about toting her to and from Girl Scouts, or babysitting on a Saturday night, or having to hear her and Mitchy Rogers make fart noises at the dinner table. But I think it right then: I love this kid.
The rain begins. Just a smattering of raindrops, but big fat ones. I don’t think about how these raindrops will make the walk back to the sand beach more dangerous. It doesn’t even occur to me. Oh, how I have second-guessed so many of these details.
Sophie spends a lot of time pocketing small stones near the shore. “I think this is a Petoskey!” she says, showing me a tiny stone with peach-colored spiraled ridges. I nod enthusiastically, but I can’t tell what it is. The wind is pushing the waves higher onto the beach, so we have to leave via the large rocks just as we came, and when we start back, she leads. She stands erect, no crouching over. She knows the weather is turning, I’m sure, so she hurries.
I watch her slip like it is in slow motion. She’s way ahead of me.
Mom’s gonna kill me, I think, picturing Sophie bloodying her knees. Maybe even stitches. But before that thought is even fully formed, I see that it is worse than this. She’s going so fast across the rocks, and she hops—two-footed. She lands, slipping. She hops again, and one foot slips. She yelps. Her feet slip out from under her and her head falls backward. It is an awkward, painful-looking fall, with too much momentum, too much force slamming the back of her head onto the rocks.
After the six or eight steps it takes me to get beside her, I see she is unconscious, and her body seizes, trembles, and jerks, the whites of her eyes showing, her limbs working so unnaturally.
The sight of Sophie, the blood on the rock under her head, the ugly movements of this seizure, it wrecks me. I panic.
“Oh God, oh God,” I say, scanning my brain, trying to think but coming up with nothing. Something about her tongue. Where’s my cell phone?
The wind blows hard then off the lake, and the air changes, a change in pressure, a change that registers on my skin. The hairs on my arms stand up and then …
Black. I don’t remember anything that happens. I lose time.
But when I come to—later, much later—I am lying awkwardly on the rocks, Sophie nearly on top of me, both of my hands on her face, one on either cheek. It is raining hard now, thunder clapping and rolling right above us. The waves roll in, slapping us with cold lake water. It is later, much later, and I am dazed.
What happened?
We are both soaked to the bone, and it is cold. My teeth chatter, and I begin to cry when I see that Sophie’s teeth are chattering too. She is okay! She opens her eyes, and they register me next to her. I’m so happy. I’m so relieved.
“Sissy,” she whispers.
Sophie sits up. I sit up too, but my head feels woozy, too big, and the air around me gets that crackle in it again. My skin begins to feel heightened, stretched differently on my body.
A burning begins in my chest, an unnatural sensation. It’s prickly and growing—electrical yet not really. I bring my hands to my chest and take a deep breath. Everything in my vision turns a little bit lighter, tinged with blue.
I turn to Sophie, ready to say something, ask her if she feels something. She is shaking. And I think: shock.
But I see her eyes roll back again. Another seizure?
Without thinking, I reach toward my baby sister and I place my hand on her cheek, a comforting gesture, a big-sisterly gesture, a loving gesture.
I see blue—that very specific indigo blue—all around me. All of a sudden, everything is bathed in it. Sophie’s face, the rocks below us, the cloudy sky, my hands. And the current, the charge running through me, it surges. No, it explodes inside me, inside my chest, down and out each of my limbs, inside my head and out my eyes, through every cell.
Then the surge grows bigger even, louder. Crescendo. Everything vibrates around us. And I am blind.
Everything goes white. I can feel Sophie fall away from my hand. I worry about her head hitting the rocks again, but I can’t see. I somehow grab her with both arms, and I get her, hold her. I feel her body shiver, shake, and then it goes limp. And I can’t see her, and it’s still surging through me, and I pass out.
I’m awoken by a paramedic in the back of an ambulance. I know before anyone even tells me. Sophie is dead. I feel it. I did it.
I shook my head and brought myself back to here, now. Back to my kitchen. And Mia-Joy’s last chance to say goodbye to Granny Lucy. It took several deep breaths to uncurl my fists, to stop gritting my teeth.
I pushed away the thoughts that I had done the same to Granny Lucy as I had to Sophie. I shook my head against the idea. I hadn’t felt it in the Rawlingses’ kitchen, not before I passed out, not when I regained consciousness. I hadn’t felt it stirring or churning in my chest.
Panic danced at the edges of my consciousness, for Mia-Joy, for her family. Because I knew what it was like not being able to say goodbye.
I had to go. I made my decision. You cannot hug Mia-Joy, cannot touch her, even if she cries. Even if she reaches for you, desperate in her time of need.
I ran upstairs, pulled on some shorts and a T-shirt, threw my hair in a ponytail, and took off for the Lurie Cemetery.
It was a short walk of about ten minutes to Lurie. I had gone there tons of times, even once to do a seance with Mia-Joy when we were around twelve, but that had been during the daylight. It was dark tonight. The air, thick and muggy yet considerably cooler than earlier, held the now-familiar scents of magnolias and salt water. Once in a while, the breeze would bring a few sad notes from a saxophone playing at the Mint Julep, the only jazz club within walking distance of my house.
The streets in my neighborhood were not completely dead, just quiet, with occasional laughter floating from the restaurants near the cemetery. An old, wrinkled banjo player sat on a street corner, although at the moment, he wasn’t playing anything except for the timely tune of his snoring, his head lolled against the nylon back of his old lawn chair, his banjo resting hopeful on his knee. A group of teenagers passed by him, laughing and talking, oblivious to him and me.
I walked by quietly, hoping not to wake him. I took these sites in around me with quick sideways glances, careful not to meet anyone’s eyes. It was habit now. I didn’t even have to think about it. It had required a lot of practice at the beginning, right after Sophie, because I had not come by it naturally.
At the corner of Manderly and Lurie, a young couple strolled arm in arm toward me from the bank of cafes across from the cemetery. I heard laughing and the clink of glasses coming from the veranda of the nearest bar.
I crossed the street, tried to look invisible, and stole around the side of the wrought-iron entryway to the cemetery. I eyed the mausoleums and monuments, the architecture of the white crypts, the gargoyle statuary, the intricate wrought-iron crosses.
Recently, I had been here to sketch, by myself, of course. But it wasn’t much of a secret that Liberty kids would be here on a Saturday night in the summer. Even I had heard about it.
I opened the wrought-iron gate and it creaked only slightly, although I was aware of how much creepier the place seemed at night. A stone gargoyle startled me as I turned the first corner toward the crypt of Madame Vallion. I knew that’s where they met. I knew there would be beer, probably the cheap kind in quart bottles, probably someone with a joint. Mia-Joy was, of course, in love. And Jules Jackson hung here, so Mia-Joy would be here, batting her eyelashes, trying to get his attention, and, of course, succeeding.
I got a little turned around near the stone crypt with the graffiti-style portrait of Jesus, but I figured it out pretty quickly. I was calming down now. I realized that I was much more comfortable with all these dead people, all these resting souls, than the idea of having to interact with real people, alive people.
I walked along quietly and heard the first murmurs and laughter in the distance. A firecracker shot off and nearly knocked me over with surprise, but once I realized what it was, I headed toward the low bass of party
