The first time the Grim Reaper swung his sickle in my direction, I was thirteen. It was a sunny California afternoon with holographic clouds stamped across the sky like a distant memory, my feet sunk into warm, powdery sand. I spent the day bodysurfing with my sister when the undertow grabbed a hold of me. My body spun haphazard, jerking every which way like a ragdoll in the spin cycle. Strong arms plucked me to shore and life was breathed into me through the mouth of a beautiful boy.
The second time death came, I was too busy letting the wind run wild through my hair, fantasizing about that same beautiful boy—the way I invaded his mouth, the way my tongue naturally mingled with his before he realized what was happening. Death operates best when you least suspect it. You can ask for it to wait, but that just makes your soul taste sweeter.
Actually, it was Claire that death came knocking for. She always did have to upstage me.
“Call Billy Knoxville and tell him I’ll do it.” She pants the words out. The first sentence whispered from her lips in hours.
Six months ago, before chemo, when my sister still had hair—when she still had life in her eyes, she and Billy went on their first official date—the movies. The idiot had the nerve to ask for a blowjob afterward. He paid for her ticket, so, logically, the moron thought it was a fair exchange.
“What?” I gape at this pale, frail version of myself. Claire and I are identical twins, you couldn’t tell us apart a year ago. We played games where we switched places and not even our grandmother could tell the difference. With my mother we expected it, but with Grandma we wondered. “I’m not calling him. He’s a dork.” I twirl her limp fingers in mine. “Sorry, sis, I don’t do booty calls.”
Her eyes close, soft and final as a casket. “I will haunt you for the rest of your life if you don’t do this.”
“Please do.” I want to tell her that way I won’t feel so damn alone, but I’m afraid to go there.
“He was going to be the love of my life.”
“Billy Knoxville has mistake written all over him.”
“Yeah, but he was going to be my mistake.” She squeezes her eyes tight. “And now I’m going to miss out.”
On everything I want to add but don’t. Sex is simply a single thread in the grand tapestry of life that she’ll be denied.
We had just turned sixteen. This was supposed to be our best summer. Instead, it’s the summer the Lidagate Killer roams the streets of Los Angeles—the same summer Professor Denton shot and killed his wife just two houses down. Mom blames it on the heat.
It’s so hot our bones melt inside our bodies, leaving us feeling like a sorry sac of skin. Death is waging a war in the city, turning up the furnace to unbearable levels, striking down the elderly as if dying itself had become a plague. My mother said the winds that came in from the desert had the ability to drive people mad—they blow in like an inferno and singe away your sanity until all you want to do is stalk the sidewalks with a butcher knife in your hand. But I know better. My mother always said my sister and I were children born from sin, and, now, it feels like the entire damn town is paying the price. My mother and her hunger for married men brought this madness into our lives—her disregard for holy matrimony is what blew in this death contagion.
My grandmother and I believed Claire might get better eventually. We would have painted the sidewalk in our blood with that truth all day long. My mother had recently grafted herself to the Way of the Covenant Church, so, understandably, we had a legion of pastors stopping by in a steady stream of righteousness. Their wives organized prayer vigils in the streets that vaguely resembled a wartime protest. They held signs and shouted at passing cars, honk for healing, proclaiming Claire’s miracle to the heavens. My grandmother and I sat in lawn chairs at the park across the street. We watched the whole thing while gulping down Slurpees. Make no mistake about it—anytime a group of believers voluntarily organize a prayer vigil on your behalf, something is very fucking wrong. If you’re lucky, they’re simply trying to save your soul from the fires of hell, and, if you’re unlucky, you’re probably dying from some incurable disease, wasting away on a bed in your living room because you’re too weak to climb the stairs to your bedroom. For us it was the latter.
Claire was dying. I held her hand and listened as the kind men from the Way of the Covenant told her how beautiful and fun heaven would be. It was a supreme day spa of the highest caliber where you could eat all the Slim Jims and glazed donuts you wanted and never get fat. You never had to sleep because night simply didn’t exist—no bedtimes, no diseases, no hate, or hurt feelings. There were rainbows and beaches and castles—all of your dead relatives would line up to greet you. I sit with sober suspicion as each of them deliver their friendly sermons and smile into this disengaged version of my sister. I hope for her sake it’s all true. And I believe it is.
I wait until the last of the celestial circus goes home and take both of Claire’s bony hands in mine. Looking at Claire was always more fun than looking into a mirror until she evaporated from under me, and, now, it’s like looking my own death in the face—and I was.
“I want to go with you.”
“No.” She tries to pluck her hands free, but she’s too weak, and I’m too mean to give in.
“Yes. As soon as you go, wait for me. I’ve got a bottle of Mom’s old sleeping pills I plan on downing. Don’t go anywhere.” I look into her dark-stained eyes. Her disapproval is so palpable, so real, it makes me smile. “It looks like I managed to piss you off.” Something in my chest sings at the idea. I like that. Angry Claire is good. That means she hasn’t checked out yet. Her breathing has been so shallow today. I’m half afraid she’ll be gone by morning. “You’ll wait for me, right?”
“Right.” She closes her eyes. “In your dreams. That’s where you’ll find me, Stevie.” She cracks an eye open to see if I’m listening, but now it’s me who’s disengaging. “Will you keep an eye on Billy for me?”
“No.”
“Please.” She pleads with those sunken eyes, her hollow breathing. “I’d do it for you.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” But I know she would.
In the morning, Mom ambushes me into going to camp. It’s only five days, and she promises nothing exciting will happen in the interim. We fight and argue, but in the end it’s Claire who tells me to shut up and go.
“Just let loose and have some fun for once would you?” Her bruised eyes bear into mine. Her skin is pink with anger, but from here it looks like life, and that’s all I want for her is life and more of it.
“Are you really okay?” I ask, solemn as shit. What I’m really asking is if she’d dare die without me.
“I’m really okay. I’ll be here when you get back—in your dreams, Stevie.” She gives a private smile when she says my name. “I’m a part of you even when I’m not in the room. You can never escape me. I won’t let you.” She swallows hard. “I love you. You’re my best friend, my other half. Let me live through you. Let me die for you—and you live for me.” Her bright blue bandana slips off, revealing her smooth head, bald as a melon, and my heart explodes into a million fragments. My grief floats through the air like a toxic cloud. Agony shaped bits of confetti splatter across the ceiling, the walls, making the kind of mess only a machine gun assault could leave behind, and I want it to. I want the entire world to see how messy death really is—how its stench eats up the room if it lingers too long.
In the end, Claire and my mother win out and I end up getting on that bus, traveling what feels like a million miles from home.
Camp is boring as shit. The only bright spot is a horse named Misty. I ride her every free moment I can. I let the wind comb wild through my hair, feel her trembling muscles beneath me as we thunder across the vast expanse of dry, cracked landscape—nothing but ribbon blue sky up above—God himself smiling down at me through the pale eye of the afternoon moon.
It’s easy to pretend Claire isn’t sick—that she doesn’t exist at all. I’m an only child with normal
parents who fight over the answers to crossword puzzles. They’re the kind of parents that take me to the movies on Sunday, right after our traditional lunch of greasy Chinese. It’s a beautiful picture, but it’s empty without Claire. Not even my fantasies can flourish without her. Instead I think of that day at Shipwrecks—that beautiful boy pulling me out of the water and the way his mouth felt over mine. I ride with wild abandon and find solace in that stolen kiss.
When I get home, my mother breaks the news the only way she knows how—by shoving the truth wordlessly in my face. She waits until I walk through the door. Gone is the medical bed we rented—gone are the miniature amber towers of medicine that spread over the coffee table like a city. No bed, no pills, no Claire.
“Where is she?” I ask stupidly with a smile budding on my lips. It happened. The prayer vigil worked. Adrenaline shoots through my body so fast, blood rushes through my ears like the ocean in a seashell. We had finally done it—moved the mountain and threw it into the sea. The cancer was strong, but our faith was stronger. Any second now I expected her to bounce down the stairs, her hair miraculously long in just five brief days.
“Honey.” My mother grips me by the shoulders—her wide eyes dart to each of mine. “We lost Claire.”
“What?” Every inch of me stings at once.
For a brief moment I picture my sister lost in the maze of a forest, feverishly calling out to my mother, to me. Then a terrible ache starts in my belly and blooms hot in my chest because “lost” in this case means swallowed by death.
It’s true. Claire died, and my mother had her cremated before I ever got off that bus. She loads my grandmother and me into the car and drives us to Star Point Marina where a nice man with a small boat takes us a mile off shore. The three of us sit shoulder to shoulder with my sister in a box between us.
Not a single tear blurs my vision. How could I cry when this was all some nightmare I would eventually wake up from? Mom and Claire were pulling the ultimate prank, but deep inside the real reason I was incapable of screaming out with agony is because I feel just as dead as she is.
Mom opens the box, and we’re greeted with gray sand, powder, nothing but ashes and dirt. Claire was off somewhere eating a mountain of glazed donuts and left me all alone with this miniature sandbox version of herself.
“Go ahead, Stevie.” Mom hands me a blue plastic shovel that belongs with some toddler on the beach, not with me, not buried in any part of my sweet, dead sister. “I want you to be the one to spread her ashes. She would have wanted it that way.”
At sixteen I don’t know a lot, but I do know she wouldn’t have wanted it this way. She didn’t want any of it. My mother has always been delusional—my sister’s death was simply the culmination of her madness.
I pick up the box and marvel at the heft of Claire’s remains—as heavy as a bag of cat food. That’s all she was reduced to. Tears come. They fall freely into Claire’s magic box as we intermingle once again to create mud and rain, our lives bisecting in a tangible manner one last time.
When we were born, they say we came out holding hands. That’s how we wanted to exit this planet, with our fingers intertwined, ready to embark on our next adventure together. We were created in tandem. It was only fair we died that way.
“I don’t think Claire would have wanted it like this,” I spit the words into my mother, unleashing the demon inside me. “She would have wanted it like this.” I hoist the box toward her face, powder-bombing my mother and all of her vitriol with my sister’s remains.
The man chartering our trip lets out a horrible noise then pukes over the side of the boat. My grandmother slaps herself across the mouth, but I just sit and stare at this version of my mother, white as a ghost—wearing her daughter like a mask—looking like death herself.
Claire floats through the breeze like a swarm of bees buzzing upward as if she were finally set free. She was on her way to see the face of God—to eat Slim Jims and glazed donuts—stay up late in a world that knew no night, all without me.
When I get home that afternoon, my mother’s sleeping pills are nowhere to be found. As one last act of sisterly love, she ratted me out to my grandmother.
She was never interested in taking me with her. Instead, Claire charged me with the task of living for her, but I’m too preoccupied with her death to hold up my end of the bargain. I torment myself just thinking about the exact second when it happened—when her soul snapped like a dry twig and set her soaring into the great unknown. My grandmother said it happened in the still of the afternoon. It was peaceful. Claire closed her eyes and smiled.
I wondered what I was doing at the time?
I bet I was on that damn horse.
I never rode again.
Seven Years Later
Stevie
I thought it was fitting that on the night I planned on taking my own life, I fell in love. Not real love, but a wave of lust-filled infatuation that everyone feels for at least six months before reality claws away the glamor, and all you see is another shitty person staring back at you. But I don’t have six months. I have maybe six hours give or take my patience to endure this spinning blue rock another second. It’s turning out to be a seat-of-my-pants plan. Had I thought far enough ahead, I would have left a note for my grandmother, maybe a dark poem for my mother to brood over, but it’s probably best they convince themselves it was an accident. It most likely will be.
Loud, harsh music bangs overhead like a toddler thrashing around armed with pots and pans. Bodies press up against me as I try to squeeze my way through the crowded room. The scent of new clothes mingling with expensive perfume nauseates me.
My father’s investment firm is hosting a mixer in Breakers Canyon, just an hour north of Los Angeles. If you split the difference, you end up at Rigby University where I’m currently a senior. But it’s the tail end of July, summer is in full swing, and not a person I know is willing to let the golden goodness slip through their fingers.
The party rages around me like the scene from some underground nightclub. Here I thought it would be populated with old men wearing beautiful girls on their sleeves like accessories, the smoke from their pipes choking me out hours ago, but it’s unmistakably chic and modern, and all of the people are typically L.A. reconstructed-to-be-beautiful. I head for the door, and that’s when I see Him—tall, black shiny hair you could admire your reflection in if given the chance, a pair of pale blue eyes that qualify as a color all their own. We’ve been exchanging glances intermittently for the better part of the last hour, sending a pang of heat through me like some sexual distress signal. Unlike me, he’s never alone. I lost track of my half sister, Kinsley, hours ago.
Women flock to him like pigeons, in droves like he might possess the fountain of youth in his boxers, or, in the least, he’s passing out a handful of dildos he’s cast himself. If that’s the case, I might be interested, or at least I would have been if I didn’t have a date with Claire.
I inspect him further as he moves casually through a crowd of estrogen. A dark-haired girl with a wicked grin hangs off his shoulder, playing with his ear. Her lips curl up at the edges while her mouth hangs partially open, and I stare a moment too long as if I might be adding an oral fixation to my long list of disorders.
Crap. I need to get out of here. I need air, and a physical buffer between me and the nearest warm body by at least twelve feet. I’m allergic to people. Since Claire died I’ve been hostile and angry and an all-around nightmare to be with, on purpose of course. The last thing I wanted was someone to coddle me, tell me how sorry they were. I hated their empty words—their sympathy without borders. Still do. Besides, I’ve got a suicide to tend to and a sister to give one long ghostly hug. Just the thought of seeing her again sends a pang of relief through me. She’s the only knife that could lance this festering wound. Without her I percolate with anger. But in all honesty, I sort of enjoyed the rage—the way it fueled me, made me powerful. I owned grief, made it my bitch. Just like I’m about t
o do with death. It may have caught Claire off guard, but tonight I’ll be calling the shots.
I hedge my way to the door, inspecting the tangle of bodies for signs of Lincoln or Kinsley one last time, my older half siblings, or at least two of them. I have one more, a sister, Aspen—she’s a bastard like me—children who entered this world through someone other than Daphne Lionheart, my father’s first and second wife. He divorced and remarried her, much to my mother’s horror.
Pearl Jam’s, Alive, breaks out through the speakers, and Eddie Vedder’s voice makes love to me, soft and unsuspecting—vibrating right through to my bones like a haunting lullaby. I mouth the lyrics as I inch my way to the entry of this goliath Mediterranean villa.
The double doors open out to the early evening, revealing a thread of pink clouds expiring in a line over a hot crimson sky. You can smell the brush fire that’s ripping through Tujunga Canyon. The spice of the flames perfume the air like an overgrown fireplace. The sky bleeds red in retribution as if it were God’s reverse gift to us. He burns the hillside to stubble, and, in exchange, he gives us a glorious mural to look at. I step onto the threshold making myself unsteady in my four-inch heels. Kinsley nearly choked when she saw I had them on. But I held true to my usual wardrobe staples of jeans and a T-shirt—no need to go overboard for corporate dingbats. It’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone, well, maybe my father, but after twenty-three years on this planet, I think I’m well aware that’s a fruitless effort.
The scent of raw, earthy cologne wraps itself around me like new leather gloves until I moan with approval.
“Beautiful.” A voice rumbles from behind, deep as thunder.
My shoulders twitch with surprise, and I turn to find Him standing there—a ghost of a smile on his lips. Blue eyes, black hair—a face that demands the attention of every female in the room—he’s gorgeous in a cutting way that slices right through to my bones. My insides squeeze tight—a quick pang sirens through me just being this close to him. Heat radiates off his body like the summer sun off a New York sidewalk, and I’m drawn to his warmth. He’s massive, muscular, solid as sheetrock, and my fingers twitch just aching to confirm this hard-as-granite theory. He glances up at the sky as if he were having this conversation with himself, and I was simply listening in. The reserve of sunlight slices through his eyes giving off a reflective luminosity found in animals of the night. This one is a tiger. He’s got those almond eyes, a full mouth he could devour you with, and I’m sort of hoping he will.