Indigo

last Christmas on the piano.

I fought the tears. Her blue eyes, all hopeful and ready for the world. That short nose, the freckles. Her gap-toothed smile.

I turned the page. Sophie as a baby, sitting in the laundry basket chewing on the rawhide that belonged to Granddad’s dog. Sophie swinging in the baby swing. Sophie eating her first ice cream cone. Sophie on the Canal Street ferry.

And here we both were, arms around each other, Sharpie mustaches that we drew on our faces—I had been trying to cheer her up after she broke her wrist falling out of the Sandbergs’ hayloft.

Jesus, it hurt to look at these. I closed the album, leaned my head back on the bed.

When I was finished, I put the album back and went to my room. I took out my sketchpad and found my pastels. I picked the indigo pastel. It was like new, unused. I never consciously decided not to use it, but now that I looked at it, it was the exact right shade of blue. Just this side of dark blue, with a hint of violet. Just the right deepness to it. Like the ocean on a postcard kind of day. Or the sky when there’s a rainbow.

Or the color of the powerful, flashing, crackling force of light that surrounds both you and your baby sister on the beach when you try to save her life, and you tell her, “Sophie, I got you, I got you,” and you hold her close, and you see the way her face relaxes, like she knows that you’ll save her, that it is going to be okay.

And you assume that blue is there when you lose time right then. You don’t know what happens. But you are sure that blue is there.

That same blue of the waves, lapping at you both on the shore when you come to, and she’s next to you—is she breathing?

And you reach out with your hand—

No. I shook my head, bumping it against the mattress behind me. I am not thinking about this again.

I was suddenly enraged, furious with Rennick “Mr. Crawdad Magic Trick” Lane. Did he think that he could gain some friends by telling them crazy stories about me? Was he trying to impress some voodoo-happy pals of his? Had he done that to me on some dare? Trying to get me to wig out so that he and his friends could laugh about it with some quart beers down at the cemetery later on?

I knew that I would go find Rennick tomorrow morning. I knew that I was going to give him a piece of my mind. I also knew that, no matter how mad I was, I didn’t want to entangle him in my curse. But who knew what he might do next time?

I was going to put him in his place. Then maybe I’d just keep going and leave here.

I shook my head. No. I knew I couldn’t run. It wouldn’t do any good. I couldn’t get away from this. I couldn’t get away from me. I would just end up hurting other people. Someone else’s loved ones. Someone else’s Sophie.

5

I stayed in my room. Isolation.

But I also Googled things. Weird things like physio-electricity. Reanimation of crustaceans. I didn’t believe Rennick. But part of me wanted to.

I didn’t find any answers. Not even any leads. But he had me thinking.

It was late, and I sat on my bed eating cucumbers and ketchup—Sophie’s favorite.

I had absentmindedly sketched several pictures of Mia-Joy while I sat on my bed watching TV. But I hadn’t gotten her eyes exactly right. They flitted from one thing to another so quickly. She lived her life in eighth notes, bouncing here and there, staccato. And I hadn’t captured it.

I heard a click-clack then. I cocked my head, tried to figure out where it had come from.

Click.

I stared at the window. It sounded like it came from there. Click-clack. There it was. Someone had thrown something at my bedroom window. I froze for a second. What? I didn’t know if I should go see who it was or just ignore it.

Maybe because I had just been looking at her picture, I thought of Mia-Joy. Maybe she needed me. Was there something I could do for her—from a distance? I hesitated. I felt guilty that I hadn’t talked to her since Granny Lucy’s death.

Another rock. Click-clack.

I walked over to the window, peered into my backyard, which was bathed in only a small triangle of light from the nearby streetlamp. I saw a figure there. It looked larger than Mia-Joy. I squinted.

The figure waved, then beckoned. Before I realized who it was, I had this sense that I was watching one of the old black-and-white movies I loved. The streetlamp, the swoop of his gravity-defying hair, the line of his profile. He was the hero, the suave leading man. Lithe and broad-shouldered. Moving with confidence. Fred Astaire. I blinked and brought myself back to where I was, to who really stood down there in my yard.

It was him. Rennick. I stepped back and sat on my bed.

Son of a gun, I thought. Did he come for another kick in the nuts?

I wanted to be mad at him. I wanted to think he had pulled some big prank on me. But really, I was hoping there was some truth to what he had told me. Shown me.

But maybe his buddies were waiting in the bushes, ready to scare the shit out of the freaky Corrine Harlowe, who couldn’t shake anyone’s hand or give a high five. Or usually meet anyone’s eye. I knew about the snickers, the theories all the kids at school had about me. Germophobe. OCD. Schizo.

Rennick.

But there was a part of me that was curious. Could he know something? It was just so hard to trust myself, my judgments, anything.

I stopped still on my bed for a moment, reaching for my blue nail polish. What if I could control it somehow? Tame it. Not just be at its mercy. It was a singular thought. And because everything always seemed so out of my control, so beyond me, I hadn’t ever seriously considered it. Until that moment.

What if I learned to control it? What if the crawdad was not a fluke? Was that plausible? What if I could own this thing?

I thought of Mom’s quivering chin when she had broken the news about Granny Lucy’s death. The way she had come into my room later that night and asked if I thought I needed to see Dr. Claude again. “Because, Corrine,” she had said, “he can go through the medical reports again. Explain how Sophie died from cardiac arrest, likely brought on by the head injury. I mean, I thought we were getting somewhere.” She had waited for me to respond. I was surprised that I was so transparent, that she knew what I was thinking, but then again, that was Mom.

My silence answered her. She liked to believe we were getting somewhere.

“You didn’t have anything to do with Lucy,” she had said. “Corrine, I lost Sophie, and ever since, I lose you a little bit more every day. Your father and I can’t watch you do this!” Her voice had broken, and she had reached for me, without thinking, I’m sure.

I had recoiled, but I added, “I’ll see Dr. Claude.” I would do anything to keep that hopeless look off of her face.

Maybe even see what this Rennick knew.

In my before-life, before Sophie died, I had loved goals, challenges, winning. I tackled Beethoven’s Ninth for contests when everyone said it was suicide. I chose Faulkner off the English list when everyone else veered toward Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates. When Coach told me I had a better chance to go to state in the free or even the medley, I chose the butterfly. It was the hardest for me as a swimmer. I came in second. I did get a first at contest for Beethoven that year, though. But I never did understand Faulkner. I traded him in halfway through the semester for Stephen King and read six of his books over spring break last year.

Tame it. Control it. It sounded impossible. But didn’t all of this?