The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  Corpse saw the puff of his dress shirt, the triangle end of his purple tie. She sat up and pressed her wrist against her jeans, her underwear into her skin.

  “Not feeling well?” he said.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “Mr. Handler told me you had a good trip to the Indian school.” His German accent bouncing over “Indian school” sounded exotic. Their eyes had a conversation:

  Mr. Bonstuber: Be strong.

  Corpse: Thanks.

  Did the entire school know about Ash’s party? She heard Tanesha spit “user bitch.” How about the rest of Crystal Village? Maybe some tourists too? Maybe she was ridiculed in Spanish, French, Japanese. DEAD GIRL DECLARED USER.

  Mr. Bonstuber tapped the table twice before he moved on.

  Mechanically, silently, they transferred the test tubes into the shock bath at 42 degrees Celsius. After sixty seconds, they transferred the bacteria to their respective dishes.

  Clark gathered the dishes. “I’ll put these in the incubator.”

  “I wonder how many plasmids got through,” Corpse said.

  “We’ll see tomorrow,” he said.

  Corpse dumped the starter colony and the inoculating loop into a biohazard trash can. She gathered the beakers and test tubes, washed them out in the sink, and set them in the drying rack. No one came near her.

  Clark watched her return. “You all right?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m glad you told me, though. You’re a good friend.”

  Clark shrugged. “It’s easy to be friends with nice people.” He leaned forward so Corpse would look at him. “Oona, Ashley has been headed toward this for a while. In my opinion, she’s been dragging you down.”

  Corpse slouched back. “Clark, it wasn’t her. I know why I tried to kill myself now, and it wasn’t Ash.”

  “Well, simple observation would indicate she was hindering your development.”

  Gabe waited for Corpse in the Student Union.

  “You didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “I just found out myself. Ash and I don’t exactly hang out anymore.” Behind his eyes was tightness, caused, Corpse was sure, by Ash’s poisonous words.

  Corpse touched his dimple. “This is my favorite part of you.”

  His face relaxed. “Really? I was under the impression there was another.”

  Their eyes had a conversation:

  Gabe: Say you love me.

  Corpse: —

  “I need to speak with you right away.” Mr. Handler’s face was ashen, and he started toward his office without waiting for a reply.

  “See you later,” Corpse said to Gabe. She followed Mr. Handler.

  Mrs. Pena, swollen-eyed, watched them pass through the reception area, and Corpse turned shivery. Mr. Handler closed his door but for a sliver. He sat down and stared at his hands. Corpse wanted to tell him he could relax, that she already knew.

  “I didn’t want you to hear this through gossip,” he said. “Ash had a party Saturday night. Her parents were out of town, and apparently things got out of control.”

  “I heard.”

  “They were supposed to arrive home very late that night. Around two a.m., I believe.”

  Corpse relaxed. Mr. Handler would tell her about Ash’s suspension next. His upper lip clung to the lower, and he seemed to force his mouth open.

  “Ashley took an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills. Seems, from her note, that she’d planned for her parents to find her when they got home. But their flight was delayed, then cancelled. They arrived home Sunday, mid-morning. Ashley was dead.”

  Corpse’s hands flew to her mouth. She doubled over, and her screams squashed me against the ceiling.

  Twenty-Three

  From Oona’s journal:

  Perfect thought lies in the apprehension of the correct reaction, for before the eye can show us the positive, it must first transform the negative and in a certain manner must break up what it records. What we see, therefore, is the turning inside out of what we receive.

  —Viktor Schauberger

  Corpse lunged into Mom’s Range Rover. “Mom—” That little girl voice.

  “I know,” Mom said, her eyes red pillows. “Mr. Handler called, right after you did.”

  Corpse made a noise like a gear shearing off its bolt. Mom reached across the console and hugged her.

  Corpse bawled. “How could I ever have tried to do this to you?”

  Mom pulled a mini-box of tissues out of the console and offered one to her. Mom took one too. They blew their noses. She put the idling Rover into gear and pulled away. Corpse watched the school. Gabe would be pissed at her for not telling him she was leaving, but this way he could have a few more hours without knowing. Corpse turned on her phone and typed Feeling sick, couldn’t lie to him and deleted it. She wrote Went home and pressed Send. Her first text since we’d died.

  She’d gotten out of the habit of using our phone, had turned it off when we got home from the Indian school on Saturday. Now it sounded, ding-dong, as a text arrived. From Ash. Saturday night, 1:10 a.m.

  Corpse set our phone on her leg like it was a grenade. I moved to the back of the vehicle, wanted nothing to do with that text. Out the window passed the parking structure, the busses. We passed the golf course. When we came to the street where we turned toward Chateau Antunes, Corpse peered right for the first time since we’d died and tried to make out our trailhead. Mom pulled into the garage and the door clanked closed. She climbed out.

  “You coming?”

  “In a minute,” Corpse said.

  Mom eyed the phone on Corpse’s leg. “Okay.” She started away, and I longed to follow. She paused. “I’m back here in five minutes if you’re not in by then.”

  Corpse listened to Mom enter the mudroom. She eyed her own white Range Rover parked next to Mom’s, and a slide-show of Ash in its passenger seat played across her vision. The vehicle’s interior light blinked off above her and she lifted our phone: Here’s to attention, user!!!

  Eight hundred people stuffed the Interfaith Chapel, its balcony, and its reception area, where a big-screen TV would broadcast. We’d had to park in an outlying area and ride there in a shuttle that felt like a hearse. Dad knew the driver from all his time at the airport, so he sat up front and they chatted about how the shuttle company had volunteered their services, how most of the things had been donated for this memorial service.

  “Damn shame,” the driver said, then caught himself and glanced at Corpse in the rearview mirror.

  She sat beside Gabe and his dad. In front of her sat Mr. Dressler, our PE teacher and soccer coach. We hadn’t said boo to him about not going out for the team this year. Corpse’s stomach writhed. I hovered just in front of that writhing, narrowly avoiding being touched in the crowded vehicle.

  Out the window the Hawk River flowed past beneath ice. Every spring someone drowned in that river. Corpse glanced at Dad, and I remembered his touch. Lethal currents flowed in people too.

  Gabe took Corpse’s hand and kissed it. Their eyes had a conversation:

  Gabe: I’m psyched we didn’t have to do this for you.

  Corpse: Ugh.

  A constant urge to barf up guilt blocked Corpse from any speech.

  Mom and Sugeidi were already at the church, comforting Ash’s mom and setting things up. Mom had spent a lot of time with Ash’s mom, and Corpse had worried she’d get even thinner. Instead Mom grew sturdy and her skin took on a peachy glow.

  When we arrived, she was waiting at the entrance in black pants and a black blouse. Corpse remembered how she’d pictured Mom at our memorial, but Mom didn’t need a clingy designer dress to show she was gorgeous. Her hair was pulled into a barrette. She and Dad exchanged an unfriendly glance, and she held out her arm to Corpse.

 
Corpse slid into it and inhaled Mom’s soft, tropical-flower scent. I hovered just above Mom’s arm and felt calmer too.

  “Mrs. Antunes,” Gabe said. “This is my father.”

  Gabe’s father looked just like him but older. No dimple. He held out his hand. “Frank.”

  “Muriel,” Mom said, and their hands clasped. “I’m ashamed that we haven’t met before today. We’ll have to remedy that.” She let go his hand.

  “That would be great,” he said.

  “And this,” Mom said, gently guiding Sugeidi forward, “is Sugeidi, our … friend.”

  We’d never seen Sugeidi wear anything but that maid dress. Today she wore an elegant black dress that accentuated the gray conquering her dark hair. I wondered if it was the dress she’d worn to her husband’s funeral.

  “Con gusto,” Sugeidi said as he took her big-knuckled hand.

  “The pleasure is mine,” he said.

  “Sugeidi rocks,” Gabe said, and she looked down but smiled.

  As they started to move inside, Mom and Mr. Hernandez’s eyes lingered on each other. Gabe noticed too, because his dimple flashed and he looked at Dad, who was taking inventory of the people in the reception area.

  School was bad, but this audience numbed Corpse’s legs. Her gait bobbed as she turned cold and stiff. Gabe was walking beside his father, so Mom moved to Corpse’s side like a shield and took her right hand. DEAD GIRL KILLS BEST FRIEND. Corpse glimpsed Mr. Handler across the room, speaking to some parents from school and looking like he’d stared at sleep all night. Everyone else was a blur.

  Mom had saved seats in the chapel’s second row. At the altar, two life-size photos of Ash were propped on easels. One her senior portrait. One from first grade. We’d listened to Mom on the phone, ordering and paying for the vibrant flowers filling the space between.

  Ash’s kindergarten soccer jersey, number seven, hung before them on a hanger from a wooden rack. Her skis were propped beside it. When we’d waited in line for that school photo, Ash had poked her tongue through the space where her two front teeth had been, and we’d been jealous because we hadn’t lost any teeth yet. After school, donned in crowns, we’d sung to the aspens in Chateau Antunes’s front yard, willing the birds to flock down to us.

  “Why won’t the birds come?” Ash had said to Sugeidi.

  “Sing mas beautiful,” Sugeidi said, so we had. Long after Ash had turned quiet and collapsed on her back in the grass, we’d kept singing.

  “They’re never coming,” Ash had said sourly as she’d watched branches yield and clouds writhe.

  I imagined our senior photo, with our hair carefully curled by Sugeidi. Our first grade photo with our ringlets sculpted by Sugeidi. In the years between, the Oona Antunes that everyone knew had evaporated till we were like a photo. Just an image. Yet inside, we’d divided. Me growing stronger, stronger, till that knife swooped down at the dance and our own photos, jerseys, and skis had been heartbeats away from filling that altar.

  If they’d been there, would Ash be here now? Ash must have been sliced open too. Maybe the moon’s not far enough. Corpse longed to hunch over and wail, but she forced herself frozen. We were practiced at this, had been doing it for years. I scanned the room’s sad faces. Was the world filled with people pretending they were whole? I didn’t see or feel any other selves hovering nearby.

  Ash’s dad stood near our seats at the front, and Corpse cringed at how much he looked like Ash, even down to the pouty set of his mouth. We’d been avoiding her parents, but now his eyes dissected Corpse.

  Ash’s dad: This is your fault.

  Corpse’s head grew too heavy for her neck.

  They filed into the row in careful order—Mr. Hernandez leading Gabe, Sugeidi, Mom, Corpse, and then Dad, who nodded to Ash’s dad and sat down. A balding man with a ring of gray hair stepped to a podium between the photos. He tapped the microphone. Everyone sat down. Ash’s mom rushed up in a clingy designer dress, and her parents moved to the seats in front of Dad and Corpse.

  Ash’s mom noticed Corpse and leaned over her chair’s back. Before I knew it, Corpse had leaned toward her. Ash’s mom cupped Corpse’s face in her chill hands, sending a shiver through her. She kissed Corpse’s cheek, and then her lips quaked while her eyes were whorls of pain. Corpse turned dizzy. Ash’s mom sat down, but Corpse was stuck, reeling. Mom helped her sit back.

  “Greetings,” said the man at the podium. “I’m Pastor Michael Wallford. We gather here on this glorious March day to celebrate a life.” Corpse braced against his cheesy amplified voice. Who was this guy? Ash’s family never went to church. Had she ever even met him? In the air above him, I pictured Ash rolling her eyes.

  Mom glanced at Corpse and took her hand. She took Sugeidi’s too. Ash’s mom’s fingers were ghosts against Corpse’s cheeks.

  She looked up at Dad, who sat as rigid as one of those British palace guards. She’d kicked his ass at LIFE, beaten him by three million dollars. His hand rested on his thigh, and though I remembered that dark surge when he’d bolted through me, Corpse reached over and grasped it.

  He smiled like it hurt. He lasted about three minutes, then tugged his hand from hers, nodding, and rubbed his palm on his suit pants.

  Mom sighed, and she looked at Corpse like she was truly sorry. Corpse couldn’t take her eyes off Dad’s hand, but I thought how I hadn’t liked to be touched either, and I longed to bust through the ceiling and rise to the clouds.

  Corpse tried to focus on the pastor’s words, tried to hear when Ash’s dad stepped to the podium and Ash’s mom curved over in shudders, but it was like trying to listen from beneath a pool. They’d asked Corpse to speak, but she’d said no before I’d realized the word had raced through her lips. I mean, we knew it was the right thing to do, but no way could we stand at that podium in front of all these eyes. They’d asked again, yet she’d still said no. Same for the third time.

  We hadn’t spoken the same language as Ash for so long. “User” was a foreign word to us. Yet if we’d been kinder, she might have still breathed.

  “I’m sorry, Ash,” Corpse whispered. She concentrated on the amplified words that ringed a halo round Ash’s head and glued wings to her back.

  Twenty-Four

  From Oona’s journal:

  Seashells—whorls—spirals within spirals are the physical manifestations of energy. Energy is primary, the physical form is the secondary effect.

  —Viktor Schauberger

  Corpse slid the rhinestone crown from when we were a kid into our coat pocket, alongside that feather.

  I pictured her on the operating table. That gray-haired doctor, in green scrubs, mask over his nose, lopped off our fingers with a scalpel and tossed them in the trash. He ripped Ash’s crown from our head and shot it like a basketball. It banged into the can and clunked to the bottom, next to our fingers and toes. The nurses clapped and cheered.

  Corpse cringed, zipped up our coat, tugged on a hat, and grabbed gloves. As she wriggled her feet into snow boots, she heard clanging in the kitchen and found Sugeidi, changed out of her black dress, easing a baking pan from its cupboard.

  “I’m going for a hike.” Corpse forced the words through the guilt still clogging her throat.

  Sugeidi set the pan on the counter, glanced at the sun beaming through the window, and noticed the feather poking out of Corpse’s pocket. “Be strong,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I am,” Corpse said. “I’ve screwed up so many things.”

  “Screwed?”

  “Messed up. Ruined.” Her voice was impatient.

  “Ah, arruinado.” Sugeidi pulled a face. She waved away Corpse’s words. “Things screwed without you.”

  Corpse rolled her eyes. “Not now, Sugeidi. I’m not in the mood.”

  Sugeidi stamped her foot. “El mundo es arruinado siempre! You must.” She pressed her hand over her ma
id dress in the same place where she’d left her soap bubble print, took a deep breath, and changed tack. “Corazón fuerte.”

  Corpse’s own heart felt anything but strong. “Whatever.”

  She strode out into one of those classic Rocky Mountain March afternoons. The temp was in the mid-forties, and she shoved her hat and gloves in her pockets within the first minutes. She didn’t stroll. She marched. Toward that trailhead.

  Ahead, at the bus stop, two skiers navigated down from a bus’s door in loud ski-boot steps, poles akimbo and swinging. The bus accelerated past us, sounding like a space ship in a movie. Corpse looked away from its driver. When its locomotion grew thin on distance, the skiers’ clunking steps grew loud again. Their helmets were cocked back on their heads, their swinging goggles suspended behind from snapped clasps. Their unzipped coats—one purple, one green—were the only way to tell them apart, and their shoulders bumped about every third step.

  Corpse arced wide to avoid their poles and their skis, which rode scissored at their hips. I wondered which house they were staying at, since nobody living in our neighborhood would be caught dead looking this dorky. The trailhead arrived on her left, and she started up it.

  One of the skiers called, “Excuse me. Is that a hiking trail?” A British accent. Male.

  She watched their globe-headed waddling, and laughter bubbled in her. “Yes.”

  “Where does it lead?” The other one was muttering, so she couldn’t tell who asked.

  “To the ski mountain eventually.”

  “Is it difficult?”

  “It’s not bad,” she said.

  “Could we hike it in sneakers?” He said it like “snake-uhs.”

  She thought of our open-toed spike heels, our dress tugging along the trail’s snow corridor. She’d been wearing a crown, had one in her pocket right now. Talk about looking dorky. “Sure.”