THE FUNERAL TOOK place eight days after Nina died.
Leo remembered very little about those days, just small images and quick words, as if they were one of East’s photographs and not a three-dimensional memory.
She remembered Nina’s phone ringing bright and early on Monday morning, less than forty-eight hours after the accident. That’s how they kept referring to it, the accident, like it was something that just happened that nobody could control, like a man with five DWIs on his record hadn’t plowed his car directly into them, killing Nina.
When the phone rang, both Leo and their mom—her brain always skitters on this part, reminding her that it’s just her mom now, there’s no “their” there—jumped. They were in the kitchen, the morning already sunny and warm, and the ringtone blasted through the room’s silence like breaking glass. Leo’s dad had gone back home on Sunday, back to Stephanie and his life and his own bed, and it was just the two of them now.
She knew it was stupid, she knew this, but when Nina’s phone rang, Leo thought, Maybe that’s her! and she could tell from her mom’s face that she thought the exact same thing because they both stood up at the same time, as if to greet Nina together.
When it rang a third time, her mom finally reached out to answer it. “Hello?” she said. Leo could hear the way grief had shredded her voice.
“Hello!” a chipper voice said. “I’m calling from UCLA’s student orientation department. I’m returning a, I think a Nina Stott’s message about a campus tour?”
The voice was so loud and bright that even without the speakerphone on, Leo still winced. Her mom’s face froze, then crumpled just before she set down the phone and put her hands to her eyes. “Hello?” the woman said again, less bright and sure this time, and Leo reached over and held Nina’s phone in her hands. It felt weird and wrong.
“Hello,” Leo said, only she didn’t make it a question. Leo had no room for anyone’s answers, not right then. “Thanks for calling back, but Nina died this weekend.”
There it was: the first time she had to say those words. She pushed them out with the full strength of her body, watching her mom bend over the kitchen sink with her head in her hands. The UCLA woman was shocked into silence on the other end of the line and Leo kept it that way by ending the call.
She remembered police officers, gently gruff as they sat in the living room and asked Leo questions. They had asked her questions at the hospital, too, at least they said they did, but Leo had no memory of that. She had no memory of anything between riding with Nina and East in the car, and the blue lights, and she told the police this. She knew that the other driver was killed instantly, that he was drunk and had DWIs on his record, but Leo had no emotion left for him, not even anger or grief. She didn’t want to give him a single piece of her that could have gone to Nina instead.
“Have—Have you talked to East?” she asked one of the officers. She didn’t bother to remember his name. They were all starting to look alike anyway.
“We have,” he told her. “Poor kid, he’s having a really hard time. One minute he’s driving his girlfriend and her kid sister and then the next . . .” He shook his head, then flipped to a new page in his book. “Leo, can I ask, why do you think your sister wasn’t wearing a seat belt?”
Click!
The sound. It stuck in her brain, the metal pieces coming apart. But it was only a noise, one she had heard hundreds of times over the years.
Leo shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, and the silence hung there for several seconds, as if they were all waiting for her to have an epiphany.
“Thank you for coming over,” Leo’s mom said before anyone could fill in the blanks. “We’ll call if Leo remembers anything else.”
“Is it bad that I don’t remember?” Leo asked her after they left, but her mom just sighed and ran her hand over her daughter’s hair.
“Honestly, honey, I wish I could forget everything, too.”
It wasn’t exactly the most comforting thing to hear, but Leo felt a little better anyway because she knew it’s exactly what Nina would have said.
She remembered the first time she hears her mom say “fuck.”
“Who’s this from?” she said when a huge bouquet showed up at the door, roses and gerbera daisies and irises all tucked into a leaf-lined square vase. It’s the sixth arrangement that had arrived that day and the house looked like a florist had a going out of business sale.
“I don’t know,” Leo said, peering over her mom’s shoulder at the note, even though she wasn’t expecting much. It was like everyone had received the same grief template: expression of sorrowful emotion, euphemism for death, euphemism for spirituality, euphemism for grief.
Thinking of you during these hard days. Please know we are here for you if you need us.
May your love always outweigh your grief.
The memories will live forever. We share in your sorrow and pain.
Wishing you peace and comfort as you move forward.
This note was no different:
We are so sorry for your loss. Sending prayers and love during this difficult time.
Leo’s mom turned the card over, read it, and frowned a little. “Who the fuck are the Rusconis?”
Leo shrugged.
The Rusconis’ flowers sat on the table for a week before someone—Leo didn’t know who—finally threw them away.
Leo remembers the funeral most of all.
It’s at a rec center one town over, a room that’s beige and plain and perfect for filling with love or grief or whatever emotion can be expressed for a rental fee and within a two-hour time limit. “You have the place from three to five p.m.,” a woman tells Leo as she and her parents and her stepmom Stephanie unload from the black town car that someone hired to take them there. “And we just ask that you please take everything out with you when you leave, including the flower arrangements.” She smiles at Leo. There’s lipstick on her front tooth.
“’Kay,” Leo says, and brushes past her to catch up with her family. They look small and incomplete ahead of her, a smile with a lipstick-stained tooth missing.
She sits between her parents, her dad holding both her hand and Stephanie’s. Leo feels bad for her mom that no one’s holding her hand, but when she tries to take it, her mom just sits there and doesn’t move. At the mic, Poppy, a girl Nina had known and secretly loathed, is talking about her.
“She had a smile for everyone,” she says, sniffling into a pink tissue. “She was everyone’s friend, she was always there for you.”
“Oh, please,” someone behind Leo snorts, and she turns to see her cousin, Gertie, sitting behind her, arms and legs crossed. She winks when Leo sees her and Leo feels some of the tension ease in her chest, even if she also spots dried tears on Gertie’s cheeks.
“Gertrude,” Aunt Kelly whispers now, nudging her, and Leo turns back around to her own mom. It’s been a long time since she’s seen Gertie. She looks sharper, older. Leo wonders if Nina would have been happy to see her here.
“I love you, Nina,” Poppy whimpers, and her sobs make the mic squeal.
Everyone cringes.
The funeral bleeds into the memorial afterward, which is held back at their—her—mom’s house, family and friends and strangers crammed into their kitchen and living room and pouring out into the backyard. Their yard backs up to a greenbelt, making it look a lot bigger than it actually is, and people take up that space, too. There’s music playing and Leo can tell from how old the songs are that her dad probably made the playlist: Tom Petty singing about wildflowers, Bruce Springsteen rasping away about Valentine’s Day, the Beatles harmonizing about what’s in their lives.
Leo hears it all and realizes that she can never listen to any of these songs again.
Teachers are there, parents and friends and people Leo has never seen in her entire life, her parents’ coworkers chatting with their elementary school principal, great-aunts deep in conversation with their next-door neighbors back before her parents got divorced and they had to sell their house and move. It seems everyone who’s ever looked at Nina has shown up to remember her, and also eat all the food that has somehow appeared on every counter and tabletop in their home.
Everyone’s talking but the conversations are hushed, like they’re all in church or a museum. Leo hears one around the corner in the kitchen, where she’s dutifully straightening cans of soda that don’t need to be straightened. “Lily’s neighbor was the first officer on the scene,” the voice murmurs. Leo doesn’t recognize it, but she’ll never forget it. “I heard they found all three kids on the pavement. Her sister and the boy, both of them like they were crawling toward her.” The voice tsks. “Such a shame.”
Leo’s walking into the living room when she sees East for the first time since the night of the accident, and she stops mid-stride as if she’s done something wrong.
He’s sitting on their piano bench, the first person to do so in years, and his dad’s arm is around his shoulders, hugging him close as another person crouches down in front of them, their hand on East’s knee. It’s the Spanish teacher at their school, the one who liked Nina even though she couldn’t “roll her r’s for shit,” as she once gleefully announced.
The worst part is that East is sobbing. His hands are grinding into his eyes as Nina’s junior year portrait looks down on all of them from the top of the piano, smiling like she knows it’s all going to be okay. Their Spanish teacher is talking quietly but East continues to cry and Leo watches from the hallway. Simon or Garfunkel (Leo has no idea which one is which and isn’t interested in finding out) starts to sing about a girl who died in August and she takes that as her cue to leave.
She goes outside, sitting just off to the side under a tree whose branches seem to dip and close around her, hiding her within its limbs. She shivers as it gets dark, not because it’s cold but because the last time she was outside at night, something very bad happened, and she shivers again when she realizes that.
Leo curls her knees up toward her chest, making herself small so that she can be alone with this feeling. There’s no one who could ever understand it.
Except for maybe one person.
“Hey,” East says, and Leo sits up at the sound of his voice, just like Denver suddenly appearing whenever someone opens the cheese drawer in the refrigerator.
“Hi,” Leo says.
He sits down next to her under the tree, his knees up so his elbows can rest there. His black tie is loose around his neck, the top two buttons on his white dress shirt undone. He looks puffy, exhausted, and Leo’s pretty sure she doesn’t look much better.
“Where’s your camera?” she asks.
“Oh, I, uh, left it at home. Didn’t think it would be right, you know, taking pictures right now.” He smiles a bit, but it doesn’t make anything feel okay, not this time.
“Hard to breathe?” she asks, and he looks over at her.
“What?”
She motions to her own throat, mimes undoing the tie, and he smiles. “Yeah, a little bit. Just had to get out of there for a few minutes, though. Thought I would try to find you. Your mom was looking for you.”
“She’s not looking for me,” Leo says quietly. “She’s looking for Nina.”
East doesn’t say anything for a minute, and Leo shivers a little. “You cold?” he asks, then shrugs out of his suit jacket and gently drapes it across her shoulders before she even answers. Leo’s only read about this kind of thing happening in books before, some of her mom’s romance novels that she kept in her bedside drawer and that both Leo and Nina had read to each other when they were younger, snickering at the sexy parts while also privately filing that information away for future use.
Leo wonders if East had once put his jacket around Nina, if that’s why she had fallen so hard for him.
“Thanks,” she says. It smells like fabric and salt, like riding home after a long day at the beach, tired and warm and safe.
Even in the dark, she can see his lip tremble, but when he turns to look at her, it’s gone.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “Leo, I’m so sorry I let you—”
“No,” she says. “No, it’s not . . . You were just driving. You didn’t do anything.”
He’s quiet when she says that, his head dropping down for a few seconds before coming back up.
“I can’t stop thinking,” Leo starts to say, and when she stops, East nudges her with his arm.
“About that night?” he asks. “Me too.”
For the first time all day, Leo feels like she can breathe.
“Just . . . Do you think she was scared?” Leo asks, and then she’s crying, the tears feeling hot and sharp on her face. “I’m just scared that she was scared, you know? Because I can’t . . . I keep thinking . . . I don’t know how . . .”
“Leo,” East whispers, and then his arms are around her, pulling her in so she can tuck her head against his shoulder, and Leo feels the burn of her tears against the scratchy cotton of his shirt. East’s chest is shaking, too, and the two of them hold on to each other and sob about what they’ve lost, about who should be there, too.
East is warm, though, and his heartbeat is fast and strong and he’s alive, and Leo wraps her arm around his waist, hanging on to this person who loved her sister almost as much as she did. “East,” she whispers, and she wants more of that warmth, doesn’t want to feel the cold grass anymore, and she turns her head up to him just as he’s leaning down toward her, and when they kiss, it’s soft and real, a safe place to land.
They don’t mean to do it.
It just happens.
“Leo,” East says, and then he’s pulling away, putting a distance between them that makes her shudder. “I’m sorry, I can’t. Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean, I don’t . . . I made a promise but it’s not like that.”
“No, no, I know,” Leo says, but she’s still crying, now stupid and embarrassed, alone outside a houseful of people, wearing the jacket of a boy that she barely knows. And when she goes inside, Nina won’t be there to hug her and laugh and tease her for being so ridiculous. It’s that loneliness that hurts more than anything, and there’s no one—not even her parents—that will ever be able to fill the empty, scraped-out feeling that’s spreading through her.
“I’m sorry,” East says again.
“Me too,” Leo whispers, and then someone’s calling East’s name, maybe his dad, Leo’s not sure, but he gets up and hustles away, leaving Leo alone once more, but not for long.
“Who was that?”
“Jesus!” Leo gasps. “Gertie!”
Gertie just raises an eyebrow, silently repeating her question. She’s at least a head and a half taller than Leo, lean and long and dark-haired. If Nina’s personality had been champagne, Gertie’s is a shot of espresso.
“He’s cute,” Gertie adds when Leo doesn’t say anything.
“That’s East,” Leo finally tells her. “He’s—he was Nina’s boyfriend.”
Gertie raises an eyebrow and nods like she’s made a fascinating discovery. “He was the driver?”
“Yes,” Leo whispers.
Gertie sucks her teeth, then clicks her tongue. “Poor kid,” she says, then takes Leo by the elbow and pulls her to her feet. “C’mon, let’s go find the cousins and get you drunk.”
“You cold?” Gertie says, and when Leo doesn’t answer, she peels off her cardigan and puts it on her cousin’s shoulders. Leo has no idea where East’s suit jacket has gone. Gertie’s cardigan smells like incense and the faintest hint of spice and cigarettes, not like Nina at all, and Leo only leaves it on because she’s too drunk and too polite to take it off.
Leo’s never been drunk before, had only had a half glass of champagne on the past two Christmas mornings, so Gertie takes the lead and Leo soon finds herself out on the greenbelt with her and a few other older cousins, Thomas and Madeline and Abigail.
“We’re family,” Gertie says, leaning toward her, a finger up and pointing as if it was almost an accusation. “We’re here for you, Leo, you know that?”
Leo hasn’t seen Gertie since last Thanksgiving. They went around the table and said what they were thankful for and Gertie said “birth control” when it was her turn and Leo’s aunt Kelly stayed pale and thin-lipped for the rest of the meal.
But now Leo just nods.
“Damn straight,” Gertie replies, agreeing with Leo’s silence.
All of her cousins were either in college or supposed to be in college, and they mostly talk to each other and not to her. Leo feels very young and dumb as she sits in a circle with them, as the dew of the grass starts to seep into the seat of her black dress.
But the white wine eases that feeling after a few sips, and then she’s hugging Gertie’s cardigan tighter around her as Thomas hands her the rest of the bottle with a sharp laugh. “Look at you go,” he says to her, and Leo giggles. It’s not the same without Nina, but none of them are talking about her sister, so she keeps it to herself.
She drinks until she can see the stars in the night sky, silent witnesses to the worst night of her life, and she lies down in the grass to look up at them. She wonders if they remember what she cannot. The constellations are moving fast now and Leo puts her hands in the grass and grips the blades, feels their sharpness on her skin again. Her cousins are drunk now, too, and they don’t notice when tears run from Leo’s eyes, across her temples, and into her hair. “She’s totally passed out,” Madeline snickers. “We did our job too well.”
They eventually leave her in the grass. When Leo sits up, the world tilts and spins and it takes a second for her brain to catch up to what she’s seeing. Is this what drunk feels like? She’ll have to ask Nina. She’ll know.
Another second and her brain catches up to what she already knows. She’ll never be able to ask Nina anything ever again.
Fuck, she should have never had this much wine. Everything is slipping past her and it reminds her of that night.
“Hey, hey, here,” East says, and then he’s there, moving next to her, putting his arm around her shoulders. “Steady, easy. Jesus, who the hell gave you this much wine?”
“Gertie,” she whispers.
“Wait, was that Gertrude?” he asks.
“You heard about her?”
“Just that Nina won the birth order lottery.”
“I don’t like her sweater. And I lost your jacket.”
East doesn’t say anything to that, just pulls Leo to her feet with a grunt and a quick grasp of her shoulders so that she doesn’t topple over.
“I can’t remember,” she sobs. “I can’t remember the car, or her, and I feel like if I could just . . . maybe she would be . . . I could just . . .”
The emptiness makes her cry harder, and East is crouching down in front of her, looking so sad and concerned that she both wants to hug him and shove him away.
“Shh, baby,” he says, and the ache suddenly turns into an embarrassed fury. How dare he sound paternal? Who does he even think he is?
“Get away from me,” she says, but East hangs on to her and puts her on a bench before running back to the house. Leo buries her head in her hands and tries to breathe, and when the sound of shoes brushing through wet grass returns, all she can think is, My mom is going to kill me.
But it’s not her mom. It’s Stephanie.
“Leo?” she says, crouching down in front of her. “East said you might need some help.”
“I need Nina,” Leo tells her, her whole mouth twitching as she finally says the truth, and Stephanie reaches up and pushes her hair out of her face.
“Is Gertie somewhat responsible for this?” she asks.
“Little bit.”
Stephanie sighs, and Leo politely waits until Stephanie gets her into the house, up the stairs, and into their—her—bathroom before she starts to throw up.
It’s awful. She blames the wine and she blames Gertie, but most of all, she blames herself.
Stephanie, though. She stays there the whole time, locking the bathroom door and putting cold washcloths on the back of Leo’s neck, doing all of the things that her mom should be doing, but Leo can’t bear for her mom to see her like this. She can’t share her grief because she doesn’t think that her mom has room for it, but she doesn’t know quite what to do with it either.
Leo doesn’t know how she’s supposed to hold this all by herself.
Stephanie handles it, though, and after Leo’s done throwing up, she gives her a small cup of water and then sits down next to her on the floor. Leo, eyes and makeup runny, looks over at her. “I know she didn’t really say it,” Leo tells her. “But Nina liked you a lot.”
Stephanie’s face twitches. “I know,” she says. “Believe it or not, Nina wasn’t as good at hiding her emotions as you are.”
They both laugh then, but Leo realizes that it’s all past tense, that Nina will never be here in this room, this house, with them again, and Stephanie reaches for her as she starts to cry.
“I just need five more minutes,” Leo sobs. “Just five, please, Stephanie . . . please . . .”
“Shh, I know,” she whispers, but she doesn’t know, not really, and Leo hangs on to her stepmom’s arm and pleads with someone, anyone, to give her more time with Nina.
Just give me five more minutes.
When she’s finally cried out, Stephanie helps her into bed, taking her shoes off like she’s a child before covering her with a blanket and turning off the light.
Leo’s asleep before Stephanie even leaves the room.