ANNIE
Luke,
You keep telling me I need to connect with my pain, and I do understand the logic of that—although I’m not even sure yet that I’ll ever let you read that I wrote that down, and I’d rather die than admit it aloud.
I’m going to start from the day after I got the notebook because that’s when it started—the glacial slide from when my life was worth something to the mess I’m in now. I woke up excited that day. I came down the stairs with my notebook in my hands and I was a ball of pure anticipation about the summer break.
Then I saw Mom and Lexie at the kitchen table, and the excitement turned into shock, and the shock turned into dread. They were sitting opposite one another, a pile of crumpled tissues on the table between them. Captain Edwards was at the end of the table. They were all crying.
No one ever told me my dad was dead. They didn’t have to. Their tears told me, and their silence told me; even the slump in my mother’s shoulders told me that life was never going to be the same. Later, I’d piece together fragments—he’d been at a fire, and just when they thought the building was clear, someone thought they heard a cry from inside. It was too hot and too dangerous by that stage and Dad wouldn’t let his team go back in, so he went in himself to do another sweep, and while he was inside the roof collapsed.
I never saw his body, and I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, and so it was a long time before I really believed he was dead. Instead, to me, he was just gone—he had simply left—and I knew that was my fault. Dad had swapped shifts that day so that he could be at the assembly for me. He should never have been at that fire.
It rained the morning of his funeral. Lexie and I had to wait at home with one of Mom’s elderly aunts, but we didn’t know her at all and she terrified us. She wore strange clothes and wouldn’t let us watch TV, so as soon as the drizzle stopped, Lexie and I hid outside away from her. The wake was at our house, so after the service, dozens of people arrived to make their way up the path to the front door.
Lexie and I didn’t talk much. We sat in the echoing shock of our grief, watching strangers as they went inside our house to mourn our father, as if we were the onlookers to their tragedy, rather than the other way around. When the procession finally slowed down, Lexie hugged me, and she told me things were going to be okay—but I was sure she was lying and so I finally started to sob. The guilt and the grief and the shock and the pain were just too much to bear.
When her hugs failed to console me, Lexie did the only naughty thing I can ever remember her doing. She walked the length of the path that ran from the street to our front door, and she made a basket with her skirt, and she picked flowers from the agapanthus that bordered the walkway. There were two straight rows of alternating white and purple plants—and Lexie methodically stripped every single petal, until they were overflowing from her skirt and she was struggling to juggle it all.
I finally, reluctantly dragged myself up from the grass beneath the tree and went to ask her what she was doing. She told me to stand on the lawn, and then she waddled over to my side with the flowers still in the skirt of her dress, and she told me to spin. I resisted at first, but she grew insistent and so I awkwardly twirled, but I felt stupid and angry. Soon Lexie dropped the flowers onto the ground and she began to gently toss them over me as I spun. The wind picked up, and my clumsy twirl gradually became more free. I twirled and the flowers rained down around me onto the lawn and the sun came out from behind the clouds, and for just a second, life was something close to beautiful again.
“Smile, Annie!” Lexie shouted, and at first I couldn’t, but as I danced and twirled the corners of my mouth lifted just a little and then I did smile and Lexie smiled, too. Soon we were throwing the petals at each other and then we were dancing and laughing as if the world hadn’t really ended three days earlier.
Lexie caught my wrist in her hand to stop me, and she thumped her other hand hard against my chest and she said quite forcibly, “Do you feel that? That lightness inside? That’s Dad. He’s with us still, I promise you. He would never leave us, not ever, Annie.”
They really were the worst days, Luke. But even then, my brave big sister made sure there was a silver lining.