When the door opened, however, it was not you at all. Aunt Kim stood there, her face ghastly. Her demeanor was enough to bring me to my feet. Aunt Kim was usually as imperturbable as a slab of granite. Even now, she was not exactly in tears. She was just pale, and her coat was buttoned wrong. At the sight of me, she flinched. Then she approached the receptionist. The two of them held a whispered conversation, glancing my way. I was alarmed to see the receptionist’s expression change, her habitual bored glaze giving way to a sympathetic grimace.
There were three sisters in your family. You were the oldest and best. Kim and Janine, the twins, were as identical as peas. They enhanced this quality by dressing in gray, keeping their hair short, favoring wispy scarves, and sporting brown lipstick. Each twin, on her own, was conservative and unremarkable. But whenever I saw them together, they were downright eerie, like walking mirror images, like an optical illusion. Same gestures, same sidelong glance, same vocal tone. When the three of you were in company, this impression grew stronger. You shared their build: slim, small, and birdlike. You were a little taller, a little bolder. Your laugh rang out a little louder. But there was so much you three shared — that swing of the hips, that tilt of the head, that rough, throaty murmur. Echoes and parallels and mystery.
When it came to temperament, however, you were unique. You lived on your nerves, exhaling emotion like breath. A beautiful sunset could stop you in your tracks. A friendly debate at a dinner party could whip you into a table-pounding frenzy. Kim and Janine lacked your sparkle. They were stoic and calm — women who viewed any display of emotion as a sign of weakness.
Now Aunt Kim took my arm and led me outside. Her mouth was a thin line.
In the car, Aunt Janine was waiting. At the sight of her, the alarm bells in my mind began to jangle. The twins were serious about their respective jobs. They never took sick days. Their holidays were always constrained. The sight of them in the mid-afternoon, away from their desks, still dressed in their work clothes, their mouths tight, their hands trembling — I did not understand it. I did not like it one bit. Aunt Janine offered no explanations. She motioned me into the back seat.
Aunt Kim drove. Her hands were so tight on the wheel that her knuckles blanched. I was still hoping that all this had something to do with my teeth. The windshield was decorated with coils of frost. Through the glass, I saw the sleepy gleam of the Potomac River between the buildings. Aunt Kim’s cell phone rang. She did not answer it while driving; she was not that sort. She pulled to the side of the road first. I recognized my uncle’s voice on the line, though his words were indistinguishable.
“Oh yes,” Aunt Kim said brightly. “Right here. Mm-hm.”
I rolled my eyes. Clearly I was being discussed.
“Which?” she asked. “The one in Bethesda? Oh, I see.”
I kept my gaze on the river.
“Be right there,” Aunt Kim said, still in the same brittle, cheery tone.
Without a word to me, she turned the car around. She and Aunt Janine exchanged a glance, communicating through twin telepathy. One narrowed her eyes, the other nodded, and they both looked away. We passed my school again. In the intervening minutes, that stone building had been diminished somehow. Through the window the place appeared curiously distant, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. The traffic was bad that morning. D.C. traffic is always bad. We drove in a silence that seemed intensified by the chilly air. Several times, I saw Aunt Kim reach automatically for the radio. It was the rule of law in her car that NPR must always be blaring. Each time, however, her fingers drew back as though burned.
Her cell phone rang again. Once more, she pulled to the curb, earning herself a barrage of honking from the cab behind us. My uncle’s voice sounded down the line, though I still couldn’t catch any words.
“Nearly there,” Aunt Kim said.
But then her face went blank. All the expression was erased, like a wet cloth on a chalkboard. There were just two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, slightly open. In that moment, she looked so much like you.
My uncle was speaking, a muffled stream.
“I understand,” she said.
Once more, she turned the car around. I saw my school approaching in the distance. Apparently we were going to spend all day passing back and forth in front of it. I cleared my throat, but Aunt Kim did not look at me. Beside her, Aunt Janine folded up one hand and pressed it unsteadily to her mouth. They still had not exchanged a word. They did not need to.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
It was Aunt Janine who answered.
“We’re taking you home,” she said.
FOR A FEW days afterward, my memory is empty. Somebody else dressed in black and attended the funeral. Somebody else handled the cloying embraces. All I have are brief, watery flashes. The icy air of winter pervading the house. My father’s red, swollen eyes. The wake was a blur of soft carpeting and muted lights. Every adult in the known universe seemed compelled to approach me and say something about God working in mysterious ways. “I’m sorry for your loss,” each of them said, as though they had all received the same script. A single moment does stand out plainly for me: one of my little cousins tugging at Aunt Kim’s sleeve. I was standing nearby, awkward in my somber dress. In her bell-clear voice, my cousin asked about you. She wanted to know whether you would be there soon, whether you would sit by her.
I was fourteen years old. At the front of the room, there was a gleaming mound, half-obscured by flowers — your coffin. I knew what was in that coffin. I knew the answer to my little cousin’s question. But I still found myself pausing, heart in my throat, waiting for Aunt Kim’s reply.
“Don’t be silly,” she snapped. “Get yourself a cookie and be quiet.”
I blinked. Time passed. I was standing outside, on the pavement, in the clean wind. This kind of thing happened often, for a while. Blink, and an hour would elapse. Blink again, and a whole afternoon might go by. It was as though someone were slicing at my internal calendar with a pair of scissors, removing time.
A few nights later, I came to myself again. I was sitting in my bedroom. My father was downstairs; he too had gone into a kind of walking coma, subsisting on televised football and cups of black coffee. He would have been glad of my company, no doubt, but I was avoiding him. I was avoiding everyone. Aunt Kim had urged me to call her anytime. Aunt Janine had independently said the exact same thing in the exact same tone. One of my classmates had dropped off that week’s homework, which was piled on my desk, awaiting my attention. There were a thousand things I could have been doing. But the world had turned upside down, and no one else seemed to have noticed. It was astonishing that my school continued to function, that I would be back there on Monday. It was incredible that cars still rolled down the street outside. Curled on my mattress, I practiced saying the word dead. Dead to rights. Dead sure. Drop-dead gorgeous. Now that I thought about it, the word was everywhere. It cropped up in everyday conversations, in moments where it had no right to be, like a warning note, something I had been foolish enough not to pay attention to before.