matter what. She used to loooove that.
I slipped into Sarah’s room and locked the door behind me. The room was filled with tokens that proved her existence: Soccer trophies, school photos, posters of her favorite musicians and bands. I spent a lot of time in museums and now I found myself in a morbid memorial to my sister.
A scrapbook rested on her desk. I picked it up and flipped through the pages. Stick figure drawings, a lanyard, ticket stubs to a concert. A childhood homework assignment. A sentence was written and she had to complete it.
One of them said: When I grow up I want to be _________________.
In her clumsy handwriting she wrote: Like my brother Ash. He sees rainbows everywhere and paints them.
I slammed the book shut and sat back on her bed and wept. I hadn’t lived up to that. I stopped seeing the rainbows. I let her kill my spirit when it would have been the last thing she wanted.
I started to feel myself slipping into the hole. The monster of depression might consume me if I didn’t find a way to stop it. I peered into her bathroom as the ugly thoughts tried to make themselves heard. I knew they were irrational. I knew I needed to call my therapist. I might need to recalibrate my meds: the travel, the unexpected high stress, the triggers. But I didn’t want to call. I just wanted to heed to the ugly thoughts.
I knew I would devastate my mother, Miller, even Bird, but the drop was so sudden and fast, like someone had pulled the floor from underneath me and there was nothing to slow the descent.
I got up and walked into Sarah’s tiny bathroom, rummaging for anything to make the free fall stop. To make the empty sinking feeling end once and for all. There was nothing, and I was so distraught, I punched the mirror in front of me and it shattered into pieces.
Then they were staring at me: Shards of glass, hundreds of broken Ashes looking back at me, judging me, taunting me.
I slid my bloody hand into the sink, reaching for a piece and gripped it. Blood flowed as I tightened the grip and it sliced into my palm. The searing pain made me feel real again. It gave me something to grasp on to and distract from the hollow feeling of a free fall.
My phone’s ring jarred me out of the fixation on the glass. I shook my head as if to break the spell, and whipped my phone out of my pocket.
I didn’t recognize the number.
“Ash?” The doorknob to the room jiggled. “Ash?” Miller began pounding on the door. “Everything okay in there? We heard a bang.”
“Hello?”
“A—Ash?” the voice on the other line was broken by tears.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me . . .” Bird, but something was wrong.
“Bird? Are you okay?”
“I—I need you here. Puh—please,” she was hysterical. In an instant, I forgot about all of my own misery and wanted to make her better.
“Calm down, Bird. What’s wrong?”
“Jordan. Jordan,” was all she could muster.
BIRD
I WOKE UP from a terrible nap. The kind of nap where your head hurts, you don’t know what century you’re in, or who you are. It was dark outside, but the sun was still out when I had plopped on the bed to cool off after Jordan had told me that he had been lying to me for five years.
I walked downstairs, audibly snickering at the painting still on my living room floor. My two favorite guys. My two biggest disappointments. I found the time on my microwave: 8:31. Awesome. I would probably be up all night. I fumbled through the dark for my electric tea kettle and flipped its switch. As I waited for the water to boil, I grabbed the remote control to my television and turned on the TV.
The evening news was on, and I moaned to myself, in no mood to watch the news, but really I was in no mood to watch anything.
Blahblahblah . . . traffic . . . blahblahblah . . . surprise, it’s going to be warm again . . . There’s a pileup on I-5, a tractor-trailer flipped, multiple fatalities.
I faced the television with my piping hot mug of tea as the helicopter camera zoomed in on the scene.
I shook my head at the mess. Cars were turned over, a few were smashed so that there was debris everywhere, traffic seemed to go out for miles behind it.
Things could be so