I should be more specific.
This is my dead sister.
Violetta.
“Javi,” she says to me, lips curled up into a smile. “Are you surprised?”
A trick of the mind, that’s all this is. That’s all this will ever be.
I close my eyes, breathing in deep through my nose, my chest feeling tighter and tighter.
I open them.
She’s still there.
Sitting right there.
She looks exactly the same as the day I last saw her in a motel in Aguascalientes, moments before she blew up in a car bomb. Her eyes are ringed with the dark eyeliner she wore to try and make herself look older, but it only made her look emo instead.
“You’re not real,” I tell her.
But fuck, I can smell the perfume she always wore.
“I’m as real as you want me to be,” she says sweetly. “I don’t think it really matters in the end.”
“What do you mean?” Then I shake my head, look away. I’m talking to nothing. I’m talking to my distorted reflection in the window. That’s what Esteban was, that’s what this is.
I’ve officially lost my god damn mind.
“You’re not talking to nothing,” she says. “It’s me. Your sister. The one you failed to protect.”
My heart drops into my stomach and I look at her again.
Why the fuck is the pain so real?
“I didn’t…”
“Didn’t fail, Javi? You’ve failed many times. Your greatest flaw and your greatest strength is that you pretend you never do.” She pauses. “I know you just talked to Esteban. I know you think you’re going crazy, but if you have a chance to be saved, Javi, you need to pretend that you’re not. You need to listen. And I need to show you something.”
She gets to her feet and holds out her hand.
I stare at it for a moment.
It looks so damn real.
She cocks her head toward the door. “Come on,” she says softly, a faint smile. “We don’t have all night.”
Reluctantly, I put the poker down and I grab her hand.
She’s solid.
So solid, so real.
I feel the weight of tears forming in my chest, rising up through my throat, and there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
I collapse to my knees on the rug, still holding onto her hand, and I cry. I cry because not a day goes by that I don’t think about my baby sister, about how it was my fault that I lost her, that I dragged her back into my life and put her at risk. For the longest time I blamed everyone else but, in the end, I only had myself to blame.
She was right. I had failed.
She was my biggest failure.
“Javier,” she says softly, squeezing my hand. “I am not your greatest failure. But I am about to show you what was.”
I feel her tug at my hand and I look up, quickly wiping away my tears.
How can she feel so real?
Maybe because what I’m feeling inside, the guilt, the shame, the sorrow, that’s all real. That’s what’s creating this, this…illusion.
And I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse.
I get to my feet and she leads me out of the living room and back toward the front door.
She opens it with ease, no need to unlock it, giving my hand another squeeze, shooting me a reassuring smile over her shoulder.
It’s snowing outside.
Big fat white flakes spiral from a dark, cloudy sky, the moon shining from a clear patch of stars.
“My god,” I say, watching the flakes fall. “Is this real?”
“It’s all real, Javier,” she says.
She continues to lead me out into the cold, and I’m shivering in no time, my balls shrinking from the frigid air. If I’m actually out here, following shadows and dreams into the frozen night, there’s a chance they’re going to find me in the morning like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
She takes me toward a patch of pine trees in the corner and, as we walk beneath them, the Christmas-scent of their branches assaulting my nose, everything starts to dim.
“Violetta?” I ask.
“Shhhh,” she says, and now I can’t see her at all.
All I feel is my hand in hers.
The only thing tethering me to this world as it goes black.
And then, a light.
Faint. Like we’re coming to the end of a tunnel.
Except what we’re walking into is a house.
A familiar house on the coast of Mississippi.
My stomach lurches as I’m suddenly transported back in time.
“No,” I say to Violetta, shaking my head. “This can’t be.”
“It is,” she says matter-of-factly. “You’re here. And you know what’s going to happen next.”
I’m standing in the middle of the old house I used to share with Ellie…or Eden, her alias back then. It’s dark and empty as we stand here in the kitchen, and my sister is right. I know what’s going to happen.
I know that if I went down the hall, I’d see myself in the bedroom.
Fucking some whore.
Cheating on Ellie without a care in the world, all in the name of business.
Then I hear a sound coming from the garage. The faint purr of an engine.
My breath stills.
The door from the garage opens.
Ellie steps out into the house.
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.
It’s her. She’s so young and so innocent and so…beautiful. My god, no wonder I never stood a chance with her.
She walks toward me, her hair long and blonde, her limbs tanned. Music notes are tattooed around her bicep, and I remember so clearly the day we both got tattoos done for each other on our one-year anniversary. The notes represented the song “On Every Street” by Dire Straits, because I told her I’d never let her go, that I’d look for her on every street if she ever left.
I kept that promise, as I always do.
And here she is, in the flesh. She looks right at me, right into my soul.
“Ellie,” I say to her.
“She can’t hear you,” Violetta says, leaning with her elbows on the counter, face in her hands. “We can only watch the scene. What’s done is done.”
“Why
