In the Closet World

Mary had been home for two weeks now and really did seem better than new. Veronica and Sylvie had been coming to Veronica’s for a change.

“All right, what you like for snack?” Mary asked the girls.

“Can we have Oreos?” Sylvie asked. “And bananas?”

“Of course, my baby,” Mary said.

Veronica was always surprised that Sylvie enjoyed plain old Oreos and bananas over all the complicated things she made for herself at home.

“It is such a beautiful day. You should go to the park,” Mary said as she peeled the bananas. “Run around. Exercise your hips! Why do you stay inside all the time?”

“We have stuff we have to do here,” Veronica said.

They took the tray and went to her room. Sylvie always went straight to where Cadbury’s ashes were.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Sylvie asked. She put her backpack on the floor and made herself comfortable at the foot of Veronica’s nightstand.

“Sure,” Veronica said. She sat next to her and put the Oreos between them.

“I have my mom’s ashes too. Or some of them.”

Veronica hadn’t seen them. She had only seen the clothes. Sylvie had an entire closet filled with her mother’s clothes, which she planned on wearing as soon as they fit her. But Veronica had never seen her ashes.

“But that’s not the secret,” Sylvie said. “When we scattered her ashes, after she died, I kind of ate some of them.” It felt like Sylvie wanted Veronica to say something. “You did?” was all she could come up with.

“The ashes got all over my hands and under my fingernails. When we got back my dad told me to wash my hands before dinner but I didn’t want her to go down the drain. So I rubbed what was left on my hands as hard as I could hoping it would go into my skin. And later that night I was biting my nails and I thought, Oh my God, I am eating my mother.”

“So, she’s, like, inside you,” Veronica said. She knew she should be grossed out. But Sylvie opened Veronica’s mind in ways that surprised her.

“Yeah. I guess.”

Cadbury’s ashes had been on the table next to her bed for a couple of months now. It made sense that Sylvie had scattered her mother’s ashes. There were probably more rules about what to do after you lost someone that important.

They spent their afternoons playing a game they had invented: Truth or Wish.

Today Sylvie went first. She chose truth.

“Okay,” Veronica asked, “are you mad every day that your mother died?”

“Yes-ish,” Sylvie said. “But maybe bad things happen to people so that when they meet other people who something bad happened to they can be friends.”

Veronica thought that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said. Probably the nicest thing anyone had ever said to anyone in the whole world. Once again, she had no words to express her appreciation for this friendship. She might as well have been mute. She wondered if she did anything that made Sylvie feel this special. She really hoped so.

*   *   *

Since Sylvie had started coming over, blankets and pillows and various knickknacks had found their way into Veronica’s room, becoming part of a secret world created inside her closet.

“We’re like the Boxcar Children,” Sylvie said, sitting down at the makeshift table they had built on the closet floor.

“Except you are a much better cook than any of those girls,” Veronica said.

“That’s because they never cooked. They just ate bread and milk and berries. By the third book I was so sick of their meals. Hand me that pillow, will you?” Sylvie shifted pillows around the floor until she was comfortable.

“If you could have one wish, Sylvie, what would it be?”

“To talk to dead people,” Sylvie said. “Then it wouldn’t really matter so much that they were dead.”

“Okay,” Veronica said. “In here we can.” She took Sylvie’s hands and told her to close her eyes. Veronica did not like to think about Cadbury because it made her sad, but for some reason she loved thinking about Sylvie’s mom. She had spent so much time at Sylvie’s looking at her photographs and touching her things, it was like she had gotten to know her a little bit. She closed her eyes and re-created Sylvie’s mother’s face in her mind.

“Okay, I am talking to your mother,” Veronica said. “She loves you so much and she also wants you to get a real haircut, at a real place. She said the place on Lexington and Sixty-Fourth is good.”

“What else is she saying?”

“She adores you and is proud of you every single second of every single day and she enjoyed your science project. She also said she has been spending a lot of time with Princess Diana, who also thinks you need a proper haircut.”

Sylvie giggled.

“More,” she demanded. “Who else is she hanging out with?”

“John Lennon. He likes your hair this way, but he thinks you should wear glasses. He wrote a song about you yesterday and he would also really like to meet me.”

“Oh my God!” Sylvie yelled.

“What? Are you okay?”

“Cadbury just told me to tell you he is eating the most delicious bone right now and he still loves you.”