Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 9
But the cop just said, “I think she might be in shock,” to another policeman I was surprised to recognize. He volunteered as the girl’s middle school soccer coach and all the kids called him Jelly Roll for some reason. I never understood this. He wasn’t fat. He was never seen eating doughnuts. He was always walking around with a green smoothie in his water bottle. But whenever the cool girls like Lia McGree saw him in the hallway, they would go Jellyyyy Roll and Jelly Roll would high-five them.
But he did not high-five me. He looked at me like I was not the kind of girl you could ever high-five, like I was the kind of girl you just felt sorry for, and I hated him for how real he made everything feel that morning.
“Where is my sister?” I finally asked. “Is she okay? Is she still in the car?”
“Why don’t you have some water?” Jelly Roll said. “I think you’re very confused right now.”
And maybe he was right. Maybe I was confused. Because I remember feeling like I had something very important to tell you when I got home later that night. I kept picturing you on your bed, saying, “Now tell me everything. Was it exciting? Was Billy upset? Did he try to save me?”
But it took forever to get home. We had to go to the police station. And then the morgue. And did you know we had a morgue in our town? I didn’t. But we had one, of course. Every town needs a place to put its dead people, and ours was right between the McDonald’s and the highway. This didn’t seem like the right place, but so it was.
I was surprised to realize that the morgue was just like any other building in the world. It was almost like a hospital, except all the people in it were dead and downstairs.
“Let me see my daughter!” Mom said, when a doctor emerged from the door.
Mom and Dad, needless to say, were distraught. Ever since they arrived at the scene, they kept alternating between screaming and crying. And now here, at the morgue, they were still screaming. Or, well, Mom was. Mom wanted to see you. But the doctor wouldn’t allow it. The doctor was eerily calm, wearing his white coat, standing in front of his door, like a bouncer to the underworld.
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you see her,” he said.
In his palm, he held two gold hoop earrings.
“Are these your daughter’s?”
“I don’t know,” Dad said. Dad rubbed his cheeks. Dad was upset. Dad pinched the bridge of his nose the way he did when he wanted to travel back in time to the moment before he rear-ended the mayor, before he spilled his coffee on the rug. “I don’t recognize them. I mean, they look like anybody’s earrings.”
And Mom wasn’t even listening to the doctor. Wasn’t even looking at the earrings. Mom wanted to see more than a pair of earrings.
“Let me see my daughter!” Mom shouted.
But the doctor was a professional. He stood there in his white coat with his pen, khakis, and gelled brown hair—and to think that he actually gelled his hair. To think people spent their whole lives at the morgue. People like this doctor got up every morning and showered and put on cologne and did their hair to be attractive at the morgue.
“I can’t let you see her,” he said. “I’m sorry. She’s not Kathy anymore.”
I’m sure this was another thing he was trained to say, something that was supposed to make us feel better, but it sounded like the worst thing I ever heard. You were not Kathy anymore. And if you weren’t Kathy, what were you?
That’s when they all looked at me.
“Yes,” I finally said. “Those are her earrings.”
And in that moment, as Mom screamed and collapsed into Dad’s chest, it felt as if I had finally killed you.
It was over. Mom and Dad signed some papers. The doctor gave me your earrings. They sat heavy in my palm, like two fossils dug up from the ruins. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I put them in my pocket. The bouncer put his clipboard under his arm. Dad put his arm around Mom. And then we did the craziest thing: We just walked out of the building and left you there. We walked through the door, back into the world, and the doctor descended into the basement, where he’d spend the beautiful day with your body.
* * *
On the way home, there was no more screaming. Mom and Dad were just quiet in an awful way. It was certain—you were dead, and we were just people in a car again. How could this be? The world was over, but we still had to do things like obey street signs and traffic lights. Dad held tightly to the wheel, and Mom kept looking back at me with a teary face, squeezing my hand. But then she faced forward, and it became really quiet, and it was still possible to pretend like none of this was happening. Like maybe we were on our way to the movies. Maybe we were going to the mall to buy you a dress for Billy’s prom.
But then we were on Main Street and the red light wouldn’t turn green. We were stopped at the red light for so long it seemed like somebody should turn on a radio or something, but nobody did. Music was already irrelevant.
In the silence of the red light, Dad gripped the wheel. Mom stared out the window like she might see you out there. A movement in the woods. A dog running across the street. I felt like somebody should speak, like if somebody didn’t speak now, there would never again be another thing to say.
“Is the light broken?” I asked.
Nobody knew. Nobody knew anything about the light. Nobody knew anything at all, except Mom, apparently.
“It sometimes takes this long,” Mom said.
Remember that Mom was connected to the town in a way Dad was not. A PTA member. A member of the Nutrition Committee. The Parks Committee. This would be important in the coming months—Mom would always be surrounded by a ring of women, everywhere she went, while Dad would grieve alone, like a dying wolf. Always inside. In his car. In his office. Dad, I would realize, didn’t belong to anything in this town, except to us.
“Does it?” Dad asked.
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember this light ever taking so long,” Dad said.
I waited. Please turn green, I thought. Please turn green. But it didn’t turn green. There was no mercy. Dad banged on the wheel. The horn half honked. Like we were in a clown car.
“Where did they take Billy?” I asked.
“The hospital,” Mom said.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“We don’t know,” Dad said.
“Can we go see him?”
“Sally,” Dad said. “Please stop asking about Billy.”
“I just want to know if he’s going to be okay.”
“We don’t know, honey,” Mom said.
“He better hope not,” Dad says. “If that boy is alive, I’ll kill him. I really will.”
Then the car was quiet again. The light was still red.
“This is ridiculous,” Dad said.
He couldn’t wait anymore. He stepped on the gas, and he drove through a red light for probably the first time in his life, and Mom shrieked and asked him to please drive like a normal person because our other daughter is still in the car, which he apparently had forgotten.
“I know our daughter is in the car!” Dad shouted.
Remember that this was our father, the same father who yelled “Eye on task” whenever we were carrying too many grocery bags into the house. Our father, who still wouldn’t let our mother buy furniture with glass edges despite the fact that we were teenagers. Our father, who put yellow masking tape at the top of the stairs so we would never forget that it was the top of the stairs. Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. That’s what I repeated as we drove home, as I walked the stairs to our bedroom and put your gold earrings back in the tiny drawer of your jewelry box, so you’d know exactly where to find them.
After you died, we went to church. That’s how it always was in our family—never religious until we had to be. Never prayed, until we lost our keys. Never went to church, until Mrs. Mitt called and asked if I was getting my first Communion like Valerie.
“Of course, Sally is getting her Communion,” Mom had said.
We were Catholics, weren’t we? We were baptized. Held above a basin of water and welcomed into the Church. Mom made me try on the same beautiful white dress that you wore for your first Communion, and I felt like I was getting sized for a costume, cast in a play about becoming a good Catholic. And you know I hated being in plays, especially plays that involved me confessing things. To a priest! But you promised me it would be easy.
“All you have to do is go in the little room and tell the priest the worst thing you ever did,” you said.
“But why?”
“So he can forgive you.”
“For what though?”
“For the terrible thing you’ve done.”
“But what if I haven’t done anything terrible?”
You laughed. “Everybody does terrible things. Even you, Sally.”
The trick was, you said, not to overthink it. If you overthought it, you’d never be able to choose between all the horrible things you did. And so I tried not to overthink it. I got in the car, where Dad put on the baseball game. Mom put on her lipstick in the mirror. I decided I’d say whatever you said for your first confession.
“What’d you tell the priest?” I asked.
“I kept it pretty simple,” you said. “I apologized for pinching the boys in my class.”
But I would never pinch a boy. I would never talk back to the teacher or harass the lunch ladies or pour milk on anybody’s head. I was a good student. I was quiet. A natural sharer, the teachers wrote. A spelling bee champ who cleaned the chalkboards before lunch.
“It doesn’t have to be pinching,” you said. “Could be anything you did wrong. What have you done wrong lately?”
It was too terrible to admit: After Grandpa’s funeral, I waited for everybody to leave the living room, walked over to the mantle, opened the urn, and looked inside. If this was actually Grandpa, I was going to take some of him home with me. I stuck my hand in, grabbed a fistful of ash, and the next thing I knew, Grandma was at my side. Grandma slapped me hard across the face.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. “This isn’t some stupid cookie jar you stick your hand in! This is my husband.”
I didn’t know, after, whether to wash my hand or not. It seemed wrong, to wash Grandma’s husband down the drain. So I just kept it in my pocket all the way home. I was so ashamed, I didn’t even tell you about it.
“I honestly can’t think of anything,” I said to you all in the car.
“You don’t always have to do something,” Mom said. “It could also be something you feel. What’s the worst thing you’ve felt recently?”
“Okay,” I said. “Well. If I’m going to be honest, I don’t really like Grandma all that much.”
“I’m glad someone finally said it,” Dad said.
But Mom got mad. “Sally! That’s a terrible thing to say about your only living grandparent.”
“I thought saying something terrible was the point?” I asked.
“Well, you can’t say that,” Mom said. “Your grandmother loves you. She’s driving all the way from the ocean, just to watch you be a sinner. Right, Richard?”
Mom always talked about Grandma coming straight from the ocean, which didn’t help things. It made her sound as if she lived in the ocean, like Ursula from The Little Mermaid who could drown people in her wild storms.
“Your mother is right, Sally,” Dad said.
“She’s kind of mean, sometimes,” you admitted.
“Your grandmother had a hard life, girls,” Dad said. “Try to imagine what it was like to be her, growing up during the Great Depression.”
I felt terrible when I saw Grandma at the church for my Communion, all done up in her orange suit, her blue lids, and the pearls around her neck. I hung my head and tried to picture her suffering, on a small boat, as a little girl, shivering in the wind. But after the ceremony, in the parking lot, I felt giddy in my white dress. I felt cleansed! Free of something terrible. Of myself.
We drove home with our parents, to the tiny party awaiting us in our backyard, to the mini hot dogs and the lemon cakes that we would feast on, because that’s what our parties were like then, so small, took place on one card table and one patch of grass between houses, and yet they felt huge. By the end of the night, I was full again. I felt like myself again. Weighted to the earth. Eating candy. Afraid to look at Grandma, who was just sitting at the card table, watching me.
“Sally,” Grandma said. “Come here. Show us what you did to your beautiful dress.”
I went. I showed them my white dress, tinged with mud from playing tag with Rick Stevenson and Peter Heart. But Mom didn’t care about the dress. “Oh, who cares about the dress?” Mom said. “I’m not having another kid. As far as I’m concerned, Sally can ruin it.”
Dad didn’t care, either. Dad said, “What are you going to do? That’s what kids do. They ruin things,” which upset Mom.
“That’s a terrible thing to say about children, Richard,” Mom said.
But Grandma just looked at me. Grandma could see the truth about me, all the way down to my rotten heart.
“Sally, what do you have to say for yourself?”
I didn’t know.
“Cat got your tongue?” Grandma said.
Grandma was always saying this to me. But I didn’t understand. Didn’t she remember that our cat was dead? That we had buried Doctor in the yard?
“What’s wrong with you, Sally? Why won’t you speak?” Grandma said. “What’s wrong with her, Susan? She’s getting too shy.”
Was I getting too shy?
“Sally’s not shy,” you said.
But this didn’t convince Grandma. I avoided Grandma for the rest of the night. For the rest of her life. Didn’t see her again until she was dead, laid out in the funeral home. She looked shockingly small, not like a sea monster at all. Grandma had just been a woman, I realized, and now she was dead, and I felt so ashamed of having been scared of her that I refused to speak at her funeral. I was too shy, I told Mom. Grandma was right. And what could I even say by that point, except I’m sorry?
* * *
I declined to speak at your funeral, too. The thought of standing up in front of our whole town made me too nervous. So, I sat quietly in the first pew between Mom and Dad and I made a mental list of all the things other people said about you:
You are a beautiful angel.
A candle blowing in the wind.
The warmth of the sun on our faces.
The reasons that the sunflowers grow tall.
And it amazed me how easily people said these things about you, how confident they sounded that you were better off now.
Then it was over and all the people came to our house and ate apple pie and swirled around our mother at the kitchen table, who was catatonic in her chair. They were still talking:
“What a terrible thing,” Mrs. Mountain said. “A terrible accident.”
“A stupid accident,” Aunt Beatrice said. “Stupid for that boy to be driving so fast.”
“He should be arrested,” Mrs. Mitt said.
Arrested?
“But Kathy told him to speed!” I finally said, because that was the truth. But the whole room looked at me as if I were crazy, even Mom and Dad. “She actually begged him to speed.”
“Sally,” Dad ordered. “Be quiet.”
Billy had just been doing me a favor, driving me to school when you told me there was absolutely no time to drive me to school. If it was Billy’s fault that you were dead, then it was also my fault—I knew this for certain. “It’s true!” I said. But nobody wanted to hear it. They refused to blame this on you.
“Sally, go up to your room!” Dad yelled, without even looking at me. Ever since you died, he seemed pained when he looked at me, as though it was too difficult to stare at one girl while trying to remember another.
For the rest of the night, I didn’t speak again. I felt weirdly unwelcome in our house. I went up to our bedroom, where I belonged. I turned off the lights and stared up at our ceiling and there we still were. KATHY and SALLY, glowing in the dark.
“What do you think Billy is doing, right now?” I asked, but you were silent.
Billy didn’t go to your funeral. For that, he was very sorry. He was sick over it. Wrote us a letter after he got out of the ICU, apologizing, and when he got home from the hospital, he apologized to me again online.
Yes, I was on your screen name. But I only went on once, and after, I deleted it forever, because some of your friends frantically messaged to see if you had virtually come back from the dead. Even Billy was spooked by it.
Who is this? Billy messaged, as soon as I logged on.
It’s just Sally, I wrote.
Oh, he wrote.
Sorry for confusing you.
Don’t apologize, he wrote. I’m the one who should be sorry.
There was a long pause.
I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the funeral, too, he wrote.
You were in the hospital, I wrote to him. Nobody blames you for that.
Your parents must hate me.
They don’t hate you, I wrote.
Our parents were divided on the issue of Billy. At night, they fought a lot about what they were going to do. To sue for reckless driving or not to sue? That was the question.
Dad wanted to sue. Dad wanted to press charges.
“That boy should be punished,” he said. “What was he thinking driving so fast on Main Street?”
But Mom wasn’t so sure that suing Billy was going to accomplish anything. Mom had driven fifty before on Main Street. Mom had become a good Catholic again ever since you died. Mom didn’t see how punishing Billy was going to help us feel better. Mom suggested we pray for him instead.
“Pray for him?” Dad laughed.
“Mrs. Barnes says that Billy’s not doing well,” Mom said. She told us how his broken jaw had been wired shut for weeks. “She said he can’t even speak. Or eat. He just cries all night long and makes himself sick.”
“Why are you telling me this, Susan?”
“Because she asked if we would have a meeting of the families,” Mom said. “She thinks it might help things if Billy could apologize to us in person.”
