SEX AND DEATH.
Before Anna died, I never really thought much about either of those things. Now it felt like those were the only two topics available.
Sex I’d always actively avoided thinking about. The whole thing seemed horrifying, frankly. Even leaving aside the specific mechanics of the act, that amount of touching, that amount of skin seemed utterly repellent.
I knew Anna didn’t feel the same way. I’d accepted, on some level, that she probably had some kind of physical relationship with whoever she was meeting, but the pills…the pills felt like damning evidence of how far apart we’d drifted, of how many milestones I’d missed.
Dying, on the other hand, I hadn’t avoided thinking about as such. I just hadn’t spent any real time considering it. It had seemed like a pointless thing to spend any mental energy on. Where life was concerned, the options were binary: you were either alive or not.
Which had suited me fine, until now. Especially since in my experience, all dead people were old or strangers. Which didn’t mean that death wasn’t sad, didn’t mean everyone got as many years as they wanted. It just was what it was.
Now I wanted there to be more options. I’d had no training wheels—while I’d once wound up at the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm after a rope swing accident, Anna had never had anything worse than a cold or a skinned knee.
So it simply had not occurred to me that Anna could be hurt in any serious way, let alone be suddenly gone entirely.
Of course, maybe not thinking about it was the only way to stay sane—anything else could drive a person crazy, knowing that at any moment they could lose everything.
I don’t know. It’s hard to say.
THE NEW TABLE ARRIVED THAT weekend.
“I really think this will be better,” Mom said. “Don’t you?”
“It’s nice,” I said. “The other one was ugly.”
“I agree. Your dad bought it at a garage sale, and when he brought it home I didn’t have the heart to tell him.” She smiled and then shook her head. “The one nice thing about it being so ugly was that I never cared about water stains. Want to bet how long it will take before this one is marked with its first?”
I began to smile and then I paused. “Wait a minute.” I jogged up to Anna’s room and began to remove three of the coasters from her bedside table. Then, as I held them in my hand, I imagined these things of hers absorbing water from our glasses, the cardboard buckling over time, until one of my parents deemed them no longer usable and tossed them away. I slid them back into the drawer.
Not wanting to come back downstairs empty-handed, I walked to my room and grabbed some old paperback books I’d been planning to get rid of.
“Here you go,” I said as I deposited the books on the new table. “We can use these until we get new coasters.”
While I didn’t expect her to give me the third degree, I did think she might at least pause, silently questioning why I thought books would make good coasters—or—even granting that—why these particular books, when the living room was full of contenders. But her expression didn’t even flicker. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” Then she smiled at me and pulled a book over to her side of the table.
Sometimes I wondered if I should find it convenient or unnerving just how odd my parents apparently expected me to be.