Why can’t I just feel the feelings that I have?
I try to shift around in my seat, but the painting
leaves me no room, and I feel confined like a sleeping bag,
shoved into a stuff sack.
Edward reaches under his seat for his backpack.
The slow whine of every zipper opening and closing,
sounds like a cacophony of desperate people crying.
The crinkle of plastic. The chewing. The smell
of bodies perspiring all around me.
I don’t know anything about Edward.
Whether he has a good family, a good home.
I don’t know why he or any of us is here on this bus.
What desperate situation drew us to leave in a snowstorm?
To put our lives in the hands of a driver?
To be protected only by a sign posted up front
that reads, YOUR SAFETY IS OUR NUMBER ONE CONCERN.
Because is it?
Edward stuffs a whole handful of fruit snacks
into his mouth. “Do you want to know
the one thing in this world I can’t live without?”
Edward is bouncing in his seat.
“Not really,” I say.
“It’s my sister,” he says, and continues.
Chewing. Bouncing. Talking.
Edward turns to me. “What’s the one thing in the world
you can’t live without?”
I sigh. I look out the window. “Breathing,” I say.
Edward inhales and exhales and scrunches up his face.
“Why?”
“Because we literally can’t live without breathing.”
The weight of the painting grows on my legs.
I lift it and try to put it on the floor. But then
my legs have nowhere to stretch, so I just hold
it in the palms of my hands. Hovering above my knees.
Edward stops chewing. “But why?”
“Why do we breathe? I don’t know.
So that we can live.”
“But why?” Edward is bouncing again.
“Because if we don’t live, we die,” I say.
Edward stops bouncing.
“Everyone?” I hear him say, but I’m distracted
by the scene outside. The long shadows from tall buildings.
Garbage trucks and taxicabs. Stoplights and storefronts
and humans walking around with their phones.
“Yeah, everyone dies,” I say, without thinking.
“Even my sister,” Edward says so quietly
that maybe he didn’t intend for me to hear.
But I heard him. I heard the pain, the grieving.
I heard him say something with his kid heart
that I once felt in mine.
It aches so deep. The pain so real. Rising upward. Rising higher.
Until it surfaces. Finally given a chance to breathe.
“Yep. She’ll die too.”
The words escape. I can’t haul them back.
I can’t swallow hard enough to unsay them.
The pain comes out so flippant.
So callous. Biting. With lots of sharp teeth.
I look over at Edward.
He’s frozen. There’s a wad of fruit snack stuck in his cheek.
He’s staring blankly at the seat in front of us.
Eyes so wide. Too wide.
“I didn’t…” But I stop. I don’t have any idea what to say
to fix this. I watch his tiny body crumple.
I watch what the words I said do to his face.
His muscles are too weak. Too unprepared to hold it all in.
He starts crying, and it breaks me.
The bus is rumbling through the city in spurts and jolts,
but Edward jumps out of his seat and is running up the aisle,
swaying back and forth with the twists
and turns of the city streets.
Everyone is looking at him. Everyone is looking at me.
His mother is yelling at him to stop.
The bus driver is yelling at him to stay in his seat.
But he continues to scream and cry.
Finally, Alex reaches her arms into the aisle
and catches Edward as he tries to run past.
Alex picks up Edward as he’s kicking and screaming
and delivers him back into the lap of his mother.
Row
I’ve had more ankle sprains
than is reasonable for someone my age.
Overuse.
Understretching.
Weak ankles.
Not enough icing.
If only we could tend to our grief
the way we tend to our injuries:
the physical therapy,
If only there were doctors
who were trained in this type of healing,
the ones who could tell you
that you’d be back on the field
in two weeks, as long as you follow
their regimen.
But there is no healing process
when irreversible things happen,
like mothers dying.
No way to heal
things that can never be undone.
Ariana
As soon as we arrive in the city, I gather my things,
the painting stuffed under my arm,
and try to get off that bus as fast as I can.
But Edward’s mother stops me. “What is wrong with you?”
What kind of person makes an eight-year-old cry?”
I look at the floor. Caked in dirt that came from our shoes.
Rings of salt from the roads. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s sick,” Edward’s mother says, pointing at the baby,
“and you just told my son that his sister is going to die?”
“I didn’t know,” I say. Edward’s face peeks out
from behind his mother. He doesn’t know the question
to ask, but I can see in his eyes that he’s saying,
Why did you hurt me?
“I’m really sorry, Edward,” I tell him. He doesn’t react.
Just keeps staring at me with longing eyes. Wanting to know
when it will all stop hurting.
I try again. “I hurt you. That’s not right. I’m sorry.”
Edward gives me an almost imperceptible nod.
It’s still not okay. His life might not be okay.
His sister might die. Tomorrow or in eighty years,
and it will still never be okay.
Edward’s mother grabs hold of his hand and hauls
her children away. They disappear into the bus station.
Into the flurry of people and hustle
moving in every direction.
Row
It’s frankly pretty challenging
to hobble through the snow
with a sprained ankle,
so by the time I end up on the doorstep,
I feel hot, throbbing pain inside my snow boot.
Kennedy answers with her little brother, Lincoln,
wrapped around her like a full-grown sloth.
“Hey,” she says. She’s trying to be nice
in front of Lincoln. But her expression
is tired. Annoyed. Unsurprised.
“I think I sprained my ankle.”
“Again?”
“It hurts,” I say.
Kennedy cocks her head,
like she’s searching my face
for the words she wants me to say.
But I don’t know how to tell her.
Lincoln slides off,
scrambling away
into the depths
of the house.
“My mom isn’t here,”
Kennedy says.
“She had to take an extra shift
at the hospital because of the weather.”
I swallow, but my
throat is dry.
“That’s okay.”
Kennedy doesn’t move.
Hand still holding the door.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Row?”
I didn’t want to tell anyone.
It felt too precious, too fragile.
The sense of hope. The possibility of love.
My words come out so cautious.
Like footsteps on the ice.
“Maybe if we didn’t love her as much.
Maybe if we didn’t stake all of our
hopes and dreams on her,
she would have lived.
“But she died, Kennedy.”
Ariana
Outside the bus, Alex is waiting. “Seriously, Ariana.
He was such a sweet kid. Maybe a little annoying. But really?”
I want to let go. I want to explore life and be a better person.
I want to chase after life like my little sister out on the field.
I want to be whoever it is I am supposed to be.
Of course I do.
But I can’t be this. Who I just was five minutes ago.
A person who could cause such pain to a kid like Edward.
I nod back at her. “I know. It’s not okay.”
We are so different. In our pain. In our grief.
But Alex doesn’t see my pain. The hurt, not from grief,
but from us. A friendship I wanted—I needed—
that never happened.
She doesn’t recognize the way pain, which we both possess,
wants to mirror itself on someone else. On me. On strangers.
Maybe Alex could only see me as the girl with the dead mother
because that’s all I could see of myself. But I wanted
to at least try to be someone more. Someone with multitudes.
“I thought that our friendship would help me move on.
But sometimes, the way you dismissed the way I felt,
even today, it hurt,” I say.
Alex looks like she wants to say something,
but her roommate wanders back to us.
“We need to go,” her roommate says.
“I’m so much more than the girl who lost her mother,”
I say. “I wish you could have seen that.”
Alex looks like the girl that I sometimes saw.
The girl whose hand trembled as she tried
to scatter her brother’s ashes. The girl who wanted,
even on the hottest days, to wrap herself
in a ratty old sweatshirt because maybe
it still held on to the scent of her brother.
But she was also the girl up onstage,
who could command a crowd, close her eyes,
and take us all somewhere with her songs.
She shifted the guitar case strapped to her back.
“I’m sorry, Ariana. Maybe it is true. I only saw you
as my friend who understood the experience of loss.”
Her roommate looks at her watch
and whispers again, “We really have to go.”
Alex nods.
Even though our relationship never became
the kind of friendship with layers like sedimentary rock,
I still appreciated what Alex brought to my life,
the complexity of who she could be,
the idea that I didn’t have to be one thing either.
Before she heads for the subway, I call out,
“Play the one about ghosts tonight, okay?”
Alex looks confused at first. Then her face softens.
“We always do.”
Row
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,”
I say quietly.
“It was a girl?”
I nod.
“It must hurt.”
I nod.
Kennedy opens the door
wider. Warm air
touches my face.
Inside I see
there are plates
and dirty dishes.
Piles of mail.
Snow boots
and streaks of mud.
Plastic trucks
and picture books
scattered about the floor.
“I can probably figure out
how to wrap your ankle
by googling it or something,”
Kennedy says.
I hobble inside.
Kennedy disappears
into the kitchen and returns
a few minutes later
with an elastic bandage wrap
tucked under her arm
and two mugs of cocoa.
We both blow on our mugs,
cooling the surface.
It tastes like campfires,
and cabins,
and friendship bracelets.
It tastes like French braids
and flashlights
and sleepovers.
Kennedy is still quiet.
“Do you believe
in ghosts?” I say finally.
She hesitates for a moment.
Really considering the question.
“I think so? My mom does
for sure. She says her mother
comes to visit her.” Kennedy pauses,
then continues. “At the most
inopportune moments. Like when
she’s sitting on the toilet
and stuff like that.”
I snort and almost spill
the cocoa. “Weird.”
“Yep,” Kennedy says.
She hesitates.
“Why? Do you?”
I set the mug down
on the coffee table
and fiddle with the wrap,
tightening and retightening
the bandage. Then,
after a while,
I nod.
“She’s there with me
when I play.”
“Your mom?” Kennedy.
I nod. “My soccer-playing
ghost mom.”
Kennedy takes another sip of cocoa,
and I don’t need her
to do anything more
than be here
and listen.
Row
After we finish our hot chocolate,
Kennedy hesitates. “I found her.”
“Ariana?”
Kennedy nods.
“How?”
She hands me
a piece of paper.
I recognize the format.
It’s a transcript
printed on our school’s
distinctive
watermarked blue paper.
“It was underneath
the sonogram,”
Kennedy says.
My sister’s grades
look like a Scrabble hand.
Too many consonants.
Not enough vowels.
I read a handwritten note.
Ariana, please consider my offer to show
your work at the gallery exhibition on Saturday.
“I did some legit sleuthing.”
Kennedy smiles.
“You should have seen me.
It was pretty dope.
Called up some contacts.
Followed some leads.”
I hand the transcript back.
“She went to the city,” Kennedy says.
Ariana
“There’s a spot on the wall over there,” a girl with red and pink
and orange hair says. “A few people couldn’t make it.
Because of the snow.”
She hands me a sheet of instructions.
“This your first show?”
I nod. It’s my first time feeling so exposed, I want to tell her.
“Mine too,” she says, then sort of falters. “I’m a little nervous
about my parents seeing my work.”
She points to a sculpture that is loud and angry and beautiful.
Broken green and
brown bottles.
Shards of glass. Arranged in a way
like an overflowing garden fountain.
All jutting out, wanting to stab you.
“They’re making me put caution tape around it,” she says.
“Probably best no one dies tonight,” I reply.
The girl with multicolored hair grins so wide. “Touché.”
Row
“There’s still time to make it down there.”
Kennedy glances at her watch.
“I looked at the bus schedule.
One leaves in half an hour.”
“I said hurtful things to Ariana,” I say.
“I implied that something is wrong
with her. Like as a person. Like her feelings
were something other than human emotion.”
Kennedy stops and contemplates for a minute.
“Maybe you need to see her
not as your sister, Row.