by Kim Turrisi
“I don’t think I can do this, Jen Jen,” I whisper. “Me without you just doesn’t fit.”
The ugly cry takes over. My parents stand back and allow my grief to pour down my face as I continue my conversation with my sister.
“Remember the article I sent you on Charlotte Brontë? The one I wrote for the Wildcat Review? I hope you understood that the quote I highlighted in the article was for you.”
I reach inside my bag, taking out the written quote. I fold the note in half and tuck it under the left side of her blazer so it will be close to her heart forever. I lean in next to her and recite it.
“You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affection: There is nothing like it in this world.”
“Will there ever be anything like that again for me?” I ask her.
The answer to that is the same as before: a resounding no effing way.
* * *
Though it’s eighty-plus degrees, my body is shivering. I rub my hand over my bare arm, willing it to stop shaking. Flanked by my mom and dad graveside, I pretty much switch to autopilot. My shades have stayed on for the entire church service and I’ve gone through every Kleenex I could get my clammy hands on.
A few days ago my parents painstakingly toured the grounds of Lauderdale Memorial Park, the oldest, most prestigious cemetery in Fort Lauderdale, and decided on the prime real estate near a two-hundred-year-old oak tree with a nearby waterfall. Jen loved the sound of rushing water, any kind of water really. They were honoring her desire to be at peace. We all were, no matter how much it was destroying each one of us day by day.
As we’re staring at the closed casket housing my sister, with grave straps dangling it over a person-size hole in the ground, it’s only fitting that an afternoon rain shower falls on us. Even the sky weeps for our loss. TJ hands me an umbrella but I push it away.
“I want to feel every miserable moment of this,” I say to him. We both know I really don’t want to feel anything. That would spare me this suffering.
Father Michael, dressed in a funeral robe, all black except for a royal blue sash, concludes the service with the Lord’s Prayer: “… forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us …”
He didn’t comply with the no-black rule, but arguing with a priest couldn’t possibly end well. The wind muffles the rest of the prayer. I despise all the mourners for no other reason than that they are here.
Father Michael grabs a shovel and tosses some dirt on my sister, then passes it to my parents, who mindlessly do the same. When Dad puts the shovel in my hand, I throw it to the rain-soaked ground.
“I’m not throwing dirt on her.” Emily grabs my hand and we retreat before I explode. TJ backs away with us.
“I’m so sorry, Kai,” Emily mumbles.
“I don’t know what else to say,” adds TJ.
“There’s nothing to say. She’s never coming home.”
When that hits me like a ton of brick, so do the sobs. My friends do their best to hold me up, one on each side of me, propping me upright. My mom places her arm around my waist, leading me to the limousine.
“Kai, we have to go.”
I comply like my five-year-old self would have, never looking back, but I hear them start to lower her into the cold, hard ground alone.
I will never forget the whirring of the grinding gears.
Ever.
* * *
Christ, it’s party time at the Sheehans’. Fucking unbelievable. Dear God, there’s a margarita machine on the patio. My house is overflowing with people. All our neighbors. Families. Jen’s college friends. A slew of people I’ve never laid eyes on, they didn’t even know my sister. Who are they? It’s a three-ring circus.
Emily takes my hand.
“If one more person says, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I will rip my hair out strand by strand. Or if they mention what a wonderful girl Jen was, I will go postal,” I say.
Emily holds me.
“I swear to Christ, every single time anyone mentions her name, she dies one more time. Over and over and over.”
“Let’s go outside. TJ already hijacked a pitcher of margaritas. One of the hot catering waiters hooked him up.”
That almost makes me laugh.
“I can’t. I have to be the hostess with the mostest. You see my parents.” We watch my mom and dad working the crowd like politicians. They’re on autopilot, too.
“I have to talk to Jen’s friends first.”
She presses her shoulder to mine. Something we’ve been doing since we met. No words necessary.
I spot my sister’s squad and start to make a beeline toward them, dodging some neighbors who moved away years ago. Is there anyone who isn’t here? Tracy, my sister’s college roommate, is the first to envelop me, her firm grip grounding me. Marlene and Bethany follow suit, all swallowed up in their own grief. They were the Four Musketeers. Surely one of them can help me put the pieces together.
Bethany breaks the circle of Jen love. “Kai, this must be so surreal.” Her voice drifts as her eyes drip like a leaky faucet.
I charge ahead. “Did any of you suspect this could happen? I can’t figure out what was so terrible in her life that she would do this.”
“I mean, she was bummed that a guy she was hooking up with from work only thought of her as a friend but … no big deal. Right?” Tracy offers up. I don’t know if it’s a big deal or not since I didn’t even know there was a guy. Another secret? Now, I’m really mad. She turned my life upside down and left me with nothing but secrets and lies.
“Is he even here?” Not that it matters, but if he is, I’m going to kill him.
Tracy and Marlene both shake their heads, draining their wineglasses.
“I wish we could help you, Kai. The truth is we’ve all been running over every text, every call, and if there was any sign, we missed it,” Bethany says, her voice consumed with a grief and guilt I know well.
Misery loves company.
“Can I do anything, Kai?” Tracy asks.
“I wish you could. All my parents keep talking about is things getting back to normal. Jen killing herself is anything but normal.”
“They aren’t thinking clearly. You have to remember that they don’t have a normal anymore either,” she rationalizes.
With that thought stuck in my head, I wander through the backyard to meet Emily and TJ. My phone vibrates. When I slide it out of my pocket, I see a text from Marlene. It’s a picture of me with the Four Musketeers from Jen’s freshman year, with a message: Love this pic.
That margarita machine is calling my name. I start to pull the metal handle back with my free hand but nothing comes out.
“Let me give you a hand,” a voice says from behind me.
I twist back to see a guy who looks kind of familiar but I can’t place him. He’s flashing me a grin. He reaches around me, brushing my shoulder, to move the handle back and forth a few times. Then a miracle happens. The frozen drink flows into my cup like a soft-serve ice-cream cone.
“Thanks,” I say. I start to leave but he stops me, taking my elbow in his hand.
“Jake. Your sister used to babysit me. We met ages ago. I had braces back then?” He tries to jog my memory.
“Sorry, I don’t remember.”
“Ouch. I had such a crush on you,” he says. Pretty sure I’m glowing red. “You’re just as cute as you were when you were eight. We should hang out sometime.”
I take a long sip before I attempt to sidestep this awkward. “Jake, not really a good time.” I hold my tongue. Are you fucking kidding me?
He sticks his lower lip out and grabs my phone. I watch in utter disbelief as he adds his number to my contacts.
“If you change your mind,” he says before he hands it back.
That happens.
I silently
thank my mom for insisting on the margaritas. The gazebo is in my sights. My parents argued about whether we really needed such a thing. Dad thought the saltwater pool and redwood deck were plenty for the backyard. Mom won the battle and added a brick fireplace for good measure even though it’s only cold enough one or two days a year to put it to good use.
“Finally,” TJ says. “We were worried about you.”
I throw myself on the chaise next to him. “This day.”
He tops off my drink.
“I have to get out of here.”
TJ puts his arm around my shoulder. “Can you escape tonight? Houser’s dock party is gonna be epic. They got a band and a keg.”
All I can do is sigh, knowing there’s no way my parents would let me go even if I wanted to. If I’m being honest, I do kinda want to go. You know, do something a regular teenager would be doing on a Saturday night. Instead, I’m trapped in hell. Thanks, Jen. Jesus, now I’m pissed at my dead sister.
* * *
The last of the waiters are hauling dishes out to the catering van. I continue to stare from my bedroom window until they drive away. Finally, it’s safe to go downstairs. Though the effects of the tequila and general exhaustion are beginning to take their toll, I decide it’s a good idea to help clean up. I finish whatever alcohol is inhabiting the highball glasses and wineglasses scattered inside the McMansion. With my parents elsewhere, I systematically make my way around the family room, talking to the dog and myself.
“A quarter of a glass of white wine? Why, thank you, Mrs. Sandler,” I mention to Duke, who’s following me hoping for a dropped taco or any scrap. He’s a chowhound.
I dread the sound of the locking dead bolt on the front door as my father seals us all inside. The finality is undeniable. The population of our family is now officially three.
The silence is deafening.
This is the new normal.
I despise it already.
Chapter 6
I pass on the whole We’re going to pack up your sister’s things activity that my mother is hell-bent on this morning. She woke up armed with a checklist, and cleaning out Jen’s apartment is first up. I can’t believe my ears when I hear her talking to Dad over coffee.
“The landlord was so kind, so sympathetic when I called him, no problem breaking the lease. He said we could have as much time as we needed to clean out the apartment. May as well get it over with, there’s never going to be a good time for this,” Mom just blurts.
“You’re packing Jen’s stuff? Already?” I squeal. “Why can’t we just pay the rent and keep it for another month?”
“It’s just something we have to take care of,” Mom rips back.
“I’m not going,” I say.
“You can spend the morning researching colleges other than FSU, you need a fallback school. May as well get a jump on it,” Dad suggests.
“I’m taking a gap year,” I state flatly. Jen was supposed to tell them, but she was supposed to do a lot of things.
Before I can even lay out my plan, my father flips out.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yeah, I am.” I fight back. “I’m going to Europe just like she did.” My voice gets louder with each word and I don’t even care.
Mom says, “I think you should wait until you graduate like Jen did.”
“What about what I want?”
Mom cuts me off. “Your sister just died, Kai.”
I stand up. “Well, I didn’t.”
My only thought as I rage upstairs, taking two steps at a time, is, We are so not done with this. I storm around my room until I hear them leave.
* * *
I’m already overcome with anxiety about going back to the grind of high school. First off, I’ll be going from Kai Sheehan, sophomore writer girl, to The girl whose sister committed suicide. It was all over social media the day after she died. How could anyone possibly understand? The silver lining is that I’ll return to my routine. I’ll go to school and every day won’t be another thing on the checklist of death. Dad is already back to work, and Mom is slowly easing into things. I’m the only one lagging behind.
I force myself to look at all the assignments I’ve missed. Two quizzes and an English paper, just last week. I’m even behind on yearbook. Hard to look at all the smiling faces when I’ve lost mine.
I should study but my mind is on something else. I Google all things Europe in preparation for the gap year that I will be taking come hell or high water. I bookmark Ireland and start a list of my own: Kelsey’s Pub in Dublin, fingers crossed for lightning striking twice with The Script. Kissing the Blarney Stone. Cliffs of Moher. Pub crawl. Duh. A quick check of Jen’s postcards sends me to Italy next.
I am distracted by a ding on my phone. TJ posted on Instagram. Shit, it’s a picture of him and Emily at the beach. Without me. From all the posts, it looks like a barbecue-and-beach-volleyball kind of a day. And here’s a picture of Emily and her sister that she posted an hour ago. There’s no escape.
I will never have another post with my sibling.
So ... how quickly can I deaden this hurt? Mom couldn’t bear to throw away anything with my sister’s name on it, not even the vials that held the pills that killed her. I helped myself to a variety of those leftovers when Mom wasn’t glued to me. I start with a Vicodin, a couple of Advil and a bowl of weed. Nice combo. Squelch the pain, kill the headache and chill the mind.
Duke’s unremitting barking signals the return of my parents. I detach my face from my pillow to steal a quick glance at my phone: 2:45 p.m. Jeez, it took them less than six hours to box up twenty-two years of life. I hear a light rap on my door and I yell, “Come in!” even though I don’t mean it.
Mom half smiles when she sees the pillowcase crease on my right cheek.
“I thought you might like to have these,” she says, thrusting a box onto my bed. I notice one of Jen’s bracelets on Mom’s arm, a beaded leather wrap, red and blue teeny beads intricately designed adorning it. Jen picked it up in Morocco at an outdoor market. She notices me notice but neither one of us says anything about it.
I crank back my anger from the morning. She’s trying.
I riffle through the box, first unveiling a Kindle, still in the original packaging.
“She loved her books, hated that Kindle we got her. The idea of being able to take so many books with her, we really thought she would love it when she traveled,” Mom recalls.
I can’t help but crack up. “That was definitely a Christmas-gift fail.”
“We boxed up her bookshelves. She had quite the collection, from Seuss to Salinger. I picked out the ones I thought you’d like to keep on your shelf. The rest will be in the garage till we figure everything out.”
I mindlessly grab the Kerouac that’s sitting on the top.
“This was next to her bed,” I say, knowing she probably hasn’t forgotten that any more than I have.
“She loved his writing and anything sixties. She was such an old soul. Maybe a little bit of a wanderer like him,” Mom says, getting misty.
I start thumbing through it. I stop near a passage that’s marked with one of her trademark neon Post-its.
Off to the side in her handwriting, in blue ink: Amsterdam July with Danielo
“She never mentioned anyone named Danielo before, but he must’ve meant something if she wrote his name in her beloved book. Right, Mom?”
“I have no idea who he was either.” Something else she kept from all of us.
I reach in the box and run my fingers down the binding of a book that brings a smile to my lips.
“Franny and Zooey, arguably Salinger’s best.”
“Jen would agree, but I’d have to go with The Catcher in the Rye,” Mom mutters as she absentmindedly folds the heap of laundry at the end of my bed. One more thing I haven’t got around to doing. I ope
n Jen’s journal of quotes and sayings and see an orange Post-it fixed to a Walt Whitman quote.
“I exist as I am — that is enough.”
I read it aloud and regret it the second I do, realizing Jen didn’t heed Walt’s sage advice. Mom and I exchange a knowing look.
“I guess it wasn’t enough,” I say, overcome with sadness.
Mom can only shake her head, water filling her empty eyes.
Still, I can’t help the happiness that sneaks in when I see the book wedged behind her poetry collection. I ease it out of the carton.
“Big Red Barn was my favorite because Jen would make all the sounds of the animals as she read aloud to me.”
“I remember that,” Mom says. “When the house was quiet, we knew exactly where to find you girls. Together, on opposite sides of the couch, each lost in a book, even when you couldn’t read. You just liked doing whatever Jen did. You had a very special relationship, Kai. No one can take that away from you.”
“I want more time,” I choke out.
“We all do.”
I chew on that for a moment.
“Mom, why do you think she did it? Why would she want to leave us? What could have been so bad?” I ask.
Mom takes a beat. With a heaviness in her voice she answers, “I wish I knew.”
“Have you talked to Dad?”
She sighs. “Honey. It’s hard for us to talk about it. He tosses and turns every night. They had an argument about money. She needed help with her credit card payment, and he thought she should be more responsible. It wasn’t a huge fight. Your dad didn’t think it was a big deal. He blames himself for not seeing what no one did.”
“What are we going to do?” I ask, continuing the longest real conversation I’ve had with my grieving mother about anything that matters.
“Get through it.” She stands up, ending the depth of it all.
“We got everything packed up for the movers to take to storage,” Mom claims.
