Chapter 9

“Just what is going on in here?” I say in a pseudo-parent voice. I’ve come to investigate a suspicious cascade of laughter from Saffron’s room. “You sound like hyenas. Could you be any louder?”

“Oh we could. Much louder,” Saff’s best friend, Vanessa, deadpans. She can only hold it for a moment before both she and Saffron start cracking up again. They’re staring at Saff’s phone.

Vanessa happens to be my favorite of Saffron’s friends because she gets my humor. Some of Saff’s other friends are so polite that I can’t tell with they’re thinking. Plus I think I scare them.

Vanessa goes on, “My mission for tonight is to get your sister to relax. We’ve got a physics exam tomorrow and we’re totally ready! So what does this girl want to do? Study more! I mean, I’m all for setting the curve—and you know we will”—she high fives my sister—“but a few cute animal videos are the only thing I’m interested in studying right now.”

“Ah, in that case, don’t let me interrupt you.”

“Too late,” says Saff. She sticks out her tongue.

I whip out my phone and aim it at her. “Oo, hold still. That’ll make a great photo. Really captures your cheery personality.”

“Leave, Cayenne,” Saff says, swatting in my direction, even though she’s too far away to even come close to reaching me. “You’re crushing our endorphins.”

“Begging your pardon, milady.” I bob a fake curtsey. “I just came in here to ask if you wanted to stop by Alicia’s tomorrow.” I think I do a convincing job of dropping this casually. It’s been two weeks since we watched Mom’s first video and I’m kind of surprised that Saff hasn’t brought it up yet.

“Oh. Sure.” She looks like she wants to ask me a follow-up question, but Vanessa is shooing me away, so I flash a thumbs up and leave—the considerate sister that I am.

I can still hear them talking from out in the hallway, though.

“No, seriously, I think it’s sweet the way she teases you,” Vanessa says. “Chris used to be like that with me, and you know what a jerk he can be these days.”

“Yeah, your sibling situation officially sucks more than mine,” Saff admits. I choose to take this as a compliment.

✱✱✱

Saff and I are sitting on the porch, smelling Micah’s burnt popcorn, hearing the rumblings of his conversation with Alicia in the other room, and watching our second video from Mom.

“So, sweets . . . do you know where I am?” She must be standing behind the camera, because I can’t see her. “It’s our secret garden. Do you remember?”

With some visible effort, she shifts the camera upward, and I glimpse a tree trunk. Four jean legs hang down, bare feet dangling, the soles of our feet dirty. The camera inches upward, and I can hear Mom breathing more heavily. I wonder how sick she’s gotten by this point. Not bad enough to be housebound apparently. And then I see us, perched on a branch, staring at the sky.

“Wow. We’re up pretty high,” I say.

“I’d never let Missy and Maggie climb up to that branch,” Saff says, pressing pause.

“I would,” I retort, but truthfully I’m not sure. If one of them came home with a broken bone, Luke would never forgive me. “Why are you stopping the video?”

“Let’s pause it when we want to talk.”

“Works for me.” I wait. “So what do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing. Just didn’t want to miss anything.” Saff smiles and un-pauses it. Clearly the “pause” button is her way of keeping me from interrupting.

“This was my thinking spot. I came here at first when I was pregnant. The world around me was getting louder and louder—not literally, just, there were so many interruptions to my ability to think. So I came here and found quiet. After you were born, Cay, I brought you here to nurse and sometimes to sleep. I’d stash my journal or my book in the diaper bag, set you up on a blanket so you could gaze at the leaves rustling in the sky . . . and I’d just sit here and be. Just BE. I hope you both haven’t lost the ability to be alone with your thoughts.”

Neither Saff nor I say anything. I guess I think the best when I’m driving alone. Sometimes I’ve gotten halfway to Axel’s house before I realize I forgot to turn on any music.

“Today’s gift is my secret garden. I come here to connect to nature when I can. Not so often anymore.” Her voice tightens. “Do you remember this spot? Can you find it? Let me show you a few landmarks you can use to rediscover this place.”

The camera tips forward, slamming me with a falling sensation. The lens narrows in on a patch of dandelions. All of a sudden, a memory hits me, of a time before I knew that dandelions were weeds. I remember plucking them from the ground, talking to them like they were little people, with skinny green bodies and wispy heads, dancing in the wind. I remember watching how their fuzzy heads shifted shape with the breeze, how I pursed my lips and blew. How I made a wish and watched the hairs break free and sail away.

I press pause on the video. “Do you remember blowing dandelions?” I whisper to Saff.

“I do. I think we blew hundreds of them at once.”

“We’re probably responsible for half the weeds in the county.”

I start the video again. I hear shuffling, and the camera shakes as she moves around. “Earthquake!” I joke, but Saff doesn’t laugh. She stares at the screen, mesmerized. There’s a gray blob in the top right-hand corner. It comes into focus slowly. “What is that? A UFO? Maybe we were abducted by aliens.”

“It’s the water tower. But that’s a terrible clue, because you can see it for miles.”

The camera moves again. Mom’s voice, hoarse: “Cayenne, here, take my camera. Can you point it toward the swings?”

My four-year-old face, smudged with dirt along the length of my nose, and serious eyes poke over the branch. “Okie, Mama.”

Something catches in my throat. I pause the video for a moment and study myself. “Look at me, Saff.”

“I know.”

“It makes me want to cry, but I don’t know why.”

“It’s your expression, Cay. There’s something about your expression that’s so sad.”

“It’s my eyes.” They seem old and tired. “And my mouth, I think.” My lips lie flat, like someone has ironed them. “I must have known.”

“That she was dying?”

“Yeah. I must’ve known. Why else would I look so sad?” I stand up and peer into one of Alicia’s decorative mirrors. “That’s not how I look now, is it?” I square off and stare straight ahead at myself.

“No, now you just look pissed.”

“Shut up.”

Un-pause.

The camera shifts again, rapidly, and I have to turn away. All that movement makes me dizzy. “How bizarre is it that I’m watching myself and I have no memory of this at all?” The camera zooms in toward a swing set, but beyond that I glimpse a webbed climbing structure. “Wait! Look at that! We called it the Spider Web Park.”

“Oh yeah!” Saff grabs onto my arm. “Remember how I couldn’t climb to the top and you helped me? You kept saying ‘Don’t look down, one foot at a time.’ You were a good sister to me, Cay.”

I can’t help but notice that she speaks in past tense.

Suddenly, a little kid screams, and the screen blurs as if it’s falling, and then thud it hits the ground camera-up. All we can see is an umbrella of leaves with bits of sun and sky poking through.

“Hold on, Cay! I’ll grab you.” Mom’s voice, stronger now.

“I’m okay, Mama.” My voice trembling. “I can fall, it’s not that far. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I can reach you, baby.”

“But I don’t want to break you!”

“Cayenne, don’t break Mama!” Saff’s tinny voice, full of lisps and slurs.

“Wow. Did I really talk like that?”

“What do you think you got all that speech therapy for?”

Sobbing. Little kid sobbing.

“Oh my god. I remember this, Saff. I remember hanging on to that branch and crying.” I remember the way the tree branch splintered into my hands, the way my arms ached, and the uncontrollable sobs that kept bursting from my body. “I won’t be able to hold on for long.”

“Ma-ma . . . m-move . . . b-ba-ack!”

“Watch out, Mama!” Saff yells.

Even though we can’t see anything but the canopy of leaves above, I remember what happened next. How I held on as long as I possibly could, how my fingers loosened, how I dropped what felt like a mile, but was probably only about six feet. How my mother stepped back, respecting my wishes, allowing me to crash onto the leaves below. How I sprained my ankle in the fall, and how Mom cried harder during the x-ray than I did.

We hear the crash as I slam down, the crackling of leaves, and the sound of whimpering.

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m o-kay.” My speech is halting, like I’m trying hard to hold it together.

“You didn’t break Mama,” Saff says. “Good job, Cay.”

And Mom’s shaky voice. “You sure are a tough cookie. Spicy and tough and sharp as a tack. Watch out, world, here come the Silk sisters!”

She must notice the camera there in the leaves then, because she peers down into the lens, her cheeks thin and her bald head exposed. There’s something beautiful in her fragility. Before she got sick, my mom was a head-turner—but in this moment, with her eyes full of emotion, she seems lovelier than ever. Even without her hair and with a conspicuously flat chest. From what Tee says, she never got breast reconstruction because she was too sick for any additional physical stress.

She takes a deep breath and speaks directly into the camera: “It breaks my heart that I can’t be there to catch you when you fall. Today”—she wipes a tear—“or in the future. I hope you can keep landing on your feet.” Click.