The man flushed and then nodded. “Sorry, yes. Show your daughter to you. Did you want to see her?”
Dad blinked fast. Then he moved his shoulders back and straightened his spine.
“Yes, I’d like to see her.” As he turned, he saw me and paused, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Stay here, Jess,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
“No,” I said. “I’m coming with you.”
The man in the white coat shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I’m coming with you,” I repeated.
—
THE ELEVATOR DOORS SHUDDERED SLIGHTLY when they opened, revealing the harshly lit halls of the hospital basement. The path to Anna was long, taking the three of us past many open doors and little side hallways.
The room we eventually entered contained several long gurneys. Only one was occupied, the body covered with a pale blue sheet.
The man walked in and stood by the gurney.
Dad took the first step forward and I followed. Every step was harder than the last.
When we stopped, the man pulled back the sheet.
And there she was.
Very still.
The man’s gaze flickered between me and her, matching our faces, comparing features. Dad crossed his arms tightly around himself. I stood quietly, even as the room began gently swaying around me and the edges started to blur.
“It’s her,” Dad said quietly.
She was wearing a dress, one she’d bought a few months back but had never worn before. It was dark purple, her favorite color, with little pearl buttons running down the front. She had a thick cardigan on over it, and one of her hands extended from underneath the long wool sleeve, fingers bent toward her palms. It was twisted, though, at a strange angle from the rest of her body.
It was easier to look at her body, or at least the part revealed from beneath the sheet, than her face. Her face, my face—her skin pale, with a hint of blue around her mouth. I felt myself reaching up to touch my own mouth, not sure whether my skin was still warm, not sure how it could be that she was on the table and I was still upright.
I dropped my hand and took another step toward her. Then it hit me. Lavender, I thought. You smell like lavender. You’re wearing a dress and you smell like lavender. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, I thought. This is all wrong.
Dad took a deep breath. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go check on Mom.”
“No. She shouldn’t be alone,” I said.
“Jess…”
She’ll wake up, I wanted to tell him. If I stay, I’ll find a way to wake her up. If you give me a minute, I’ll figure something out. But even as I opened my mouth, the words stuck in my throat, no match for her bluing skin, for the stiffness of her twisted limbs.
—
WE WERE ALMOST BACK TO the elevator when something broke inside me, slamming against my organs with the force of a fist. I swerved off course, staggering away from my dad and toward the closest bathroom. Inside, I lurched to the sink and grasped it with both hands to avoid sliding down to the tiled floor. I dry-heaved into the basin as my body tried to exorcise the image of Anna’s too-pale face, the knowledge that she was gone.
But it was buried deep within me and could not be extracted.
I don’t know exactly when it started, when I decided to diverge from who I was before.
It seems like there should have been one big moment when it happened, when it all began spiraling down.
Doesn’t it?
MY PARENTS USED TO THINK there was something wrong with me. They never said as much, but I clearly remember long drives to meet with doctors who asked me a lot of strange questions and spent no time checking my physical health. Anna came along on those visits, but she didn’t get asked those questions—she was allowed to play with toys in the corner, to write and draw on sheets of construction paper. It’d be her turn next time, our parents said when we asked about this disparity. It never was.
I knew, of course, that people found Anna easier to get along with than me. I saw how their shoulders relaxed when they interacted with her, how those same shoulders tensed when they talked to me. How she somehow knew what to do, what to say. Sometimes I’d watch her and try to mimic her, but her words and gestures felt wooden, unnatural when I performed them.
Not that it really mattered. In Birdton, Montana—population 4,258—once people decide who you are, there’s little you can do to change their minds. Everything about you could change, but they’d always remember the time when someone bumped against you in the grocery store and you screamed and screamed, or how, back in kindergarten, the teacher’s aide had to come with you to the bathroom so you didn’t spend thirty minutes washing your hands.
Anna knew those things were only small parts of my history, not the whole of who I was. She had been the only one who’d understood that. Who had understood me.
And I thought I’d understood her too. Thought I’d known everything about her. But I kept going back to the policeman’s questions: if she’d seemed upset recently, if she’d had a boyfriend. I’d said no to both, without even thinking I could be wrong.
Yet looking back, things had been different for the past few months. We’d talked less, and she’d been tired, distracted, and forgetful. She’d even snapped at me a couple of times, which she’d never done before. I’d been so sure of what we were to each other that it hadn’t occurred to me that these changes were a pattern, that they might indicate some larger problem beneath the surface.
I’d been so confident when I’d said there was no boyfriend. Anna used to talk to me about boys sometimes, starting back when we’d still shared a room, her words
