This spring they dragged three bodies from the Potomac River. I started counting at the end of April. Now I often visit the places where they washed up. I like to climb down under the bridge that connects Washington, DC, to Virginia and listen to the cars rumble overhead. I like how the water hisses as it licks the bridge’s concrete legs.
I’m nervous about drowning and I’m afraid to swim. That plays into all the stereotypes about Black people. But the idea of big water makes me want to never leave my room. Not even for the temptation presented by the fried catfish and hush puppies our housekeeper, Bea, makes. Not even to shop for church hats with Gram. Not even to get sheet music from Melba’s Blue Note when they have their yearly sale.
My twin sister, Madeleine, would hate how I’ve gotten more scared now, and she’d say to me: “Lena, stop being Chicken Little. The sky isn’t always falling.”
But that’s how it all feels.
I keep coming back to this place. Like the gravel on the boathouse shore needs me to stand there. Like it won’t really look right unless my shoes press into it, smooth it out for all the people who come to rent paddleboats. Like maybe those dead people might not have died if I’d been standing in this very spot.
I scramble up onto a nearby rock and sweep away cigarette butts left there, letting them fall like snowflakes into the waters below. Madeleine always smells like cigarette smoke. She says the scent and the smoke clouds help her think, help her paint. I’ve been getting older men who think I’m pretty to buy me cigarettes for the past two weeks. They stand in front of the corner stores in Adams Morgan, and all I have to do is take a cab down there and smile.
They help me smell like her. So I can think like her.
I’ve tried all different brands: Newports, Camels, Lucky Strikes, Marlboros, American Spirits. I like the shape of the boxes and their colors and how if you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were full of the most wonderful candy imaginable instead of just cigarettes that can give you cancer or cause birth defects if you are pregnant.
My favorite are the little black ones. Cloves.
They come in an all-black box and carry the scent of Christmas, and watching the stick burn down to a nub calms my brain. Even though that’s weird, and people buy cigarettes to smoke and I don’t actually do that. But I couldn’t tell anybody why this happens, why I feel better afterward. Because the words to try to explain it just don’t make sense anymore.
Nothing does.
The cigarettes drift off in the water below. And I watch them, wondering if dead bodies float so effortlessly.
I stretch my arms out into the sun. I didn’t get any browner this summer. We didn’t go to Martha’s Vineyard because of all the things that happened.
My uniform skirt whooshes, filling with the air from passing cars and becoming a bell curved around my legs. I like to feel the breeze whipping up through my panties, whistling inside me, reminding me that I’m awake.
That I’m here.
Madeleine plugs in Mama’s old stereo. Paint specks freckle her neck and hair. We’re identical, two little yellow-brown Black girls, but everyone can tell us easily apart now. Ever since we started high school last year, she wears her hair all natural and curly and frizzy, a cloud around her face and neck, while I get mine blown out straight every week when Mama’s hair stylist comes to the house. Madeleine says I’m too much like Mama and not enough like myself.
We rest on our backs, attic dust everywhere, gazing upside down at the wall and ceiling.
Her canvas.
Our ritual.
She paints all over the loft, in the tight corners, the pointed ceiling when she can get to it, the floor panels at times. The wood is awash with portraits full of different hues of blue, her favorite color. When we were seven years old, she declared the attic her studio, where she’d become her own version of Picasso or Dalí.
I wish I could hide the piano in a secret room away from our mother’s listening ears and commentary. Where I could play any melody I wanted with no one to correct me about it. Where I could become my own version of Miles Davis or Duke Ellington.
Thin streams of smoke create a gray cloud between the walls, the junk, and us. She lights dozens of cigarettes in ashtrays she stole from public places. They’re smoking lily pads dotting a lake all around our brown legs.
An early spring heat wave warms the wood beneath our bodies. An air-conditioned breeze struggles through the small vent, and the tarot cards pinned on the wall rustle. I changed the arrangement today, sorting them into two T-shaped patterns, trying to divine some good luck.
I tap my fingers along the floor, plunking a melody across the wood while we gaze up at her painting. A gigantic hand stretches over our heads, consuming sections of the ceiling. The fingers are dangling branches of a demented willow tree with sharp, scratching petals. Last month, a beautiful dogwood grew over the wall, its flowers changing whenever Madeleine didn’t feel well. Bad spells, our gram calls them. Attitudes in need of correcting, Mama labels them. I used to stay up here and whistle her a tune until she calmed down; then she’d transform the color of the petals and come out of the confusing place. I made her feel more like herself, and she made me feel not like myself. Confident, less afraid.
Madeleine whispers close to my ear, “Do you like it?”
“Can we turn the radio down?” I ask.
“You know Mama’s always listening. Answer my question.”
I don’t remind her that Mama is getting her nails done.
“Wait, don’t answer yet. Hand me the bowl near your head,” she says, her voice high-pitched with the excitement of finishing a piece. Her rare cloud of happiness drifts around me. Everything about her is animated today: her footsteps across the wooden floor, her frequent smiles, the light movements of her brush on the painting. She always folded herself inside the attic, never worried about all the things outside its borders. I want that feeling, to finally start writing my own music and play more jazz and less classical. Despite Mama’s protests.
I don’t want to ruin her excitement by telling her that her hand scares me. It makes me think of the bodies that have been washing up all summer.
I pass her one of Mama’s teacups filled to the brim with gray paint. If Mama catches her with the good china, she’ll be punished for the rest of the school year.
She spreads a skinny line of color across the wall with her fingers. I watch her as she moves back and forth in front of the hand. Her tattered cutoff shorts are smudged with color, barely recognizable as denim. A valley of scabbed blisters covers her inner thigh where she sometimes snuffed out her cigarettes and anger. We argued a million times over why she wouldn’t stop.
She rejoins me on the floor. A streak of gray lightning now cuts through the black thumbnail.
“Now, what do you think?” She watches my expression. I avoid her eyes. They remind me of marbles with storm clouds trapped in them.
“It scares me,” I admit.
“You’re scared of everything.” She pokes me with her paint-covered fingers.
“Am not,” I reply.
She flicks the brush at me. A gray fleck sprays onto my cheek and another on my linen shorts.
“Maddie!” I rub away the drop before it dries.
“Lena!” Madeleine mocks me. “Don’t be so fussy.”
“I don’t like being dirty,” I say.
“You’d put plastic down under your head if I let you.”
“No.”
“Yes. Clean and virginal Lena Marie Hathaway.”
“Dirty and bad Madeleine Sarah Hathaway. Whatever.”
“Will your shorts be okay? Can you still supper with Mama at the country club?” she taunts.
“Mama and Daddy don’t belong to a country club.”
“Our house might as well be one,” she replies.
I snuff out a few cigarettes in the ashtray nearby.
“Hey, you know those help me focus,” she says.
“They give me a headache. Mama will kill me if I come down smelling like smoke.”
The word kill stretches between us and I regret using it.
She cracks open one of the four circle windows, the eyes in her attic. They look out onto our neighborhood. “The Gold Coast doesn’t look that gold.” She moves the smoking roundabouts to the room’s far corners and creates a circle of scented candles and incense around me. “Now you’ll smell like Egyptian musk and vanilla. Stop being so afraid of Mama.”
“You used to be scared of her.”
When we started tenth grade, a small crack split the platform we both stood on. She got into more and more trouble—outbursts, skipping school, running away. I thought it’d just be a phase, like in eighth grade when she locked her hair after she claimed to channel Bob Marley through our old Ouija board. I was confident the crack would seal up, the wood fibers stitching back together, the platform remaking itself anew, and we’d go back to doing all the things we used to. Midnight movies, diaries full of secrets, and eavesdropping on all the dinner parties Mama would host.
But it got worse, and Mama and Daddy kept arguing about what to do about it. Mama didn’t want their business out ’cause everybody at church and in our community always had something to say.
“Give me your arm,” she orders.
I extend it. We face each other, our knees touching. A cornrow snakes along her hairline and purple beads hang from it, grazing her light-brown cheek. The hairstyle Mama hates. Blue veins bulge in her temples and her small hands from the attic heat. Her face reminds me of the homemade butter Gram used to churn when we were on the farm in Mississippi. Cool yellow.
With the tiniest brush she draws a stream of orange around my wrist. The liquid feels like yogurt on my skin.
“I’ll be careful not to splatter on those precious shorts,” she whispers.
I tap her hand, noticing wounds on the underside of her forearm. Fresh red gashes, like lines drawn with a teacher’s red pen, mark up her skin. A train of painted red beads circles her wrist and covers sections of the cuts.
I grab her arm. She switches the brush into her other hand, not pausing her work. She lets me examine the barely scabbed marks.
“I thought you were done with that. You promised both me and James.”
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes fix on the attic’s latch door.
It vibrates from a series of knocks. The stereo tumbles over as it lifts upright.
Mama doesn’t poke her head all the way in. All I hear is her voice: “Turn that music off and come downstairs, Lena. I told you to stop coming up here.”
The idea of drowning scares me. I was surrounded this summer: stories about the bodies on the radio in Daddy’s car; headlines staring up from the newspapers; TV reporters trying to find patterns in the cases on the tiny kitchen TV that Bea watches when she makes us dinner; phone calls soliciting Mama’s opinion on the matter.
Those bodies really didn’t have much to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to let your insides die by filling yourself with water. To soak your heart, letting the empty spots flood. The pain of punching the waves. The fight to keep your head above water. The burn of gasping for air. I think it might be the worst thing in the whole world. So many had done it this spring, and everyone was talking about it. I guess everyone . . . except my family.
We eat in silence now. No more arguments. No more tears. No more threats of punishment. Not even any more we-aren’t-talking-about-sad-things-right-now.
Mama flips through her schedule book, planning a fund-raising memorial, and Daddy has his eyes fixed on the newspaper. Dark spots ring their eyes like two pairs of crescent bruises, and Daddy’s light-brown nose is bright red and blistered with broken blood vessels.
Bea sets out breakfast dishes between us—warm biscuits and honey, country ham and grits, and steaming mountains of home fries, the potatoes glistening with onions.
You’d never know anything was wrong.
We could be frozen in a snow globe. The perfect family. If someone was watching us, if someone even shook up our ball, the little flakes would swirl around us, but we’d still be in these exact positions. And no one would ever think bad things happen in our family.
Gram says a pile of money can make a barrel of sins disappear.
But what about sadness?
My stomach growls and I know I should feed it, but I have no interest in even chewing, really. Madeleine sits beside Daddy. She doesn’t reach for a plate. She stares at the stack of biscuits on the table.
“It might be time to clean that room,” Daddy says.
“I don’t want to,” I reply.
“Lena.” Mama says my name in a way that means this isn’t a choice. She bats her disappointed eyes at me; they’re the color of two honeybees. She looks like she stepped out of one of the black-and-white photos that hang all over our house or from the pages of a vintage clothing catalog. Sleek chignon bun, a bloodred lip, her skin a cool yellow like a slivered almond, and always in expertly tailored dresses. Gram says she belongs to a different time. “This is not a discussion.”
Mama hasn’t always been this dissatisfied with me. I used to do everything perfectly, without even being asked. Madeleine was the one who argued and did the opposite of what she said. I didn’t know how to not do what she wanted. But nothing makes Mama happy these days; she finds every out-of-place hair on my head.
“Let’s adjust our attitude, shall we?” Mama lifts a perfectly arched eyebrow.
I’ve never had an attitude before. I rarely pushed the line. I wasn’t the bad twin, the one who did anything out of the ordinary. I wear my hair the way she wants, my school uniform skirt is always the right length, I never overdid it on the makeup she let me use, and I’m still a virgin.
Madeleine crosses her arms over her chest like she’s ready to say something to them and start trouble.
“Not right now,” I say to her.
She shrugs.
“What was that?” Mama asks.
“Maybe we should discuss this while at the Vineyard house over the long weekend,” Daddy says.
“I think we put this conversation off a while longer,” Mama says to Daddy before turning her gaze back to me. “The cotillion rehearsal is tonight.”
My body clenches.
“I don’t want to do it anymore,” I mumble. “I don’t even have a date. Brett moved away. Did you forget?”
“Well, James will be without an escort,” Mama says. Whenever she says James’s name, she puts her excitement about him into each letter of it.
“I think under the circumstances no one would blame us if we canceled,” Daddy says, flattening the paper in front of him.
Madeleine stares at me. Her gaze heavy, almost hot.
“You and James would make a beautiful pair. The dress is already made. It was delivered this afternoon,” Mama says. “I don’t think we should stop doing the things we planned to do.”
“Let’s discuss this later,” Daddy says.
“There’s nothing to discuss. We honor our commitments in this family. Right, Lena?” Her eyes sting, and a blue vein pulses in her temple.
Madeleine winks at me.
“Of course,” I mumble.
The first body that washed up this spring was a white man. A paddleboater found him on April 28. The man’s jacket got caught on a rusty hook, and he just floated there for days until somebody spotted him, face down, legs stretching out from under him, bloated like a dead fish. I want to look for that hook. I want to press my finger against it, see how strong it is, see how it could catch that body and hold on to something so heavy.
I take the newspaper clipping out of a shoebox. I smooth it out on top of my comforter and think about ironing the page if the paper gets wrinkled again.
His name was Jeremiah Flanagan, and he was from what Mama calls one of those Virginia towns with three people and a stoplight and a cup of racism. I wonder if people smile when they remember him or if they say good riddance. I wonder if you don’t know how people really feel about you until you’re dead. Would they wish you back? Would they think the world was better off without you in it?
Would people cry if I jumped?
How would Madeleine feel?
My sister’s boyfriend, James, lives next door. Our houses sit like perfectly tiered cakes on a glittering tray, far away enough away to not touch like the other houses in Washington, DC, but close enough to look pretty together. Gram calls our area the Gold Coast. She said it’s always been called that, since her own grandmother settled in the house. A place where rich Black people got away from the poor ones. But still didn’t have to live with white folks.
You’d think the houses would be dipped in gold, though. Instead, the driveways hold expensive cars, the flower boxes burst with exotic roses, and only certain people with the right kind of money belong. Mama said, “Different people had different kinds. Old money, new money, illegal money, sports money. But we had money from the dead.” Which has always been the most important.
I move a brass telescope in front of the window. We used to always peep at James through it. Daddy bought it for us when we turned eight, after we told him we planned to be the first twins to go to outer space.
When they first started dating, Madeleine liked to look each night to make sure he didn’t have another girl in his room, even though he has the type of parents who don’t allow girls to come over. She would climb across the thick tree boughs that reached from his window to ours.
I watch him now, pivoting the telescope to avoid the tree’s new spring leaves so I can see him clearly. I catch parts of him. He has his shirt off. Daddy calls him “the scrawny boy next door” and thinks he’s a little too soft. Mama just thinks his mother should feed him more. He’s all freckled, even his light-brown chest. Madeleine said she would play a game where she’d try to connect the dots on him with one of her gel pens.
James catches me staring at him from my window and he flinches as if I’ve touched him. He yanks on a T-shirt, then sheepishly waves.
I lift open the window, and he does the same.
“You good?” he shouts, then scratches his head. “I mean . . . like . . . I know you couldn’t possibly . . .” He drops his gaze.
“It’s okay,” I lie. “Can I come over there?” I yell back, and sound more like Madeleine and less like me.
He looks surprised by my question but then he nods. “Sure.”
I do what my sister always did—climb into the arms of the tree and tiptoe across the boughs like it’s a tightrope. I stop on his window ledge. He helps me inside, his hands warm from a shower and their heat pressing through my shirt.
“You smell like cigarettes,” he says. “You smoke now?”
“No.” I glance around his room. It’s so different than Madeleine’s and mine. A large bed is tucked in the corner and video game posters cover the walls. He’s even got two small, glowing aquariums full of colorful fish. His DJ equipment is piled into one corner—turntables and speakers and albums and headphones.
I inhale the scent of his room and try to identify all the components.
“So how’s it been?”
“Fine.”
“You still coming tonight?”
The cotillion rehearsal.
“I guess.” His gaze follows me as I walk around his room. I run my fingers over the items on his desk. I let my leg graze the beanbag chair in the corner. I wonder if this is where Madeleine used to sit when she came over here. Or was she bold enough to get on his bed? Yeah, she probably just plopped right on his blanket.
“My mom said that you were going to be my date.”
I stare up at a clear piggy bank on his shelf, fat with coins. His dad is a banker.
“You know I’m sorry, right?” he says.
“About what? You didn’t do anything.”
“I didn’t say anything. I could’ve . . .”
I turn around to face him, then close the gap between us. Tears slick the surface of his deep-brown eyes.
“She always does what she wants,” I say.
His eyes comb over my face. “You both look so much alike. It’s so weird . . . like . . .”
I lean forward and press my lips into his, pushing whatever he’s about to say back into his mouth. He grabs my shoulders and steps away. His brow furrows with confusion.
“What’re you doing?” he asks.
“Don’t you miss her?” I say, moving closer again.
“Of course . . . but . . .” He puts his arms out to block me.
“Then why not?”
He catches me before I get too close again.
“You don’t want me?” My bottom lip quivers and a hot wave of embarrassment warms my insides. My head gets light and the room spins around me.
“Lena . . . this isn’t right,” he replies. “I know things are hard, but—”
“You don’t know anything.” I shove him and head back to the window. “I’ll see you tonight. I guess.” I start to climb out and look up.
Maddie stares at me from our bedroom window.
We all stand inside Ballroom C in the Hay-Adams Hotel. It’s one of Mama’s favorites in the entire city, where she does most of her own private fund-raising events. If she and Daddy don’t go to the Vineyard house, they come here for long weekends, leaving Maddie and me home with Bea.
“You okay?” James whispers as we stand in a pocket of noisy kids waiting for the cotillion dress rehearsal to begin.
Even if I did answer him, my words would be lost in the boom of voices echoing off the high ceilings. The faces of the other kids are a tornado of brown, most hailing from other DC private schools, some from Maryland and Virginia. We’ve seen each other at these events throughout the year. But now, we’re all sixteen and are dressed up like we’ve escaped a group wedding.
Mama likes to call it our very own secret society: a group of wealthy Black people who have their membership-only club to ensure that everyone finds the right person to marry or the right network for the right job or the right people to be friends with. Women with perfect smiles, pearls, and pretty dresses, gentlemen in fine suits, swathed in the best fashions. They were people who set up the Black middle class and distinguished a high society for us, according to my mama.
And now we’re here to be presented.
I smile at a few of the girls I recognize as their eyes comb over my dress. I feel like I’ve caught a fluffy white cloud, its rippled layers of tulle and satin and crinoline swallowing me in a corseted storm. It all feels stupid to be dressed up to practice. It all feels silly now.
I look for my sister, but she’s not here. Parents and volunteers watch us from the side and flash me pitiful smiles if I catch their eye.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention? Please locate your partners,” Mrs. Moore, one of the cotillion organizers, directs. “We’re going to practice the entry and go straight into the first waltz.”
My eyelids droop in the dim light. The noises wax and wane in my ears, like someone is turning a radio dial up and down, up and down.
“Places,” she says. “When you hear your name, come to the center of the room and step up onto the platform. Find your mark and stand there until I’ve called everyone.”
The names drone on. There’s a fly in the room. I watch it whiz over the beautiful treats set out for the parents to eat. It seems to dance from one cupcake to the next. It could almost be a bee. If only it were more beautiful.
James jostles my arm. “Let’s go.”
“What?” I say, too loud.
A nearby girl chuckles under her breath.
“They called us.”
“Now, presenting Lena Marie Hathaway, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Hathaway. She is escorted by James R. McKinley, son of Dr. and Mrs. George R. McKinley,” the cotillion announcer says.
James tugs me forward like a doll.
I try to smile, but I can’t. My mouth won’t soften. My lips won’t part.
We stand like mannequins on our marked spot as the other debutantes and their escorts are called one after another: “Tamara McDonald, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel McDonald, escorted by Michael Pinkney III, son of Dr. and Mrs. Michael Pinkney II . . . . Emilia Jenna Mullen, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Douglass Mullen . . .”
I feel Mama’s gaze on me. Out of all the eyes, I know the heat of hers the most. I can hear her say, “Lena, push your shoulders back. Soften your face. Look graceful. This is practice for the big event. It will be the event. Act as if it’s the real thing.”
The dress hem of one of the other debutantes drags when she waves at her mother and breaks her arm link with her date. Her mom stands almost on stage, taking prohibited photos of us all. They look just alike, both their shoulders curled over, and they have moon-pie-shaped faces.
I spot Mama shaking her head at her; she’ll gossip about her on the car ride home.
We’re led off the platform. The stage lights dim, and thousands of tiny lanterns glow from within the fake trees planted all over the room. A waltz begins. James grips the small of my back. The tiara glued into my hair bounces from his jerks. His shoes leave gray footprints on my dress hem.
“I need you to pay attention. You’re messing up the steps,” he whispers. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead.
“It’s just the dress rehearsal,” I snap.
“Still,” he complains.
“Ugh, I can’t. I need a break,” I say, leading him to the side. I glance behind me to make sure Mama wasn’t watching. She has her hand cupped to a woman’s ear, no doubt whispering the latest scandal in our small community.
“What is it?” James says.
“Come with me somewhere.” I squeeze his hand.
He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no.
I yank him forward.
The second body didn’t really wash up at all. Police boats fished out a Black lady still wearing a church hat. The news said her leg hung from her body like a broken twig. The radio said that her husband barely recognized her. Called her pale. Said she’d lost most of her skin color. I guess you can jump into the water as a Black person and die, and be discovered later having lost some of your pigment. You can become white after death—if you start out light enough. The dusty brown color I got at the Vineyard house would fade fast. I’d be the yellow like the butter Gram always served at the Mississippi house. Like Madeleine.
The construction workers putting the new addition on the Williamsons’ house wouldn’t call me a “red bone” girl anymore. When I asked Mama what the term meant, she said it was some old-timey term left over from slavery. That our bones must be red ’cause we were fair-skinned Black people instead of dark brown.
This church lady became one, too. From the water.
Reporters kept shoving microphones in her husband’s face, asking what happened and balking at the fact that a grown woman couldn’t swim.
The man cried so badly, his tears glittered like constellations of stardust.
Her name was Bernadette Jackson, and she was sixty years old. Her husband said neither of them had learned to swim when they were kids because pools didn’t allow Black folks in North Carolina to enjoy the water.
He said she’d left a note that he wasn’t ready to talk about.
I’d love to have read it.
I ask the bellhop at the hotel to get James and me a cab.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“You’ll see.” I pull out a pack of cigarettes from my clutch and light one. I take one puff just so it will start disintegrating, and watch it burn. I hate the way they taste but love watching the clouds of smoke dance in front of me.
The cab pulls up, and we get in.
“We shouldn’t be leaving,” he says, because he always follows the rules, like I did.
“We won’t be long, I promise.”
“Where to?” the cab driver asks.
“The Key Bridge.”
“That’s not a destination,” the cab driver replies.
“The boathouse,” I snap.
“Okay,” the man replies.
“This isn’t a good idea.” James frowns.
“Nothing is a good idea anymore. But no one asked me how I felt about it. Maddie sure didn’t. My parents didn’t.”
“Okay.” He sits back and stares out the window, then slides earbuds out of his pocket and puts them in.
My sister gets into the front seat. Like the smoke called her right to me.
The cab driver makes a left out of the parking lot.
“You know you should go back, right?” Madeleine stares at me, but I don’t look at her. She shouldn’t be here. But she doesn’t startle me. She hasn’t left my side since the last week of March.
“Lena, you’re missing the last parts of rehearsal. Mama will be mad,” she says. “You hate making Mama mad.”
“I don’t care.”
The cab driver glances up at me. He raises his eyebrows.
“I’m not missing anything important,” I say. “Why you so worried?”
James takes out his earbuds. “Who are you talking to?”
“Madeleine,” I reply.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“You don’t like it when Mama and Daddy are upset with you,” she says.
“You didn’t have to come,” I say.
“You dragged me along,” he says.
“I didn’t mean you,” I say to him.
I look away from him and at her.
“I did have to come.” Madeleine stares back at me. The beaded cornrow along her hairline grazes her cheek. Her curls frizz a little from the humidity. Pale-blue veins raise in her hands. One appears down the center of her forehead, and I know she’s hot. I feel hot, too, just because she does. Just because we’re always supposed to feel the same things.
The cab pulls up to the little boathouse. I give the man cash, and we get out.
James walks beside me, and I feel him watching me.
Maddie lingers behind us. “You have to go back,” she calls out. Her voice is desperate.
I flinch.
“Why did you bring me here?” James asks. “And why are you being weird?”
I ignore her, and him. She never used to act scared of anything: always breaking curfew, not afraid to show Daddy a bad report card or kiss boys in the basement or say curse words at Mama’s benefit luncheons just to be embarrassing.
I am the scared one.
I watch the water.
“You’re too close,” she warns, and now she’s right beside me, her hand reaching out, trying to pull me back to safety. Her nails and fingers are painted purple, and I think one day the colors will seep into her bloodstream, and her sweat and tears will change colors.
“We shouldn’t be here,” James says. “This is weird.”
“You sound like her, you know,” I say.
“It’s time to go. Too much time near the water. And thinking about the water.” She reaches for me again. The moonlight makes her hand see-through.
I don’t take it. I can’t take it.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asks.
“Are you going to be okay?” I spit back.
“I lost her too.” He looks away as a tear falls.
The third body that washed up this summer was my sister’s.
James and I light cigarettes and throw them in the water. Their slender bodies bob in the cold and angry waves. I watch the water soak into the filters and stamp the light out. It makes me think about Maddie and what it might’ve been like for her.
The sadness drowning her like the water. Her heart stopping. Her mind going silent. Insects nesting inside her. Her blue veins and red bones exposed to the light.
“I wish she was still here,” he mumbles.
“Me too.”
I cut my eyes at her. Each time we light a cigarette and toss it, a part of her disappears.
A leg.
An arm.
One of her ears.
Her neck.
Like a candle flame extinguished in the dark.
“Did you know she was going to do it?” he asks.
“No,” I say, but it feels a little like a lie.
“What do we do?”
“I don’t want to let her go.”
“I don’t think she’s gone.” He tries to smoke one of the cigarettes but breaks out into a fit of coughs. “Whenever I see you, I’ll also, always see her. You carry her with you.”
He doesn’t realize she’s standing right next to us. Well, what’s left of her. I watch as she slowly disappears.
“I feel like I drowned with her,” I admit.
He looks at me. Then touches my arm. “We all did.”
Closing my eyes, I tell my sister I will always love her. Then I take my pack of cigarettes and throw it into the water.
Turning to James, I say, “I’m ready to head back now.”