The Me You See (2 page)

I haven’t seen mom since I was twelve. I haven’t heard from
mom since I was twelve. I know she isn’t anywhere around this town because
people can’t hide here. If you’re in Granite Ledge, somebody knows where you
are. And no one knows where my mom is.

I lean my back against the kitchen counter that holds the
caramel rolls and wonder, does she know? Has my mom heard? Is she even still
alive to attend her oldest daughter’s funeral?

Oh. God. What if she shows up?

And what if she doesn’t?

Dad says it doesn’t matter either way. And maybe it
doesn’t. I’m all for reality but sometimes I think my dad is a total pacifist.
Stefia called him Gandhi one time and he looked out the window at a chickadee
in our bird bath and said, “One day, you will understand.”

I keep looking for One Day on the calendar but it hasn’t
come up yet.

My mom should not have left, but she did. That’s reality.

Someone should know where my mom is, but no one does.
That’s reality.

My sister is dead and mom probably doesn’t even know.

And that’s reality.

**

People will accuse me of painting over the past to say all
the things everyone expects to hear after someone dies, but trust me when I
tell you that I grew up believing that having Stefia as a sister was a promise
that everything would be okay.

After mom left, life at home was a silent but swirling
storm of disorder, and Stefia’s sleight of hand kept me in the eye of that storm.
She was my protector. My comedienne. The one who distracted me from the
physical absence of a mother and the emotional absence of a father who either
couldn’t—or just plain wouldn’t—say anything.

No one ever said anything. So Stefia had to.

And sweet Stefia, oh, the words that fell out of her mouth,
the way she could make it all better. The simple manner in which she could
twist her lips around a word and shape it into something useful. Something
helpful. Something needed.

I remember countless late summer storms when the wind would
howl and I would cower in the corner of my closet. There was no way she could
have heard my whimpers over the bellowing of the wind, but Stefia would know I
was scared and would come find me.

“Naomi. Naomi…” she’d call as she came down the hallway
from her room to mine.

She was only a year older than me but decades braver, and
she’d speak with the most soothing honey soaked voice, coating me with an
impenetrable shell of protection.

“We’re going to be okay, Naomi…”

God, I hated those storms. They’d whip up and turn the sky
a shade of green black that made me think of the Wicked Witch from Oz. The wind
would scream in competition with the sirens that served as its warning. It
would roar against the house, pushing with a full-mouthed howl, threatening to
collapse the walls and bury us within.

“Come out, Naomi. Come on.”

But I couldn’t. My legs would soften into useless rubbery
pegs, unable to hold my weight, and I would shrink into the corner, concealed
by hanging clothes and forgotten toys.

Then the closet door would squeak open and Stefia would
crouch inside to find me huddled behind a mess of things. She’d move whatever
totes I had pulled around myself as a shelter and squish herself next to me.

“We’re going to be okay. I promise.”

She’d hold my hand, humming and singing; a warm pillar of
strength next to my shaking body. But somehow, even though I trembled, I knew
that if Stefia’s words covered me, I was safe from the storm.

“See, Naomi? The storm is over. Everything is okay.”

No matter what the angry sky tossed at our little house, I
always survived. And I believed it was simply because Stefia said I would.

**

After mom left, people teased my father that with three
daughters born within three years, his life would be one estrogen fueled
disaster after another. They advised him to not get in the middle of the cat
claws that were sure to fly between his girls. But that’s really not how it
was. Well, at least between two of the three of us.

It wasn’t that Stefia played favorites, or that she only
had enough love to pour out on one of us. I honestly believe even now that
Stefia had enough love to fill up anything that breathed. So it wasn’t that
Stefia didn’t adore or wasn’t kind to Gabriella. It was that Gabriella didn’t
want kindness shown to her. Stefia had always chased after Gabriella, ending up
in places I know she really would have rather not been, just to haul her sister
out of trouble. Always. The scuffle down at the riverbank by Beidermann’s. The
car accident when Gabriella got her first minor consumption. Jimmy Kreeger’s
party. Stefia was there when dad couldn’t be—when dad wouldn’t be—like a sister
and a parent and a friend all rolled into one.

Gabriella just didn’t want anything to do with it.

I’d only seen Stefia cry a handful of times in my life.
Most of them were because she couldn’t reach someone who needed reaching. Most
of the times, that person was Gabriella.

“I can’t get to everyone. I get that,” Stefia said to me
one night. She and I were lying in the grass at Pine Tree Park, looking up to
the sky for shooting stars that weren’t there. “You’d think if I could affect
someone from the stage, I could do the same with someone in real life.”

I didn’t say anything, mostly because I was one of those
people who didn’t know how to say things that wouldn’t come easily. I didn’t
have the heart to tell her I really thought maybe there are some people who
don’t want to be reached.

And then, ironically enough, there are others who don’t
even realize they need to be.

**

I swipe my finger along the screen of my phone to unlock it
and check my Facebook newsfeed. Normally I wouldn’t think of looking at my
phone in a room full of grieving, voiceless relatives because I was raised with
manners. But since no one is talking to me or looking at me or even
acknowledging that I’m still breathing even though my older sister isn’t, no
one will notice anyway.

Everything happens for a reason.

God never gives you more than you can handle.

He has a plan.

Praying for Granite Ledge.

The thing with Stefia was that even though she always knew
what to say, it wasn’t always what people wanted to hear. She could soothe you
with her words, or she could set you straight. And it makes me wonder what
Stefia would say in reply to the prayers and inspirational memes being posted
today—the day of her funeral. I mean, is plastering some sympathetic words over
a picture of a candle or a pristine snowy field supposed to help?

If Stefia were here, she’d compose something about how people
post things to make themselves feel better about whatever has happened. Then
she’d add that I should stop being so cynical.

I smirk at the thought.

I’m not a cynic, though. I’m a realist. By the end of next
week, will anyone on Facebook remember what they are praying for? Will they
even still be praying?

Aunt Melanie walks past me. She eyes the caramel rolls, and
then turns towards me to look over my shoulder at the newsfeed I’m swiping
through.

“Our thoughts are with the families of the victims of the
Crystal Plains Theater Massacre,” I say, mocking what I read from my phone.
“Wait. Now it was a massacre?”

“Honey…” Aunt Melanie’s voice trails off, unable to finish
a sentence that she wasn’t sure why she’d started.

“The death of six people is not a massacre,” I say. “The
Native Americans were massacred. The victims of the Holocaust were massacred.
But the shooting at the theater?”

“Naomi,” she says. “You of all people should know not to
discredit the lives of the people who died at the theater…”

“I’m not discrediting anything. I just wish people would
call it what it is.”

She looks as though she has mixed pity and disgust in a
bowl and painted it on her face. I hate the way she glares at me, like she
wants me to believe she hasn’t already made up her mind how to feel about my
reactions.

I look away from her judgmental stare and wish for Stefia
to be at my side. I wouldn’t have to explain myself to Stefia. Stefia would
know what I meant. Stefia would be able to say it better.

Aunt Melanie didn’t get it. Nobody did. I took a deep
breath and remembered that Stefia told me once most people just need to talk
and make noise to deal with what happens. They need to spout off words to sort
out things they will never understand. It’s just how most people cope.

The problem is noise doesn’t ever change anything that’s
already happened.

Melanie offers a weak smile and turns from me to sit with
dad. She mumbles something as she rests her hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t
look up. He doesn’t say anything.

He never says anything.

**

Just three months ago on Christmas Eve, as Stefia and I
hung stockings and lights on the banister of our open staircase, I cringed at
Gabriella’s empty stocking hook.

Gabriella, never happy in Granite Ledge, had dropped out of
high school in October. In her quest to attain more than the black sheep status
she’d earned here, she moved to Virginia with Adam, the supposed love of her
life. Adam was nineteen and already a four time published author and he was
going to rescue her from the dull life she led in small town Minnesota. Dad
never even told her not to go.

Dad never said anything.

Bing Crosby’s
White Christmas
played in the
background while Stefia twisted strings of multicolored lights around the
banister and into slats and out again, turning our home into a twinkling
paradise heavy with the scent of pine and snickerdoodles.

She saw my eyes fall on the spot where Gabriella’s stocking
should have been hanging. I took a sip of hot apple cider, sucking the warm
tartness across my tongue.

“You know,” Stefia said, “human beings seem to have a big
problem with how they view life experience.”

“How so?”

“Well, most of them believe in the very bottom of their
hearts that there is a way things should be.”

I took another long sip of cider, the steam collecting on
my cheeks and mixing with tears I wasn’t fast enough to blink away.

 “People want to believe there is some sort of equation for
how life is supposed to go,” she continued. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“That’s bullshit, Naomi. There really isn’t a way things
should be. There’s only what happens and what we do about it.”

I stared hard at the hook that was supposed to hold
Gabriella’s stocking, remembering how years before I’d stared the same way at mom’s
empty hook.

“What happens, and what we do,” she repeated, “is all there
is.”

**

I gawk at the caramel rolls. I’m hungry. But no one else is
eating them; the pan stands like a glass display for looking but not touching.

No one would care if I ate one. No one would notice if I
ate the whole pan. No one would even raise an eyebrow if I took all the rolls
and threw them out into the snowbank. They’d just stare at me thinking,
Poor
Naomi, It’s so sad, What a shame.

Oh, they would stare. But they wouldn’t say a thing.

I decide against the rolls and walk back up the stairs,
tracing my fingers along the banister and remembering how when Stefia,
Gabriella, and I were all younger we dared each other to slide down the banister.
None of us would ever do it, but we decided that sitting on our butts and
bumping our way down the stairs would be safer and probably just as fun. So
we’d run to the top of the stairs and bump our way back down, sometimes racing,
sometimes crashing into each other at the bottom. We’d pull ourselves up from
the rug, grabbing at the post with the swirly top that looked like a frosted
cupcake, oblivious to the fact we were loosening it from the floor a bit more
every time we pulled.

Those were fun times.

Dragging my toes along the carpet with each lazy step, I
arrive at my bedroom closet. I slowly thumb through hangers trying to
decide—but not caring about—what to drape over my body for the day. There will
be media, there will be photographs taken and news footage shot. And I don’t
even care what I’m going to wear.

I could wear something from Stefia’s room.

I could.

 Even though she’d been blessed with the beauty in the
family—God had placed all his eggs in one basket on that deal—Stefia and I had
technically been able to wear the same size.  We had always traded clothes back
and forth. Always.

I knew that if Stefia were here, she’d have lent me
anything I wanted to wear.

Of course, if Stefia were here, I wouldn’t be going to a
funeral.

Without even realizing I’d left my room, I find myself suddenly
standing in front of Stefia’s door and I hold my hand on the knob.