A Million Miles Away (26 page)

A muted thunder in her head, like a bomb going off.

Kelsey drew back. She was unsure of what she just heard. “What?”

“What?” Peter repeated, pulling back to look at her, his brow coming together over a puzzled smile. He batted a blue balloon away from his shoulder.

Kelsey searched his face, unable to ignore a panicked ringing in her ears. “Was that an accident?”

“Was what an accident?”

“You called me Michelle.”

His voice lilted, joking, “That’s no accident. It’s pretty standard for humans to call one—”

“Peter,” she said quietly. “I’m Kelsey. You know that I’m Kelsey. You said you got my video when we talked last week.”

“What video?” His eyes narrowed, and his smile disappeared. “What do you mean, ‘I’m Kelsey’?” He spoke slowly. “If you’re Michelle’s sister…”

Kelsey’s pulse jackhammered. “I sent you a video to explain. You said you got it.”

Peter frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Okay,” she started, and humiliation at its purest seemed to form a force field between them. “This is weird. Try to remember the video. Try to remember telling me about the video.”

Her image on-screen, as he was supposed to have watched, came to her, hurting her head.

She had opened her mouth and pointed out her crooked incisor to the camera.
See that?
she had said to Peter.
And this?
She had stood and turned to reveal the mole on her lower back. Those are really the only differences. Were. Were the only differences.

“Video? I never said anything about—Oh. I told Michelle the video was bad on our Skype call. That’s the only time I said anything about a video.”

“I thought you understood. I—” Kelsey swallowed.

Peter’s face got gentler, trying to understand. He put his hands on her arms. “You keep saying that. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Where is Michelle?” His eyes moved briefly around them, as if she were there, somewhere in the house.

Kelsey’s breaths were coming slow and frayed. She was paralyzed.

She had already done this. She had already broken down as far as she could go. She couldn’t go back now, right here, in a sea of balloons, people laughing and talking outside.

“Say something!” he burst out. The beret was crumpled in his fist.

“Kels?” she heard a voice coming from the kitchen. “What’s going on?” Her mother entered, stopping in the doorway.

Slowly, the two of them stood.

She couldn’t speak. It took everything Kelsey had to will herself to the mantel, where a folded piece of paper sat, as it had remained for eight months. She handed it to Peter and waited, her eyes down, just feet from where she stood that day in October.

It was a program from Michelle’s funeral. Kelsey had memorized and recited the passage written inside, from the Book of 1 Corinthians.

She remembered:
I tell you this, brothers: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.

She tried to push away the sound of her own voice saying those mechanical words, but her brain wouldn’t let her forget that cold day. Now of all times, as if it was taking her there to punish her.

Peter read the program, turned it over, and read it again; the letter she should have sent from the beginning.

“She died?” His voice was surprisingly light, with the accidental innocence of a kid.

Kelsey tried to choke out a response, but her brain was too busy.

But someone will ask
, her voice echoing in the microphone, absorbed by somber faces,
“How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

Her mother crossed the room to her, stepping over balloons. “Kelsey, what is going on?”

But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.

“Shut up!” she said aloud, and her mother looked at her like she was a wild animal. “I’m so stupid,” she muttered. A thin layer of cool sweat coated her skin. “I thought you knew. I thought you had forgiven me.”

She could see the muscles of Peter’s jaw working. “Forgiven you? How am I supposed to forgive you?”

Kelsey’s mother took her shoulders gently, turning Kelsey to face her. “Kels, look at me. What happened?”

But she couldn’t stop looking at Peter. She wished he would look at her for just a second, a millisecond, so he could remember who she was, really. His best friend. His love.

Peter’s voice bit into the room.

“I can’t believe you did this to me.” Peter paused to laugh, but there was nothing good in the sound. Nothing mirthful. “What a—What a strange thing.”

Her mother’s grip tightened on her arm.

“I met your sister, but for God knows how long, I have been…” He couldn’t finish.

“Peter, please!” Kelsey called, her voice weak and strung.

When he finally met her eyes, there was nothing behind them. “I can’t deal with this.” He set the program carefully back on the mantel.

Kelsey tried to step around her mother, but she held tight to her shoulders. “How was I supposed to tell you?”

“I need to…” Peter put his hand to his forehead, trying to find an exit. “It will be best for everyone if I leave, I think.”

“Don’t leave!” Kelsey was practically screaming. Her words left her before she thought them, quick and sloppy. “It’s still me.… No matter what you called me… I’m still the person you talked to and wrote to.… I love you in every real way.… I tried to stop but I couldn’t.… I…”

Her mother put her mouth close to Kelsey’s ear. “It’s time to be quiet now. Let him be.”

The din of her own words collapsed on her.
For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans.…
She felt a deep pain, but had no idea where it was coming from.

The funeral passage, haunting her, now engraved in Kelsey’s eyes:

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

Peter sidestepped the table, the couch, taking the widest route around her that he could, kicking balloons out of the way.

With a creak and a click of the door, he was gone.

Dear Michelle,

My flashlight ran out of power last night because I was reading your letter over and over. I hadn’t planned on it, but once I read it, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to start at the beginning again. You make me laugh too loud late at night. You get me in trouble.

I’ve heard it said that comedians are the saddest people, that they resort to humor because their world is so dark and absurd it doesn’t make sense, that you have to be in deep pain to be funny, something like that. They say that about artists, too, for that matter. Hell, Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear. What I’m saying is, you are both funny and an artist, and I hope that sadness is not the case with you.

But I would also understand if it was. I’ve always had a bit of the blues myself, even before I decided that a free college education would be worth nine months in this hellhole. I hate it when older people say that we have nothing to be sad about, that we’re young and we couldn’t possibly know real sadness. Or maybe no one has said that to you. But I bet they have. Anyway, if I’ve learned anything here, it would be from the children who hang out in burnt-out buildings by themselves, with no one to talk to but a dog and a beat-up soccer ball. They have lost their moms and dads and brothers and sisters, and who would say they don’t know real sadness? Sadness isn’t measured in years. Feelings, I don’t think, can be measured in anything. We are just bodies guessing about other bodies. That’s why songs and paintings and poems exist. They’re the best guesses.

I told you once that the thought of you somewhere happy is what keeps me going, but the thought of you somewhere sad is okay, too. I mean, I don’t want you to be sad, and if you aren’t that’s good, but it’s just you, as you are, that I think about. However you are.

Are you sad?

You don’t have to tell me. But just like you are there somewhere for me, I am here somewhere for you. If you are sad, I want to make you happy. If you are happy, I want to make you happier. Pen is running out of ink. Must get new pen.

Yours,

Peter

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

A knock on her door woke Kelsey from a dreamless sleep. It was dark outside, but her lights were still on. She had no idea how long she’d been out, but the partygoers were gone. One of Peter’s old letters lay next to her on the bed.

Her mother entered, now changed out of her dress clothes into sweatpants, glasses on the tip of her nose.

“All right, get up,” her mother said.

“Thanks, Mom, but I really don’t feel like talking right now,” Kelsey said, burying herself deeper in her pillows.

“Sit up,” her mother said.

“What time is it?” Kelsey asked.

“It’s time for you to be held accountable for your actions. Sit up.”

Her mother’s tone made Kelsey feel like she was seven years old again, and she hated it, but she did as she was told.

“Put on a sweater.”

She followed her mother to the front door without a word. The night air smelled as if it had just rained and they walked toward the river to the sound of the breeze. Yesterday’s events were still with her. Michelle’s death was, at least, out of her hands. It was accidental, a freak event.

The shame of losing Peter, of losing him because of her lies, seemed more like an endless sickness no one could cure. She would never forget what she’d done to him.

When they stepped aside for a jogger, Kelsey realized it must almost be dawn.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” her mother said beside her.

“Why?” Kelsey asked. Her throat felt itchy from crying.

Her mother put her hands in her sweatshirt pockets as she walked, and sighed. “I don’t know whether to call this boy’s mother or take you to a psychiatrist or what.”

Kelsey stopped in her tracks. “What? No.”

She put up her hands. “You obviously aren’t handling your sister’s death well—”

“None of us are handling Mitch’s death well!” Her voice was raised. Her fists were clenched. It was all coming out now. The rage, the hurt, the sensation of yelling at her mother from the bottom of a well to HELP ME UP, GODDAMNIT. “You criticize me all the time! You fill my house with strangers that you talk to more than me!”

She paused for air, watching her mother’s face fall. But Kelsey wasn’t finished.

“You don’t even like me!”

Her mother spoke softly. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. I love you.”

Kelsey wiped her nose. “Then why doesn’t it feel like you do?”

She couldn’t make out her mother’s face anymore in the streetlights, just the outline of her mane of hair and her body, more sure of itself than Kelsey’s. “Let’s keep walking.”

The flush of anger had not left Kelsey’s face. “Why?” she asked.

“Because.”

There was a deep rhythm to that exchange, an understanding that existed before she could even spell her name:
Do this
, her mother would say.
Why?
she and her sister would ask.
Because
, and that was the end of it. They would follow her anywhere.

But this wasn’t any other day. “Because why?” Kelsey countered.

She could sense a smile behind her mother’s words. “I’m not taking you to the loony bin, Kels.”

They continued on until they reached the river, and turned right down the gravel path on the north bank, deep into the trees as morning broke through the branches. Rocks crunched under their feet, birds conversed. The silence was soothing. Maybe it was the act of walking, setting a pace, putting her body back into a steady cadence. Maybe she had forgotten how well her body could speak to her. Maybe her mother knew what she was doing.

When they reached the large rusted gate that marked the end of public property, her mother leaned on it, and Kelsey followed suit. They looked at each other, two versions of the same eyes, one with makeup streaks, one with crow’s-feet. Her mother waited, asking silently, Why?

She could tell the story from the beginning, as she had done for her friends, as she had done on the video, or she could just answer.

“I missed her,” Kelsey said finally. “I really didn’t mean to pretend to be her. I wasn’t even good at it. It was mostly just wanting to be close to her again, you know? Even closer than I was when she was alive.”

Her mother was looking at her, contemplating. “And Peter wanted to be close to her, too.”

“Yeah, I guess. And I kept going after that because…”