.”

  Her eyes search mine the way they search the night sky for falling meteorites. “Okay,” she finally says. “But that’s it?”

  “That’s it. I just miss them. You know?”

  She nods, then lies next to me on the rug. We are quiet.

  That kid in group was right about all of us in the Circle of Sad: I am a piece-of-shit lying junkie.

  “There’s a crack in your ceiling.”

  “Yeah.”

  Right now, my sister radiates calm. Usually she’s buzzing, like a third rail, zzzzzzzzz, never stops, but right now she’s like putting your hand on a stone that’s been sitting out in the sun for hours. A rock. Me? I’m water. A puddle. Sludge at the bottom of a well.

  I wait for her to tell me I’m a piece-of-shit junkie. She won’t say it like that. She will use big words and be precise and reasonable. But underneath, we’d both know I’m a piece-of-shit junkie.

  “The Red Cross called,” Mae says. She almost whispers it. “They need DNA.”

  I turn my head to look at her. Push the cobwebs out of my brain. Dee-en-nay.

  “What?”

  She swallows. “To help them identify the bodies, Nah.”

  There’s not enough Vicodin in the world.

  “Fuck no. Fuck that.”

  I have decided that my parents are just floating. Forever. Whole and forever and they will float on the sea with sunlight and moonlight. Hand in hand.

  She ignores this and explains how, in order to prevent disease, the Malaysian government has dug mass graves. Our parents might be in one of those. Mom, with dirt and other people on top of her. She’d hate that. She never liked closed spaces, always had mini panic attacks on elevators. We took the stairs a lot. “Good for our hearts,” she said. Then she would grin. “And our asses.”

  I push up onto my elbow, which is goddamn hard when you’re made of sand. “They’re not bodies, they’re our parents, Mae.” I have a hard time zeroing in on her face, but I do my best. “Don’t get fucking clinical on me.”

  I fall back down, and Mae’s hand reaches across the rug and grasps onto mine.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I was trying to use the most efficient way to explain the process.” She takes a breath. “We have to find them, Nah. We can bring them back.”

  In a cardboard box, probably. Ashes.

  I close my eyes. Imagine Mom floating on a calm sea in corpse pose.

  Dad floats beside her, and he even managed to keep his glasses on. They could be the illustration for the Two of Cups in one of Mom’s tarot decks, love and harmony.

  When there’s no … body, it’s hard to know when to stop looking. I don’t ever want to stop—but this kind of looking, only looking for a dead body. No. I can’t. I can’t.

  I keep my eyes closed, shake my head.

  “We have to do this, Nah.”

  I am so tired.

  “Fuck the Red Cross. It won’t bring them back.”

  She sighs. “I’ll do it myself. I don’t want them to be so far away.”

  I’m such a selfish piece-of-shit junkie. Why couldn’t I think of that? Of doing right by them.

  “Jesus.” I groan. “Just help me up.”

  We get me vertical, and when Mae’s out the door, I slip another pill in my mouth before following her into my parents’ room.

  “They said hair is good. Toothbrushes. Stuff like that.” Mae holds up two ziplock bags, and I take one, then follow her into the master bathroom.

/>   “I’ll do Dad’s,” she says.

  For a second we stand there, staring. At the rug I puked on when I drank too much vodka at Julie Cirna’s party, back when we were thirteen. The shower curtain with the kitschy Paris theme that Dad hates—hated—and Mom loved. The orderly row of Dad’s bottles of cologne and aftershave and shaving cream. I can see him, running the razor down his skin, Mom brushing out her long, witchy hair. Talking about the book club they didn’t want to go to or if we should grill out for dinner or just get tacos.

  “This is fucked up,” I say.

  Mae squares her shoulders. “We’re gathering data. That’s all we’re doing. Okay?”

  Mae World must be really nice.

  I open the drawer between the two sinks and grab some of Mom’s hair out of her brush. It’s darker than mine. I hold it up to the light and notice strands of gray that twist through the black. That bit of silver is like a switch that turns off any bit of light inside me. It’s so dark in here.

  “I feel bad about teasing her,” I say.

  Mae looks over from her search through the cabinet on Dad’s side of the counter. “What about?”

  “A few months ago, I noticed she had a gray hair and I gave her shit for it. Just kidding, you know, but I could tell she was upset.”

  “Doesn’t seem like her.” Mae carefully places one of Dad’s used razors in her plastic bag. “She’s always said she can’t wait to be that old lady with flowing gray hair. Miss Rumphius.”

  “I know. I thought it was weird. I mean, she’s all about au naturale.”

  It hits me then, with the force of the wave itself.

  “She’s never going to be an old lady,” I whisper.

  We stand there, holding our bags. It’s like an upside-down version of when we got goldfish that one time, after Dad won them in a carnival game for us. We each took a goldfish home in a Ziploc. Mae reaches out and takes the bag from me.

  “I’m gonna mail them. Want to come?”

  I shake my head. In about an hour, once this next pill kicks in, I won’t be here anymore. I’ll be on Asteroid B-612, the Little Prince’s planet, with my thorny rose and the prince, too. Let the tigers come with their claws—I won’t give a flying fuck.

  “Micah will be here soon,” I say.

  “Oh.” She shrugs, looks like she might say something, then changes her mind.

  I see Mom’s perfume, a special rose blend that Cynthia makes, and bring it up to my nose. Mom is pulling me in close for a hug, leaning over me to check my homework, twirling in a spray of scent before she heads out the door. I raise the bottle and spray it just above my head, then turn in a slow, slow circle as a shower of rose petals rains down on me.

  Mae hesitates by the doorway. “I’m going by school to pick up homework and stuff. Later. Do you need me to grab your assignments?”

  “Are you serious?” I hold Mom’s perfume close. “Our parents are dead and you’re worried about homework?”

  I’m a mean junkie. Nice sober. I don’t know why.

  Her fingers twitch. That stress thing she does. A tell. Dad said she would have been terrible at poker if she ever had her hands above the table. Otherwise, she’d kill it. Freaking sphinx, most of the time.

  “Look, it might help, okay?” she says. “You can’t just sit in that room, Nah, taking pills and—”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  For once. For once I would like it if she could freak out. Acknowledge that this is really bad and I am not crazy for feeling like we just drove off a cliff.

  “With me? You’re the one who’s high—”

  “Our parents are dead, Mae. We are literally collecting fucking DNA samples and you want to go get your homework?”

  I’m shouting. I don’t care.

  “What else am I going to do, Nah?” Her hand grips the doorway. “I don’t have a Micah to come hold me and kiss me and love me. The only person I have is you, and you’re not here, not really. Not when you’re on that stuff. So what am I supposed to do?”

  We stare at each other, surrounded by my mother’s scent. Let the tigers come with their claws.

  “You didn’t even cry,” I snarl.

  As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn’t.

  Her blue eyes darken a little. Like clouds covering the sun.

  I don’t care. I really, really don’t fucking care. She is the enemy. The one who will try to keep me from floating and I want to fucking float, okay, I want to go away. And I want her to go away, too, I want to be on my planet, alone.

  “I’m going to bed,” I say.

  She zips the bags shut. Won’t look at me. “My cell’s on. If you need me.”

  Mae goes, and maybe I should feel bad about snapping at her, but I don’t. Not really. I’m starting not to feel bad about anything, which is nice. I see why they call them painkillers. They really do kill the pain. Murder it.

  I take Mom’s brush to my room and set it beside a candle, like it’s a relic. I don’t know whether or not I want them to be found. I hate the idea of them being separated. Dying alone. So if they were both in the grave, then maybe it meant they were together until the end.

  I’ve imagined the wave so many times. In one version, Mom and Dad are together at the beach. They hold on to each other as the water covers them. They die in each other’s arms. But I know that isn’t possible. Mae said the water was too strong. Something about force and acceleration. Nerd stuff. I don’t know.

  In another version, they’re at their bed-and-breakfast, and they make it to the roof, but it’s not high enough and the water sweeps them away. Or they cling to palm trees that topple over. Or a piece of metal decapitates them. Or a floating car crushes them.

  There are so many ways to die.

  I lie back down on the rug in corpse pose and stare at the ceiling. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the crack seems bigger.

  i ignored the last call I got from my dad because i was watching a movie on TV.

  Kitchen Cupboard

  4302 Seaview Lane

  Venice, CA

  9

  Hannah

  My parents have been dead for one week.

  I am running out of Vicodin.

  Fuck my fucking life.

  It’s early evening, and shadows crawl over the carpet. I don’t know when that happened—the sun leaving. It was here, just a minute ago. Whatever. I live here now. On this carpet.

  There’s a soft knock on my bedroom door. Someone is always knocking on the fucking door. No one can take a hint. I make sure the rest of my pills are in the envelope inside the throw pillow, not on the desk. Then I turn on the bedside lamp.

  “Come in,” I say.

  Aunt Nora is barefoot but still wearing her lawyer pantsuit. She looks a lot like Mom—dark hair, olive skin, mysterious smile. Uncle Tony’s behind her. He’s in his usual uniform of Red Sox shirt and jeans.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Tony says. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m tired, I guess.”

  I wish Dad had left behind more Vicodin. I wish Priscilla delivered. It’s hard to sneak out to the boardwalk. Maybe there’s an app for that.

  “Got time for a little chat?” Nora asks. I nod, and she perches on the edge of my bed.

  Mae comes in. Plops down on the floor, leaning back on her hands. As usual, something has been decided without me. I don’t know what.

  “Do you want me to lead up to what I have to say, or should I just say it?” Nora asks.

  I like how blunt she is. Nora always cuts to the chase.

  “Say it,” I say.

  “Tony and I”—she looks at Tony, who nods—“want you to move in with us.”

  “But you live in Boston.” I look over at Mae, panicked. She’s watching me with her thinking face on: brows furrowed, eyes a little glazed, biting her lip.

  “They told you already,” I say to her.

  “You were sleeping.”

  The heir and the spare. Of course they told her first.

  “The
re’s a really good high school by us—Saint Francis,” Nora is saying. “Nate’s in the dorms at MIT, but he comes home most weekends. We’ve got plenty of space in the house—you’d have your own rooms.”

  “I can’t … I … Micah lives here,” I say.

  Nora nods. “I know, sweetie.”

  I close my eyes, see him and Dad painting the house sky blue. Days and days of them covered in paint, then trooping in like conquering heroes, Dad’s arm slung around his shoulder.

  I see Micah climb through my window at night and act out all the waves he caught that day, me trying not to laugh too hard so Mom and Dad would hear.

  I see the look of pure bliss on his face when he overhears Mom refer to him as “my son, Micah.” He turned to me and whispered, “We can still get married, right?”

  Now I don’t have time to make things right between us. To bury what happened in March and stop blaming him for what that day did to me. I need time. More time. But it’s run out.

  This is a nightmare. I’m living in a nightmare. Jesus, somebody wake me up.

  “Why can’t we just stay here?” I say. “I mean, can’t Gram and Papa live here until … like, graduation or something?”

  “It’s not good for Papa’s health,” Nora says. “It gets too cold at night. His rheumatism acts up. And I think it’ll be too much for them. They’re getting on, you know. They don’t really know how to live with teenagers.”

  Mae clears her throat. The faintest blush spreads across her pale-as-milk cheeks.

  “Is there…” She frowns, like she’s translating words in her head. “With my adoption. Is there any way that social services could—”

  Aunt Nora stares at her. “No. Oh, Mae, honey, no. Have you been worrying about that?”

  Mae looks at her hands, nods.

  I feel like an asshole for not knowing she was stressing about that stuff. For not asking. Has she been worried this whole time that she was going to be taken away?