Summer Bird Blue

by Akemi Dawn Bowman

  And maybe that’s why Mom isn’t here—she thinks I’m strong enough to do this alone.

  I shouldn’t hate her for not knowing me as well as Lea did, but I can’t help it.

  I failed as a sister and a daughter, but she failed as a mother, too.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’m not prepared for this.

  Lea’s guitar stares up at me from the floor. It’s covered in stickers—the oldest is a shimmery My Little Pony one, and the newest is a Pikachu face. Her hot pink guitar pick is still wedged between the strings and the fret board.

  Mom must have sent it. Why else would it be sitting in the middle of Aunty Ani’s living room like a long-lost relative showing up in the middle of a dinner party?

  A memory

  I shouldn’t be jealous, but I am.

  It’s just a guitar. I already have a guitar, even if it isn’t anywhere near as nice as Lea’s. And I have my piano, which Babang bought me the year before she passed away, back when Lea wasn’t interested in music. Back when I had music all to myself.

  Lea forfeited her birthday present this year because she wanted a guitar for Christmas. A guitar I told her she should get, so that the two of us could be in a band. This isn’t a surprise—it was inevitable.

  So why am I so mad about it?

  I didn’t ask for a guitar, and I didn’t give up my birthday present. I wanted a new planner for Christmas—a fancy one with my name on it and washi tape and stickers and gel pens and all the rest of it. Because I’m going to be in sixth grade next year. Everyone in sixth grade uses a planner. Or at least, that’s what Bella Polednak told me, and she’s in seventh grade so of course she’s right.

  And I got it—all of it—even the My Little Pony stickers that I wanted almost more than the planner itself.

  It’s not that I want Lea’s guitar—I just don’t want her to have it. Not anymore. Because all Mom’s been asking all day is for Lea to play her more songs and sing her new melodies, and it’s like they both forgot that I’ve been playing the piano for years. When I said we could start a band, it was going to be me and Lea, on our own.

  Mom wasn’t supposed to be a part of it. She wasn’t supposed to start paying more attention to Lea. She wasn’t supposed to suddenly be less interested in me.

  I’m the musician.

  Or, I was. Now I guess there’s two of us, and I’m not sure I’m happy about it.

  I listen for Mom and Lea at the door. They’re in the kitchen getting dinner ready. Lea’s guitar is sitting on her bed. Alone. Unwatched.

  And I don’t know why I do it. Maybe I’m just a jealous jerk. But I take one of my gel pens—the purple one, which is the darkest—and I draw a big, squiggly mark on Lea’s guitar. Because now it’s not perfect or new or cool. Now it’s ruined.

  I take a step back, push the cap on my pen, and look over the instrument like I’m hoping to admire my handiwork.

  Except I don’t feel pride or glee or even remotely better. I feel so much worse.

  Something heavy forms in my throat, and before I can think, I’m running my thumb over the ink, trying to wipe it away. It smears deeper into the grain, a menacing blotch of meanness that erupted from inside me. I can’t take this back. I can’t erase it. I can’t hide it.

  I find my chair and wait for the inevitable.

  When Lea comes into the room a few minutes later, she looks like she ran through the hallway. “We’re making apple pie for dinner. Want to help make the shapes for the crust? I’m going to do a horse.”

  “Horses don’t belong on an apple pie,” I snap, my eyes burning because the guilt is already taking over.

  She moves toward her bed, and my heart plummets into my stomach. I can’t look at her. I squeeze my hands together and stare at my desk.

  Lea lets out a noise. She sounds like an injured animal. And then it turns into a growl. “Rumi, what did you do?” she shouts.

  I spin around and try to keep my face still. “What?”

  Her brown eyes are filled with water. “You drew on my guitar!”

  “No I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.”

  “You did, you liar. Look!” She points at the mark.

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “It was. It’s purple.”

  “So what?”

  “I don’t have a purple anything, Rumi!”

  And suddenly the two of us are screaming at each other. I keep telling her she’s wrong, and then she calls me a liar, and I call her a liar for calling me a liar, and there’s so much screaming and shouting that Mom has to come into the room to slice through the yelling.

  “What is going on?” she demands, wide-eyed. “It’s Christmas. There’s no fighting on Christmas.”

  “She ruined my guitar!”

  “I did not!”

  “You did too!”

  “I don’t even care about your ugly guitar!”

  The screaming picks right back up again, and Mom moves between us and looks at the guitar.

  I swallow the lump in my throat. She knows. She recognizes the purple, and all the denial in the world isn’t going to convince Mom it magically appeared there.

  “Lea, can you please go to the kitchen and check on the casserole?” Mom asks gently.

  Lea is crying furiously. “But, Mom—”

  “Now, please. I’ll be there in a minute.” Mom presses her hand against Lea’s back and guides her out of the room. I can hear my sister wailing from the hall.

  I sink into my chair, scowling. I wait for Mom to accuse me of defacing Lea’s guitar. I wait for her to scold me, or to tell me how horrible I’ve been, or to tell me she knows I’m being jealous and cruel and that she’s going to take my planner and everything else away because I don’t deserve it.

  Scowling is all I have left.

  But she doesn’t say any of those things. She looks at me with big eyes and a soft brow. “It’s a real shame Lea’s guitar is marked up, especially after she was so excited to get it. She’d been asking for more than a year to have a guitar. She thought if she had a guitar, you and her could have something in common. You know, because you always spend so much time on the piano. She thought if she got really good, you might want to start a band with her.”

  My lips are pressed so tightly together that I can feel dimples forming all around my mouth.

  Mom shrugs. “And it’s too bad because what Lea really wanted for Christmas was that My Little Pony set. She only asked for a guitar because she thought you’d be happier if the two of you could have something to do together.”

  I feel wriggly and sick and like my skin is going to fall off, but I have to be still. I don’t want Mom to see me fall apart. I’m too ashamed. Lea asked for the guitar because of me. To make me happy. And I ruined everything because I don’t like sharing Mom, even though Lea has just as much right to her as I do.

  I look at the floor instead.

  Mom lets out a sigh and leaves the room, and as soon as the door shuts I start crying like I’m a broken sink.

  I want to take it back, but I can’t erase gel pen. When I stop crying, my eyes find her guitar. I can’t erase this. There’s no way to reverse the damage I’ve done. She’ll always look at her guitar and know I tried to sabotage Christmas for her.

  She’ll always remember that I’m the worst sister ever.

  I don’t know what to do to make her forgive me.

  I stare at the purple mark for a long time. I think of Lea making her horse pie crust. And then I turn around and look at my pile of new stickers.

  When I bring the guitar to the kitchen, Lea is sitting at the table with Mom, cutting out the shapes in the dough. She looks at me, then the guitar, and her eyes start to flood again.

  “Here,” I say quickly, forcing the instrument toward her.

  She takes the guitar and holds it to her body almost protectively, and then her eyes drop to the purple mark. It’s covered by a big, shimmery sticker of Rainbow Dash.

  Rainbow Dash isn’t even Lea’
s favorite; she’s mine, which is exactly why I picked it.

  I don’t have to explain it—Lea sees the sticker and knows what it means.

  “This too,” I say, thrusting a piece of paper under her nose.

  She picks it up carefully and looks over the scribbled, glittery writing that reads:

  This piece of paper is valid for three wishes to be used at any point in time, which I promise to carry out to the best of my ability because a wish is a wish.

  I’ve never been very good at saying sorry, but this is me trying in my own way.

  When Lea looks back up at me, her small face so tired, she says, “Want to help make the pie crust?”

  I nod, pressing my lips together. “A horse?”

  “A horse,” she repeats. “Because horses like apples.”

  The Rainbow Dash sticker is the most faded of all of them, but it’s still there, hiding the purple mark.

  Aunty Ani stares at the guitar for a long time, probably deciding what she should say next. I’m not looking at the guitar anymore—I’m watching her face. I’m watching the care in her eyes, the consideration she’s giving to her words. It’s like watching someone dance with fire. I literally have no idea how she does it.

  Words don’t mull over in my head. They come out like vomit, harsh and abrupt. It was like that even before Lea died.

  I’m not a sensitive person. Maybe I’ve always been cold. Maybe it’s more noticeable now that she’s gone.

  “Why is this here?” I growl, my throat raw already.

  Aunty Ani looks up, horrified. Not at the gesture, but because she didn’t quite manage to find the right thing to say. “I’m sure your sistah would have wanted fo’ you to have it.”

  “Why? So I can miss her more than I already do?” My shoulders are shaking. I don’t feel anything but uncontrollable rage, and I’m running out of people to direct it at.

  “I thought it would be good fo’ you. So you could practice again,” she offers.

  Why doesn’t anyone see what a terrible idea this was? To have Lea’s guitar just show up one day, like how I want my mother to show up—like how I want Lea to show up—it feels like someone’s stabbed me in the chest and is waving the knife around in front of me.

  And maybe Aunty Ani couldn’t have known what music is to me—what Lea’s guitar being shipped here would mean to me—but Mom should have. More important, she should have brought it herself, if she cared at all, instead of shipping it across the Pacific Ocean like she shipped me away.

  I pull my arms over my chest and squeeze my rib cage like I wish my body would collapse into itself. I shake my head to make the throbbing stop, but it only makes it worse.

  Aunty Ani looks over at me from the table, frowning and tearful. “I’m trying really hard, Rumi. I thought getting you your guitar back was the right thing fo’ do. I’m sorry if it wasn’t.”

  “This is Lea’s guitar,” I say thinly. “It’s not mine. It doesn’t belong with me.” I might’ve wanted to know it was safe, but I didn’t want it sent to Hawaii like I’ve inherited my dead sister’s prized possession.

  Aunty Ani moves toward me and places her hands on my shoulders. “But maybe music could help you heal. Maybe if you spent the summer—”

  I take a step back so her hand falls away from me. I don’t want comfort. Not from her.

  “No” is all I manage to say, and suddenly I’m in my room with my back pressed to the door and my eyes shut tight.

  Music can’t heal me. Music hurts me.

  I spend the rest of the day in bed.

  * * *

  I don’t know where Aunty Ani puts Lea’s guitar, but I don’t see it when I wake up the next day. And I don’t ask, because the truth is I’d rather not know. Looking at it scares me. I’ve never seen a guitar so soundless before, like all the life was ripped out of it. There was no music left in it—just emptiness.

  How could Lea’s guitar end up that way? So hollow and void of life? How could her songs just end, like notes on a page that will never be played again?

  It’s too fucking sad. I can’t take it.

  I find Aunty Ani sitting at the table behind her laptop. She looks surprised to see me. I think it might be the earliest I’ve woken up since I got here.

  “Are you hungry? You like me make you breakfast?” she asks eagerly, pretending yesterday’s conversation didn’t happen at all.

  I shake my head. I don’t want her to be nice to me.

  She gets up anyway, rummages through the fridge, and comes back with a container of sliced mango. She sets it on the table and pulls out a chair. “Try eat a little bit, okay? I don’t want you getting sick.”

  I slump into the chair and pick at the fruit with a fork. Aunty Ani is trying to hide the fact that she can’t stop watching me, but I feel her eyes land on me over and over again. It’s annoying.

  After a while, she pushes the lid of her computer down and clears her throat. “I go back to work tomorrow. I used up all my vacation days.”

  “Okay,” I say, the sweetness of the mango washing over my tongue.

  “You’ll be okay at home? On your own?”

  I look up at her. She isn’t asking if I can take care of myself—she’s asking if I’m emotionally stable enough not to completely lose it.

  “I’m sad, but I’m not suicidal,” I say forcibly. “They don’t always go hand in hand, you know.”

  Aunty Ani tightens her mouth. “I’m just saying, if you aren’t ready fo’—”

  “I’m fine, okay?” I stab another piece of mango. “Besides, Kai wants to show me Palekaiko Bay. I’m making friends.” It’s kind of the truth, I guess. Even if his dad did say we aren’t allowed to hang out together.

  “Oh. That’s good,” she says, and that’s the end of our conversation.

  At the hottest part of the afternoon, I move to the covered patio—the area beneath the world’s saddest lanai—and lean back against a cushioned lawn chair with one of Aunty Ani’s magazines in my lap. I’m not actually reading it—I’m trying to remember the lyrics Lea and I were working on. The last song we tried to write—the one I have to finish because it’s the only thing I can think of to repay Lea for being a better sister than I ever was. I’m trying to rewrite every word, just as Lea thought of them, inside a magazine so it doesn’t feel like I’m betraying Lea.

  But it feels so much like betrayal that I can’t keep my hand still.

  Because I was never supposed to write songs alone. We were a team. We should still be a team.

  Writing lyrics down in a notebook feels too real. It feels like cheating.

  I bite the inside of my mouth, and tell myself this is what Lea would want and to stop making excuses to avoid facing reality forever.

  She’s not here anymore. Every time I write a song or play the piano or think up a new lyric, it will be me without Lea. I can’t change that, but I can give her the song we started. I have to try.

  I should try.

  Because I owe her, and because it might be the only thing in this world I have any real control over.

  My eyes fall back to the magazine. In the summer—no. Every summer I think—no. Why can’t I remember it? What was the bird part? The blue part? Did we even make it that far?

  God, why can’t I remember the words?

  I can only remember her word. Lea’s last word.

  Rumi.

  But I’m not a song. Lea was the music—I was the page that collected all the notes together. I’m the part that doesn’t change—the base that never moves. Lea was water, and magic, and emotion.

  I need her to write. I need her to live.

  I can’t do this on my own.

  When I look down at the magazine, the page is crumpled and half falling out of the binding. I’ve been squeezing it without realizing. Do I do that a lot nowadays? Do things without realizing? Sometimes I wonder if I’m really awake, or if this is all one really drawn-out nightmare.

  I fling the magazine across the patio angrily
.

  My eyes catch sight of something wedged between the outdoor fridge and a chain-link fence that’s being overtaken by grass and leaves.

  A black guitar case. Lea’s guitar case.

  Something tugs at my rib cage, and I’m standing in front of the black case without realizing I even got out of my chair. I don’t know what Aunty Ani was thinking, leaving it outside in the heat, but I guess she doesn’t know anything about music or instruments.

  I should be irritated. I am irritated. But I’m also distracted by the sight of Lea’s guitar.

  Nobody is watching. It’s just me, and I can react however I want to—however I need to. Maybe looking at her guitar won’t be so hard when I’m by myself. Mom needs to deal with her grief alone—maybe that’s what I need too.

  I lay it over the outdoor table and take a step back. It looks like a coffin. And what’s inside is practically the same as a dead body, at least to me.

  My fingers tremble as I lift the first clasp, and before I know it the case is open and the guitar is in my lap. I squeeze my left hand against the guitar’s neck.

  I miss it so much—the music. The magic. I miss how it used to make me feel—like I was alive.

  I close my eyes, try to empty my thoughts, and strum my thumb against the strings.

  The guitar is out of tune, and the sharpness of the chord jolts me back into the present.

  What am I doing? Why am I playing my sister’s guitar, hoping to feel alive again? What is wrong with me?

  Lea isn’t alive. She never will be again. I’m going to grow old without a sister—I’m going to live an entire lifetime without my best friend.

  Playing her guitar—trying to feel alive again—it feels like I’m trying to move on. It feels selfish.

  And being selfish is the reason I’ll always hate myself for everything I did to Lea.

  For everything I didn’t do, too.

  It’s too soon.

  It’s way too soon.

  * * *

  By the time I’m back in the living room with my arms wrapped protectively around the black case, I’m breathing so heavily there’s spit flying from my mouth.

  “You can’t leave this outside. It can’t be out in the heat. It’s a guitar, not some old piece of garbage!” The voice I’m using toward Aunty Ani isn’t one I even recognize. It sounds cruel and vicious—when did I become those things?