and dissolving in the lapping water.
I passed by the storm drain where Devadatta had thrown up the night before and remembered the police lights down by the bridge. The shootings must have happened around then, right when we were talking about Mercury going retrograde. I thought about the dead boys and I thought about the box-mall-church. I put the image of the woman crying in the parking lot, the one with the daughter who lost the doll at Superland™, I put her face next to that of the two dead boys. They looked the same to me. The more I tried to see them as separate, the more they blended into a single face. The image came to me like a sending: a light-skinned black man with large red freckles and a bad perm crying for his lost doll while he bled to death from a gunshot wound. Behind him was the faint outline of a woman in a bronze miniskirt, a machete glinted in her hand, and over them all the Rat Queen stood, sniffing the air. Who cares? In three weeks I would be gone. This was all someone else’s karma, the five zillion people before me who fucked everything up. It had nothing to do with me.
I was two blocks away from Jimmy’s and there was one more thing I had to do that night. It’s not fair to let someone you care about walk into all that history unprepared. When I got to her place the door of her apartment building was propped open with a brick. I heard katydids in the bushes as the door swung closed and I stepped into the black hallway. The carpet smelled like smoke. I crept up the creaking stairs to her apartment. There was no light under her door but that didn’t mean anything. Jimmy doesn’t like to use electricity. She says all this is just a war for resources and she doesn’t want any part of it. I listened. It was silent. Amber light from the lamps came through the window at the other end of the hall. I pulled a sheet of paper out of my notebook.
Dear Jimmy:
My mom and dad have always believed that you should face hard things head on. That’s how they taught the three of us, Credence, Cady and me. In case you didn’t know, Cady and Credence were twins. She was the one holding my mother’s other hand that day in Redbird Square when the people were chanting and I was scared and wrapped myself in Mom’s wool coat. (Have I ever told you that when you smile you remind me of her?) Credence was on Dad’s shoulders.
On the anniversary of her death, Mom decorates the house with pictures of Cady and drawings she made. She makes Cady’s favorite food, Frito pie, and we tell stories about how she was. Do you still want to come?
Let me know,
Della
There had been a big debate and we held a family council about it when I was twelve. Should we celebrate Cady on her birthday or on the day of her death? The argument split along these lines:
Celebrating Cady on her birthday—All the obvious reasons.
Celebrating Cady on the anniversary of her death—People hide the sad things in the world from their sight. Bury their grief and, not facing the pain of their loss, devalue everything around them. They act like there’s just one piece missing when what is missing was a part of everything. That’s what it was like when Cady was gone and we decided to mark the day she left us because that’s when it all changed. For me, it could have been any day.
I folded the note for Jimmy and slipped it under the door.
There was a whirr of trees when the bus went off the cliff. I put my hand against the glass and green blurry streaks raced beneath my fingers. I imagine her in the thorny arms of wild blackberries singing. Mom used to say that we should look sadness right in the eye. I look Cady right in the eye, my older sister, thirteen, crying, tangled in metal, shining. I cannot turn away.
Cady Elizabeth Mylinek
You are always welcome at any gathering:
019791993.13
I lay back on the carpet in front of Jimmy’s door. The wind was pressing against the windows. I was thinking it’s like a castle. Outside it’s so dark that even armies sleep next to each other, all dreaming of tomorrow’s war. I was sure if I got up