On the third of October, I rose from bed, my body moving automatically as if pulled by an unseen force. I grabbed the package waiting on my dresser and went to my brother’s room. Miles was already awake and sitting at his desk, his hands folded over a wrapped package of his own. He was waiting for me.
“Happy birthday,” he said, offering the barest of smiles.
“Same to you.” I sat on his bed and we exchanged gifts.
Miles went first, ripping open the wrapping paper. Back on the mountain, I’d made him a journal in bookbinding class. Every bit was handcrafted, from the paper, which I’d mashed in a pot, to the cover, which I’d dotted with wildflower seeds. I’d had a hard time deciding what to give him—no gift seemed appropriate for someone’s final birthday—but it felt right to offer him something that had the ability to grow.
“You don’t have to actually use it,” I said. “You can tear the cover apart and plant it in the backyard.”
Miles ran his hand over the cover’s embedded seeds. “It’s perfect.”
It wasn’t. The handmade paper was rough and bumpy, difficult to write on, and he might not have time to fill the pages anyway.
“Now open yours,” he said. His gift to me was a broad flat rectangle, like a book. I remembered the astrology book he’d given me for my sixteenth birthday. I still had it somewhere in my room.
I carefully peeled away the paper. I didn’t want to tear into it, to destroy what my brother had put together for me. When I finished, I was holding a notebook with a spiral binding and a worn cover of pale blue. It was instantly recognizable, as familiar as an old friend—the journal Miles had kept throughout our childhoods to map out my juvenile markings.
I flipped through the pages, astonished. It was like looking at old photographs of myself, or reading my own biography. My childhood markings had once seemed unforgettable, their patterns indelible in my mind, but now they struck me as foreign and strange.
I kept turning pages until I arrived at the juvenile pattern on my left elbow. Miles had sketched these markings again and again, drawing different lines to connect them as if to conjure new possibilities. The visual evidence of his obsession and his uncertainty.
“Check the back,” he said.
Tucked inside the notebook’s back cover were loose sheets of paper, mangled and torn but taped together in rough topographies. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but then I understood: These were the practice drawings I’d ripped to pieces before I left for the mountain two years prior. These were ravaged drawings that my brother patiently put together again, using transparent tape to seal the wounds.
“I thought you should have all of this, especially after I’m gone.” He paused. “It always belonged to you, anyway.”
I clutched the notebook to my chest. On this, the last of our birthdays spent together, we’d given each other paper. Paper like the tissue-thin pages of Mapping the Future. Paper like the drawing of my abductor sealed under my bed. Paper like the letter I’d written to Miles but never sent. Paper like the tarot card revealing the truth of my body and my fate.
Breakable, burnable paper.
In the backyard, my mother prepared a table for my birthday luncheon. She spread out a lace tablecloth, made a centerpiece of lilies, and set five place settings with a seating card tucked behind each plate: Celeste, Marie, Louise, Angel, Cassandra.
I stood barefoot in the grass with my arms crossed, watching her.
“I’d rather spend the day with you and Dad and Miles.” I had to hold myself back from pointing out this was our last guaranteed day together as a family. No one needed that reminder.
“It’s your birthday, too.” My mother adjusted the vase of lilies, making sure it was centered. “You need time with girls your age.”
I did miss the close company of other girls. My friends from the mountain sent me letters enclosed in pale violet envelopes, but it wasn’t the same. Since returning, I’d spent nearly all my time working with Miles and Julia. Even my visits with Marie focused on work. Now, with Cassandra, Marie, and Louise each home from university for fall break, my mother was convinced the timing was perfect for a girls-only birthday lunch.
“They’ll be here any minute.” My mother checked the lilies one more time before letting her gaze rest on me. “You look lovely, Celeste. Like that dress was made for you.”
I wore the blue dress she’d brought to me from her work with vulnerable girls. It was a dress envisioned and crafted as part of therapy, a dress of blues as deep and as complex as water.
Aside from putting on that dress, I didn’t bother much with my appearance. I let my hair hang long and loose, and makeup wasn’t even a consideration—I wasn’t sure if I still had any, and I didn’t care to look. Trying to find an appropriate pair of shoes felt like too much effort, so I remained barefoot. Besides, standing directly on the grass, the slight chill aside, was comforting. It made me feel grounded.
My friends began to arrive. Marie and Louise were first, carrying an overflowing bouquet of flowers between them. Angel was next, wearing a smart pantsuit that made her look older than her fifteen years. She gifted me a delicate silver locket, the space for a photo empty and waiting. I could already see my brother’s image there, miniaturized and hanging close to my heart.
Only one seat was still vacant. I stood and paced, too nervous to relax, until finally she came. Cassandra. She stepped into my backyard in a fitted black dress, her kitten heels digging softly into the grass. She struck me as sophisticated, confident, adult. She was, I reminded myself, a young woman studying to become a doctor. She was going to live a beautiful life.
Instead of the flowers or jewelry I might have expected from Cassandra, she held a wreath of ivy leaves.
“Ivy for remembrance,” she said. “And some say for immortality. May I?” She lifted the wreath and gently placed it on my head, adjusting my hair under it. I stood perfectly still, unsure of how to respond, and grateful when Marie and Louise came forward to help.
“Your hair has gotten so long, Celeste,” Marie said, moving it gently around my shoulders. “It suits you.”
I hadn’t thought of my hair in ages, and I certainly couldn’t remember the last time I’d cut it. It was a part of me, but it didn’t warrant my attention—it just kept growing quietly in the background. Now I ran my fingers through the long strands and marveled at its length, its strength. How it would keep on growing even after Miles was gone.
We took our seats, and my mother served us the food my father was busy cooking inside. Only later would I understand that my parents were giving me a gift. They were showing me that life would go on, that I needed friends and normalcy, and that grief aside, there was beauty in enjoying a warm autumn day with people who mattered to me.
My mother brought out a bottle of dry white wine so my friends could toast my birthday. I kept sneaking sidelong looks at Cassandra until she met my eyes. She knew about Miles. She knew about my work with Julia. She knew, and yet she was so far away from me.
“Marie,” Cassandra said, but her gaze was still on me. “Have you told Louise the story of the banner downtown? The one for the skin cream. Remember?”
“No one could forget that banner,” Marie said with a laugh. In a flurry, she and Cassandra filled Louise in: how the banner showed a naked woman without markings, how the entire town erupted over it, how it was removed in only days. Louise sat listening with wide eyes. She was from a more cosmopolitan city, where she said such a banner wouldn’t be quite as scandalous.
“Some people might have a problem with the nudity,” she clarified, “but not to the extent that it would be removed so quickly.”
“It was a simple line drawing, not detailed or graphic,” Marie said. “Now I wonder what that was all about—why people got so violently upset.”
But I knew. I’d had time to think about it on the mountain, to let the outline of that woman become part of my daily life.
“It wasn’t that she was naked.” I watched the sun sparkle against my wineglass. “It was the fact that she had no predictions. Think about it. If you walk into a museum, every last portrait of a woman includes markings. Even statues have them, chiseled right into the marble. But to show a woman who is blank—that’s making a statement.”
Everyone looked at me. I noticed Marie and Cassandra did not point out that my father had been the one to design the banner. We could have asked him what he’d done and why he’d done it, but I believed I understood better than he did. The implications of his work were so subtle that he probably hadn’t been conscious of them at the time.
“It was a threat,” I continued. “A woman unmarked, a woman not restricted by either her own future or that of others. No one knew what to do with that.”
Louise leaned forward, her eyes steady on me.
“It sounds a lot like what you and Miles are doing with Julia,” she said.
My friends and I sat in silence for a moment, contemplating our work as a threat, as a way to transform everything. We glanced around as if to pinpoint all that we might be able to tear down with our strength and our anger. The confines of my backyard, or perhaps the neighborhood, or the entire city. The sky, the earth, the whole of the world.