by Julie Wright
My hand went slowly down, and my fingers wrapped around the rather large umbrella I’d just set down, which I’d taken even though the weather had been good that day. If Steve had decided to make a move, he’d find me to be a less-than-easy target. I held the umbrella out at the ready and made my way to my room, making sure not to step on any of the places where the floor creaked. Anders lived in the apartment directly below mine. He complained when I paced over and over the squeaky boards. And so I had learned to pace around them during my first month of residence. Who knew that such an education would allow me to apprehend a criminal?
It’s not like anything in my apartment held any value or could be called special or important. There certainly wasn’t much worth stealing, which was probably the reason I never bothered to lock the door. But there was my laptop, and my laptop contained everything I had ever written. If I lost that, I’d be ticked. And okay, I was smart about my writing. It’s not like I didn’t understand the laws of loss. With technology, there are only two kinds of people. There are those who have lost their information due to a crash or whatever, and there are those who will lose their information.
I’d already managed to make the list for the first group. Losing work was possibly the worst thing that could ever happen to a writer. It had taken me months to get my mojo back. I now kept everything up in the cloud. But that didn’t mean I wanted whoever was rooting through my stuff in my room to get access to anything on my laptop.
If that meant bludgeoning the perpetrator to death with an umbrella, I considered that option to be a heroic act.
Based on the sound of my closet door closing, it seemed that the criminal was coming my direction. I stood outside my bedroom door with the umbrella held aloft, waiting to let fall a fatal blow. Okay, maybe not fatal. But hopefully a disarming blow. A normal person might have been afraid, but I couldn’t help but consider the moment to be an exciting opportunity to get some hands-on research. I would absolutely write it all down in a book sometime. I was not a normal person. I was a writer.
The intruder darkened the doorway, prompting me to lift the umbrella higher. Just as I was swinging down, the criminal exited and was . . . humming?
The tune was familiar enough and the voice was familiar enough that I managed to just stop the umbrella from connecting with a skull. “Kat?”
My standing in front of her with an umbrella held over her head must have startled her. Or possibly it was me shouting her name that startled her. Either way, she made a yeeahh noise, jumped several feet the other direction, and hit the wall.
“I nearly bludgeoned you!” I finally had enough control of myself to lower the umbrella without actually hitting her.
“Lettie, you scared me!”
“I scared you? Who’s the one currently involved in a home invasion?”
“I left you a voice mail,” she said. She was wearing my favorite elephant-print chiffon jacket, which explained what she’d been doing in my closet. Her naturally curly, long, dark hair and narrow elfin features made the jacket look better on her than it did on me.
“No, you didn’t,” I answered
“Yes. I did. I swear you never check your voice mail.”
She had me on that. I didn’t always check. My voice mail wasn’t one of those things that I was actually good at keeping up with. “My phone broke. I had to order a new one, and it took a while to get here.”
Not that my phone being on order meant I couldn’t check voice mail, but the excuse still felt valid enough to let stand. With my heart coming off the adrenaline kick and finding a normal rhythm, I allowed myself to really look at my little sister. “Hey. Are you okay?”
Kat lifted a bony shoulder in a shrug.
“What did she do this time?”
“Nothing different from the usual. I just hit my limit; that’s all.”
I closed my eyes briefly in relief. I’d been on the receiving end of my mother’s fun-sucking lectures and “reality blasts” for most of my life. But I worried sometimes that, without the blood bonds, she would take it further with Kat and do some real damage.
“So how long are you staying?” I asked.
We might not be blood related, and we certainly didn’t look anything alike considering her dark skin and dark hair next to my freckles and red hair, but Kat was as much my sister as any that could have been born through my actual parents. Kat’s great-grandparents had emigrated from Iraq in the fifties. Her mother was the first in her line to marry outside of the arranged marriage tradition. When I introduced Kat to people as my sister, we sometimes received odd looks, but I refused to introduce her as my stepsister. We solidly belonged to each other.
“At least a week, if that’s okay. Our step-monster is just so . . . argh!” She made a growling noise. “If I stayed for even another minute, they would have to haul me in for homicide, and you know I look terrible in orange. Prison is so not for me.”
“That bad, huh?” I always thought it was funny that she claimed my mother to be my stepmother, too. When we were younger, I argued the point, insisting that my mom was my actual mom not my stepmom. But Kat informed me that even though the woman gave birth to me, she still played the part of evil stepmother in my life. The logic was sometimes hard to dispute. I let Kat come crash at my house and empty my fridge into her belly whenever she wanted. It was cheaper and less trouble than psychiatric evaluations would be.
I had some friends who claimed that steps were only good for leg day, not for family. But it wasn’t true, at least not in the case of my little sister. She was a delightful bonus that came from my parents getting divorced and my mother remarrying my stepfather. The new stepfather wasn’t a bad guy either. He was just a yes-man. To whatever my mother wanted, he said, “Of course, dear.” Which was really annoying. But the daughter he’d brought into the family from his previous marriage was like a beautiful present given to me by a universe who must have felt apologetic for all the other crummy things in my life.
The downside was that sometimes Kat biased me against my own mother. Because, though my mom was difficult in the ways that she was difficult, she wasn’t entirely evil either—no matter what my sister and I said about her. My mother genuinely believed she did her best in raising me and in raising Kat, too. She felt that by eliminating anything whimsical from our lives, she prepared us for the real world.
“How come you don’t have any cookie butter?” Kat was the only person on the planet who put cookie butter on her ice cream. It was weird but still lovable.
“Because you ate it all last time you were here.”
“Why didn’t you buy any more?” she asked.
“Why don’t you get a job?”
We stared at each other for a few moments before we both burst out laughing. The go-get-a-job comment was one that my mother used on both of us during our teenage years. Since Kat was not yet out of her teenage years, she probably still heard it several times every day.
The thing was that Kat actually did have a job. It was our little secret from Mom. If Mom had any idea that Kat had found gainful employment, she would probably start making her pay rent immediately in spite of the fact that Kat had yet to graduate high school. Mom was a tough-love kind of woman. A long time ago, I’d decided that tough love meant that it was tough to love someone who didn’t often seem to love you back. Kat went to work as soon as she was able so that she could save up enough money to move out immediately after graduation.
Both Mom and Kat’s dad thought that Kat was doing an unpaid internship to earn college credit. And that was mostly true: all but the unpaid part. Kat was actually getting paid very well for her accomplishments, and everything she did was specifically for college. She worked for a fashion design company where she played with fabric swatches and a sketch pad all day. Since she fully loved clothing and had a natural understanding of how to create fashion out of anything, the job was perfect for her
. A guy named David who was a family friend of her mother’s had gotten the job for her.
“How did you get a whole week off of work?” I asked, thinking of my own work and all the grief Nicole had given me in spite of my work ethic and longevity with the company.
She looked abruptly away from me and turned all her attention back to the cupboard, which was painstakingly void of the cookie butter she’d been searching for. Her voice became suddenly small. “David felt like maybe I needed some time, especially for today.”
“What’s—” I almost asked what today was before the truth of it hit me. My life had been so crazy and full lately, I’d forgotten about my sister’s needs. I exhaled a slow breath before asking, “Would you like me to take you to the cemetery? We can stop and get some flowers and a new night-light if you want.”
Her eyes went shiny with tears. “I don’t want to be a bother, Lettie.”
I crossed over to her and wrapped my arms around her. “Kat, you will never be a bother to me. You’re the best thing I’ve got going in my life.”
Her showing up at my door now made sense. Catching the subway from our parents’ house to mine was doable for her. Sure, there were about three miles of walking to get to the station, but Kat didn’t mind stuff like that. There was no subway line to take her to where her mom was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery on Cape Cod. Not that such things had stopped her before. When our parents were first married, she’d gone missing. After hours of searching, her dad had found her curled up around her mother’s headstone. It had been the second anniversary of her mother’s death and, instead of spending the day with her, he’d spent it with my mother. Kat had rightfully felt abandoned, and had taken off. Even now, none of us could verify how she got there.
Her dad had promised her that he wouldn’t forget and leave her to mourn alone ever again. But she was at my house today, which could only mean a broken promise.
“Let me get changed into normal clothes and we’ll go, okay?” I said.
She nodded and blinked several times to keep the tears from falling.
Once in my bedroom, I hurried and placed an order from Bob’s Grocery. Not having a fairy godmother didn’t mean I couldn’t be a fairy godmother. My sister wanted cookie butter, so there would be cookie butter waiting for her when we returned. I ordered a few of her other favorite things as well and left a note to leave the order at the door.
With that done, I changed clothes, grabbed my bag, keys, and sister, and left on a quest to salvage her emotional well-being.
We stopped for the necessary items: flowers, a solar-powered light-up dragonfly, and car snacks, because every road trip, even the short little two-hour ones, was worthy of good car snacks. And because it was my kid sister in her formative teen years and I cared about her health, I even made sure we had some healthy options. The last thing I wanted to be was a bad example.
The lack of snow days and the warmer weather meant a slight green had begun to overtake the cemetery lawn, throwing off the dead of winter. The day had been warm enough to mostly dry off the many days of rainfall New England had experienced, leaving the air smelling clean and the plant life eager to wake up.
At the grave, I stayed back to give Kat privacy while she settled the flowers and arranged the solar-powered dragonfly light. Kat regularly replaced the light she kept at her mother’s gravesite so her mom always had a working night-light. She said it was because her mom had always made sure Kat had a working night-light when she’d been little.
Keeping myself busy while Kat took some time with her mom was easy. Her mom had been interred in my stepdad’s family area. His family had chosen headstones with interesting funerary art, but the entire cemetery was interesting. I wandered through the stone tributes and considered the lives of the people tucked under the grass. Francis Moore, a humble baker who was also one of the revolutionary patriots, was buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery. His story intrigued me because he was one of the few men who threw tea into the Boston Harbor without disguising himself as a Native American. He went to that protest as himself, not as part of the mob, but as a man sending a message to the king that he would not stand for tyranny. He stood for something, and he stood for it in his own shoes. He owned his decisions.
After ten or so minutes, Kat looked up and caught my eye; she smiled and waved me over to join her.
When I reached her side, she took my hand and stayed quiet for several moments before saying, “You know, my dad didn’t even mention it this morning. It was like he’d forgotten her completely—like he hadn’t ever known her. And when I brought it up to him? He actually got mad at me. He told me to forget her. He told me it was time to stop mourning like a child and to grow up and live my own life because that was what she would have wanted. She’d want me to forget all this nonsense.” She slumped down cross-legged on the grass in front of her mother’s headstone. Her father’s words sounded like my mother talking.
Kat stared at the frayed edges of her shoes, a pair of sky-blue hemp wedges, to avoid having to look up at me.
I lowered myself to the grass, ignoring the fact that it was cold and still wet enough from rain that it would leave a spot on the back of my pants, and ducked my head low so I could peer into her face. “Your dad isn’t right, Kat. You shouldn’t forget her. That’s not the answer. I’m pretty sure, after everything you told me about your mom, that she would want you to remember her. She’d be glad that you come visit her grave and make sure she has a night-light and beautiful things surrounding her.” I took a deep breath, feeling pretty certain Kat wouldn’t like hearing what I had to say next. “But your dad’s not wrong, either.”
Her head shot up, and I lifted a hand to quell her argument. “Your mom would want you to live your life. She would want you to be happy, not sad. Whenever I think of your mother and the person that she might have been, I always think of you and the person that you are. I bet you’re like her. And you’re the sort of person who would want someone to celebrate the fact that you lived, not mourn the fact that you’re gone. Your mother would want you to live. She would want you to be happy. If she saw you all sad and mopey all the time, I think that would make her sad too. So your dad’s not right, but he’s not wrong either.”
After a few seconds of her not responding, I added, “You see what I’m saying, right?”
She nodded. “Maybe. You’ve got a point, but it’s not just about her. It’s about him, too. It’s like he never even loved her. He only thinks about Felicity now. And he repeats everything Felicity says and does like he’s her pet parrot.”
Kat only called my mom by her actual name when she was really mad. She called her the step-monster when she was mildly irritated, and stepmother the rest of the time. Hearing my mom’s name made me cringe. “Your dad does love my mom.” The fact couldn’t be argued.
She deflated even more as the anger drained from her. “The weird thing is I think she really loves him, too. She takes care of him, you know? She does stuff for him—little things like making sure he has the pepper grinder on the table for all meals and always buying the chocolates with the almonds in them . . . that sort of thing.”
Those facts couldn’t be argued either. They might not be awesome as parents, but they were pretty good as a couple. And they weren’t always awful as parents either. I could understand that when I was feeling fair-minded. My mom loved reality—even in all of its harsher shades. She felt that stable adults came from children who could face reality.
Kat rolled her eyes at herself. “It’s fine that he loves her. You know? It’s not like I don’t want him to be happy. Of course I want him to be happy. I just want him to love my mom, too, so . . . you know?”
“Come on, Kat, you know he still loves your mom.”
“How would I know that? People fall out of love all the time.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t believe people ever fall out of love. Sure, they
might get bored, or they might get selfish, but I think if you ever really loved somebody, you don’t ever stop.” The bigger problem was finding people who were really in love to begin with. My own parents had married for reasons that still eluded me. I didn’t think they had ever been in love, so it still baffled me to think that my mom could love anyone, but I didn’t tell Kat that.
“Then why would he tell me to forget her?” She ripped grass blades out of the soil and tossed them away from her. “I don’t think he loves her at all anymore, and if he . . .”
Man, I was dumb sometimes. How had I missed the bigger picture of her fears?
“He loves you, too, Kat.”
She stiffened. “I wasn’t saying . . .”
But she had been saying.
Why was today full of all the hard things?
“Maybe it’s easier,” I said. “Maybe moving on is the only way he knows how to handle his grief. If he stays in that past place full of grief and loss, how will he be able to have happiness in his present and future? How will he find joy in what he has—a daughter who is growing to be a beautiful woman—if he is stuck in the grief of what he doesn’t have? Everybody handles grief differently. It’s not fair to him to say that he doesn’t love her or to worry about him loving you. I’ve heard him talk about your mom. I’ve heard the ache in his voice as he drops into a reverential whisper usually reserved for deity. And sometimes when he’s sharing a memory with me, he gets that smile that people get only when they are thinking of something perfect and wonderful. He gets that same smile when he looks at you sometimes.”
“Does he?” So much need and hope in two words.
“He absolutely does. So let’s not be too hard on him, okay?”
