I’d never seen Blake’s mom before, but I knew the story. She’d died six hours after giving birth to Blake. A hemorrhage of some kind.
I meet Blake’s eyes, wondering what that must be like. Never having known your mom. To only have that picture on your phone, or stories told over dinner about a person you know but never really knew.
When my mom died, it felt like everyone I knew had a story about her. Every story was a different flavor of grief, a memory that would just pour out of people to absolve a wound far beneath the skin. To make sense of something that couldn’t make sense. As they talked, I would wonder if it was for me or for them, the stories slowly becoming empty words. Empty words passing over lips in an attempt to reconcile a loss that couldn’t be reconciled.
Sometimes the things people told me didn’t even sound like her. Like the parts of my mom they were giving me were all wrong. Like they didn’t even add up to the person I knew.
What would it be like to just have those stories? To maybe not even know what was real. Or… what was fake.
“Well,” I say to her, not wanting to pick at either of our wounds, my eyes moving back to the yearbook picture of her gawky teen dad. “It’s good to know the whole crushing puberty thing is genetic for you Carters. All I got was boobs and a tick mark over five-three.”
She pockets her phone, giving me a long look.
“Fine. A tick mark over five-two.”
She shakes her head and holds out the yearbook to me, but as she does a folded piece of paper falls out of the very back. I watch as it floats down to the worn wood of my parents’ bedroom floor, the faded page landing gently on the ground between us, with a whisper too quiet for me to hear.
I can feel it in the air though, the hair on the back of my neck standing on end when I catch sight of my mom’s handwriting, bleeding through from the other side.
I reach out to pick it up, carefully unfolding it to see JULIE MILLER’S SENIOR YEAR SUMMER in thick, bold letters. TWELVE ADVENTURES BEFORE TWELFTH GRADE is written just under it, slightly smaller.
The paper is crisp but thin underneath my fingertips, holding all the years between the last time my mom touched it and right now.
The handwriting is the same loopy cursive I remember. More legible, perhaps, with the forced neatness we all try for when something is important. Every line is written in a different color ink, still vibrant after all this time.
Get a tattoo.
Get over my fear of heights.
Go on a picnic.
Try a new food.
Get out of Huckabee.
Sleep under the stars.
Go on the Huckabee Lake trip.
Skinny-dip in Huckabee Pool after hours.
Buy a book in another language.
Steal an apple from the First Tree at Snyder’s Orchard.
Find a four-leaf clover.
Kiss J. C.
“What is it?” Blake asks.
“It’s like… a bucket list,” I say, holding it up for her to read. “From the summer before their senior year.”
I watch her eyes move down the paper, quietly taking it all in.
“How’s it going up there?” my dad’s voice calls up to us, the bottom step creaking under his weight as Blake and I jump.
“Fine!” I call back, quickly folding the paper and shoving it into my pocket. I start to load the stuff back in the box, the yearbook, the stuffed moose, the varsity letters. “Just got done packing up the shoes!”
I don’t look at Blake, but about halfway through my manic packing, she starts helping me, quickly stuffing the last few things in the box and standing up.
“I’m taking a truckload of stuff over to Goodwill,” my dad calls, which has been his catchphrase for the past week and a half. “You guys want to bring your boxes down?”
“Yeah, definitely!” I call as I slide the Huckabee Lake room-number plate inside and fold the cardboard corners of the box shut, over, under. “We’ll be right down!”
Blake stands and grabs the first box of shoes from the closet, heading toward the bedroom door.
But then I see the black cardigan peeking out through a small hole in the side.
“Wait!” I exclaim, jumping up. Before I can process what I’m doing, my emotions get the better of me.
She stops dead and looks back, our eyes meeting as I run over to her, pushing aside the mound of shoes to dig the black cardigan out of the box. The second my fingertips touch the soft fabric, a feeling of relief pours over me.
“All good?” she asks.
I nod. “Yeah, I just… couldn’t let this go yet.”
She nods, like she gets it.
As she heads out of the room, I shuffle off down the hall, hiding the box of high school memories and the cardigan underneath my bed before booking it back to my dad’s room. I grab the second box of shoes and assorted top-shelf items, almost buckling under the weight as I stumble down the glossy wooden steps, trying my very best not to trip over my own two feet and face-plant.
I’m relieved when my foot hits solid ground, and I stop to adjust the box, my arms burning. The black front door is thrown wide open, and I can feel the afternoon heat radiating slowly into the house.
I lug the box the rest of the way to my dad’s beat-up pickup truck, where Johnny swoops in to take it from me. A pained expression appears on his face as he pretends it weighs a million pounds, staggering his way over to the truck bed.
“Phew, Em. You got some muscles!” he says, and my dad lets out a booming laugh, the likes of which I haven’t heard in… forever.
I watch as he slides the box of shoes onto the back of the truck, and it becomes just another box in a sea of boxes. I
