The End, page 19
It would have ended between us sooner or later, but he only remembers the good things, Tilda wrote in that letter.
Is that true?
When Tilda and I were together, I sometimes felt that there were things she wasn’t telling me. Something in her eyes. A sentence left unfinished.
She was the person who knew me better than anyone else in the world. But she wrote that she’d kept secrets from Lucinda and me long before Foxworth.
I’m afraid of what we’ll find once we start looking. Will I discover things that force me to reevaluate our whole relationship, something that will ruin even the good memories?
The girl you were with . . . she doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe she never did.
Why didn’t I take her seriously? I was willing to do anything to get back together with Tilda. Anything except listen to what she was actually saying.
It feels like Foxworth is a spotlight that illuminates everything we do to try to hold on to the people we love the most. Judette sacrificed a relationship with Maria. And I have no right to be angry with Stina for giving Judette an ultimatum. It was what she needed.
A gust of wind whispers through the crack in the door. Bits of paper tumble across the asphalt.
There are no streetlights around. Did Tilda come here to meet someone? Or was she already dead when her body was left here?
No one would have heard her if she’d screamed for help. That night was full of screams.
Would I hear her now? If I really listened?
When I drove Stina to work, she suggested I try talking to Tilda.
The idea makes my heart beat faster.
“Tilda,” I say.
Her name feels strange in my mouth, like her death has transformed it into something else.
I shiver. Close my eyes.
“Tilda, if you can hear me, I want you to know that I’m thinking about you. And I miss you. A lot.”
There’s no reply. I feel ridiculous, but force myself to continue.
“Lucinda and I are trying to find out who left you here. She misses you, too. If you can help us in any way, please try.”
I jump in my seat when someone knocks on the side window. Lucinda is standing outside the car. She mimes sorry. Her hair is blonde, with bangs, just like in the photos in Tilda’s room. It takes me half a second to realize it’s a wig.
Has she seen me talking to myself?
I step out of the car and pull my hood up against the wind.
“Sorry I scared you,” Lucinda says.
In her black sunglasses, I’m reflected against the sky. This time, I’d like to hug her if she makes the first move. She doesn’t.
“Thanks for talking to Maria yesterday,” I say.
“You don’t have to thank me again. It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s something.”
She smiles, but I can tell that something’s wrong.
“Is everything okay?” I ask her.
“I don’t know. Is it ridiculous to think we can do this? I mean, even if we find the person who did it, why would they confess?”
I swallow the desperate impulse to try to persuade her. I don’t want Lucinda to agree to this if she doesn’t actually want to.
But I want her to want to.
“I don’t know if it’s ridiculous,” I say. “All I know is that I have to try. And the person who did it might want to confess.”
Lucinda brushes a strand of hair from her face. She looks doubtful, but is still listening.
“Stina says that the people who come to church nowadays want to unburden themselves,” I continue. “She says people who know they’re dying tend to share their secrets with someone.”
“I never did. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
I don’t know how to reply to that. For a long moment, Lucinda’s quiet.
“We’ll have to hope that whoever we’re looking for isn’t like me,” she says after a while, and then looks at the piles of flowers and cards. “Did you bring anything?”
“I didn’t even think of that. Should we have?”
She shakes her head firmly. “Tilda lay dead here for days. It’s the last place I’d like to leave her flowers.”
I follow her gaze. Consider how cold and wet the asphalt must have been that night. Lucinda is right.
“Okay.” She sighs. “Let’s do this.”
We cross the parking lot side by side. I pick up a discarded note. The text is unreadable—the ink’s dissolved in the rain, blossomed into storm-colored clouds, and dried again. I let the paper go, and the wind catches it while we keep walking. The sun shimmers in shattered glass, gleams in empty bottles. Cigarette butts are everywhere, as if there’s been a party here. There’s a faint rustle when the wind moves through drying bouquets.
Lucinda removes her sunglasses. The circles under her eyes are as dark as bruises. Together, we look at the teddy bears and stuffed animals. Some of them have fallen on their sides, like passed-out drunks. Their eyes gaze emptily at us. Two furry bears each hold out a heart-shaped pillow with factory-made greetings in cursive. I miss you! and You rock! I squat down, inspecting them more closely.
“They used to sell those at the hospital,” Lucinda says, face unmoving. “I got five of them while I stayed there.”
I take photos of the bears with my phone. Lucinda picks up a bouquet. The leaves are so dry they crumble when she pulls out the card that’s been taped to the stems.
“‘From Elin and Amanda,’” she says. “‘We love you. Rest in peace.’”
She puts the flowers back without photographing them, then lifts a white plush rabbit that dirt and rain has turned a speckled gray. Her phone clicks. I lift a candle that weighs down a checkered piece of paper. The handwriting looks like it belongs to an older person who, with hands that trembled slightly, tried to write as beautifully as they could.
Do not say that nothing is left
Of the loveliest butterfly life has blessed.
Don’t say the colorful wings are lashed
By winds that turn them to ash, to ash.
If the butterfly’s body
Is buried of late,
Yet still the dizzying flight awaits!
The poem is signed by someone named Gill. I look up at Lucinda, who’s been reading over my shoulder. She’s donned the sunglasses again, and pushes them up her nose.
“What a bunch of bullshit,” she says, and takes a photo.
There are more poems. Song lyrics. Collages made up of photos of Tilda.
“Look at this,” Lucinda says, holding out a laminated piece of paper.
I immediately recognize the text, which is printed in a font meant to suggest calligraphy. It’s the start of a poem that was everywhere at the beginning of the summer. The poet, Lord Byron, was one of Emma’s favorites when she was our age.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
“Whoever left this probably didn’t even know who Tilda was,” Lucinda says.
I dutifully take a picture of it, but I suspect she’s right. The poem has nothing whatsoever to do with Tilda. It’s about all of us. An attempt to elevate our own deaths, to make them something darkly romantic and haunting.
We find a few greetings from old classmates I’ve never met, and one from the teacher who wrote “no smoke without fire.” Metal gleams under a bouquet with uneven, torn stems. Someone has picked woodland sage and red valerian from a flower bed. The purple and pink blossoms have turned brown and faded. There’s a pile of medals with different-colored ribbons underneath them.
“They’re from relays the team won with Tilda,” Lucinda says, handing them to me.
The metal is cold against my fingers. I trace the names, trying to recall if I watched any of these competitions, but it’s difficult to separate all those different pools in my mind.
The relays were the only times the swimmers worked together, were a real team, and I see Tilda in my mind’s eye. How she flowed through the water. Her open mouth sucking in air before her head disappeared back under the surface.
“No note,” I say.
“There doesn’t need to be. Tommy had them. But it’s only right that he give them to Tilda. It’s because of her we won so many.”
The medals clink together when I place them back on the asphalt.
“Did you like it?” I ask.
“What?”
“Swimming?”
A couple of seconds of silence pass.
“Yes. I loved it more than anything.”
She gets to her feet.
“Can I ask you something?” I ask.
“Sure.”
I follow her to the fence. Now I see that what I took to be trash are paper flowers, attached to the fence with pipe cleaners. The thin, silky paper has been ruined by the rain and the wind.
“When you were sick . . . did you get used to the idea of dying?” I ask.
“Yes.”
Lucinda plucks a pale-yellow flower from the fence, takes a picture, and then reattaches it.
“So you can get used to it,” I say.
“There’s a difference. I was so sick I didn’t care anymore.”
“But do you think you had a head start? Compared to the rest of us.”
Lucinda turns to me.
“I’ve missed out on so much, I don’t know which of us really has a head start.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“I know. But it’s just like Tilda wrote. She and I were good girls who always did what we were supposed to do. We thought we were going to live life later. And look at us now.” Lucinda wipes away tears from under her sunglasses; her breathing is heavy.
“Sorry,” I say again.
“You don’t have to apologize. But I don’t have any fucking cancer wisdom to share to make things easier for you.”
She starts picking at a pile of stuffed animals. I pick up the stump of a candle. A note with a heart on it. Sait has scrawled his name on it. But he was also at the after-party when I got there.
“I recognize this,” Lucinda says.
She holds out a tiger cub with large paws, long whiskers, and oversized blue glass eyes. I’ve never seen it before. When Lucinda photographs it, it looks like its half-open mouth is smiling at the camera.
We’re finishing up, and I shiver when a breeze creeps into and under my hoodie. Lucinda gets up. Looks at me.
“Shit,” she says, and touches a hand to her forehead.
I reach her just as she collapses.
NAME: LUCINDA
TELLUS #0392811002
POST 0029
Ifainted in North Gate. It was a head rush; I got up too quickly. And I haven’t been sleeping enough.
Simon drove me home. He stopped a block away so Dad wouldn’t see us together. At that point, I felt fine, albeit somewhat embarrassed.
When I stepped into the house, I could hear Christmas carols echoing through the halls; it was the kind they play in shops throughout December, prompting you to wonder how the employees can stand it. Someone had placed the ugly knitted Santas I’d made ages ago in school on the chest of drawers in the hall. I went into the kitchen, where Dad and Miranda were enjoying non-alcoholic mulled wine. There were Santas everywhere. The Christmas lights were on. I don’t know how to convey how bizarre it was to see a Christmas star in the window while the garden was blooming outside.
Miranda had been down in the cellar and brought up boxes of Christmas things. She’d found the wine and spices in the cupboard. I wondered how long she’d been planning it. “I wanted to celebrate Christmas one last time,” she explained, and I didn’t dare look at Dad. I knew that if I did, one of us was going to cry, and it would probably be me. My little sister loves Christmas. Most kids do, but I do mean loves. Not just the presents, but the food and the gaudy decorations and the cheery carols.
Dad found a tin of anchovies in the fridge and made Christmas casserole, while Miranda and I decorated the tree. And I actually got into the holiday spirit, especially when the sky got dark. While we ate, we watched Donald Duck’s Christmas on YouTube, and as usual, Dad went on about the show being the most important thing about Christmas when he was a kid, “because they never showed cartoons on TV back then, and we only had two channels, and no internet. You wouldn’t have lasted a day.” This speech is pretty much a Christmas tradition of its own. And now we got to experience it one final time. Then we watched a movie called Home Alone. I grinned and suffered through it for Miranda’s sake. She laughed herself sick when the thieves got all beat up.
I don’t write enough about my sister. I don’t want you to think she isn’t important to me. I’d love it if she wrote in TellUs, too, so you could get to know her properly. Maybe she’s already doing it. It would be typical of Miranda not to tell me or Dad about it. Have a look and see if you can find her stories on here.
The two of us are so different. Miranda has always been a thinker, but it hasn’t stopped her from having lots of friends. I wonder what she would have been like in junior high, when so much can happen so unbelievably quickly. We ended up in new classes, in new and unpredictable roles. Pacts and loyalties could change on a daily basis, friends becoming enemies overnight. Nothing was reliable. Not even your own body was the same from one day to the next. I was glad I had swimming, just so I had something else to focus on. We were outsiders to the invisible wars raging through the corridors. We were in a bubble not many people were interested in penetrating. But Miranda didn’t have a refuge.
Simon and I didn’t find anything in North Gate, but we’re going to keep looking. My hesitation went away as soon as I met him. Strange how much braver you get when there are two of you.
I wonder what so much time spent alone has done to me? Have I become a coward? Difficult for you to respond, I know. You haven’t known me for long, and can only get a part of me through these posts. And you can never really know me, not even if I wrote down every single thought I’ve ever had. Not even if we met. Not even if you were human, too.
Tomorrow at noon, Simon is meeting Caroline. He might find out something new about Tilda, about why she was so angry with Tommy.
In the afternoon, after we’ve found out what Caroline knows, I’m meeting Tommy in town. I promised Simon I’d suggest a public place. Just to be safe. Ironic, isn’t it? I’ve been avoiding town so I wouldn’t be seen, but now I have to go there to be seen.
If Tommy doesn’t give us any leads, we’re going to contact Tilda’s dealer. I’ve figured out what to say to him or her. I just hope I don’t need to.
I’m going to try to sleep now. I dozed off after the movie, for half an hour or so, but when I woke up, my sheets were soaked with sweat. It can happen to anyone; it doesn’t have to mean anything. It really doesn’t. But that’s exactly what I told myself when I first got sick and refused to consider that something was seriously wrong.
P.S.: Simon’s mom Stina said people want to share their secrets before they die. I didn’t think I was like that. But isn’t this my way of doing just that? Even if I’m writing to someone who might not be real?
P.P.S.: Our “Christmas” really made me miss winter. And I normally hate the darkness and the cold. Now I find myself longing for the cover of snow, the way it makes everything shiny and luminous. I keep thinking about the way snow creaks beneath your boots.
2 WEEKS, 2 DAYS LEFT
NAME: LUCINDA
TELLUS #0392811002
POST 0030
So, the plan was to (a) meet Tommy in a public place, and (b) do it after Simon had spoken to Caroline. But Tommy called me this morning and said that something had come up. If I wanted, he was “in the area” and could pick me up in his car.
I imagine I seem somewhat intelligent and eloquent on TellUs, but when faced with something unexpected, it’s like my brain starts lagging. And that’s the best possible outcome. Other times, I completely shut down. Like when Tommy called and wanted to come pick me up. I couldn’t think of a single excuse. So I said yes. Sure. That’s fine. How nice. Please don’t kill me.
I decided to record the conversation with Tommy, even though it didn’t go particularly well the last time I tried that, with Simon on the dock. (I never told you this, but I dropped my phone right in front of him. Had he been the murderer, I might not be writing this.)
Since I am, you can probably guess that I wasn’t horrifically murdered. But I was scared stiff when Tommy’s car stopped on my street. I had visions of nightmare scenarios: I ask the wrong question, Tommy panics and hits me over the head so hard I pass out, the car drives to North Gate and stops outside the glass factory.
What actually happened was that I sat down in the passenger seat while Tommy unfastened his seat belt so that he could hug me tightly. He said, “I’m so glad you got in touch,” and “I was hoping we’d have the chance to speak at the funeral, but well, it got kind of messy.” While driving us toward town, he told me he’d started group therapy this summer to deal with comet-related anxiety (his expression, not mine). And he’s met someone who means a lot to him. He’s never felt like this before.
He never used to talk about himself much, especially not about things that could be seen as weaknesses. I guess it would have undermined his authority. I was grateful to Foxworth for transforming him into such an open, talkative person, because I didn’t really have to contribute to the conversation. Now and then, I caught him glancing at me, sneaking looks. As if it was forbidden to notice how thin I’ve gotten, the fact that I was wearing a wig. It’s usually exhausting to know that you make other people uncomfortable simply by existing, but at that moment, it felt like a kind of protection. Tommy didn’t dare eye me so carefully that he’d notice how nervous I was; and even if he did, he’d think it was because of my illness.
