A Million Miles Away (7 page)

Kelsey noticed the dark circles under his eyes. They didn’t match the relaxed way he said his words. People from out West, where his hometown was, often spoke lower and with a little bit of a drawl. Funny that he kept that, even as he was panicking. She would just give him a minute. Just another minute or two to relax. “How bad is it?” she asked.

“It’s hot. Of course, it’s hot.” He shook his head, smiling at her apologetically. “We carry our gear around everywhere, too. Fifty or so pounds of extra weight, all the time.”

“You’re not in immediate danger, though, right?”

Peter rubbed his hand over his hair, looking away. “You never can tell.” When he looked back at her, his arms twitched, as if he wanted to hug her. “There have been a few scares, but it’s quiet most of the time. More than most of the time.”

Peter looked down, and when he looked back up, he was smiling as broad as he could, trying to hide the fear that had risen up in his eyes. Kelsey knew that game. She played that game every day.

“It’s boring, really. So boring. I draw every day. I write you letters.”

“You write me… you write letters?” Kelsey hadn’t seen anything for Michelle in the mail for a while. Only college acceptance letters, which her mother had promptly thrown into the trash.

Peter shrugged. “I’ve only sent one. But I write you every day.”

Kelsey started to reply. Peter, there’s something you should know. That’s it. That’s what she would say.

But then he continued, “I write you in my head, too. As we walk around in the hills, and ride around to villages. I talk to everyone back home in my head. Is that insane?”

“It’s not insane,” Kelsey said quietly. She did that sometimes with Michelle, too.

Peter’s shoulders loosened. A happy, faraway look returned to his eyes. He didn’t communicate like any other boys she knew. He wasn’t shifty, or distracted. He thought long, and as he thought, his face was an open book.

“I always mean to write down what I say, but I forget,” he said. “I remember wanting to tell my dad about how the men sit around in barbershops and yell at the TV when they watch the Pakistani cricket team, just like he does. I think he would like that. I’ll have to remember that one.”

The mention of his father brought her back to reality. He would learn of Michelle’s death, somehow, wouldn’t he? “Do you Skype with your family?”

“Sure, all the time.”

“Do they—” Kelsey paused. “Do they know about me?”

“They know I have a girlfriend but they don’t dig too deep into it. Said I shouldn’t be distracted.” He laughed to himself.

He was quiet then, looking at her. Kelsey was quiet, too. They were both lost.

Finally, he spoke. “I mostly write to you, though. I think about the different things I would tell my dad, what I would tell my mom, my sister. But I tell you everything. A lot of these guys are really…” He looked around the tent again, getting quieter. “A lot of these guys are really closemouthed, you know? I don’t have to talk all the time, but I’ve got to say something.”

Then Peter’s eyebrows knit together. “People are dying. No one I know, but we are going to have to…” Kelsey could see Peter’s jaw working, trying to hold back. It hung in the air, sinking into both of them. Kelsey speculated the end of his sentence. Kill people.

“Ugh.” He let out a sound, shaking his head. “I’m not allowed to talk about it, but, anyway,” he said.

She didn’t know what to say.

“Tell me what have you been up to. Distract me.”

Kelsey felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. “It doesn’t really seem important—”

“It’s very important,” Peter interrupted. Kelsey could tell he was determined to put all he had toward her, to forget. “How did finals go?”

Kelsey’s instinct was to answer
terribl
e, as usual. But that was her, and Peter wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to Michelle. I’ll just let him have this. Just a little while longer until the right time comes.

“Great, I think! The, uh, Art History essay questions were fascinating.”

“I’m sure you nailed it.” Peter lit up. “Did you listen to that song I told you about? The Cicadas?”

Kelsey would say, Uh, no. Kelsey only listened to songs you could choreograph dances to. Including musicals, which Michelle made fun of mercilessly. The Cicadas sounded like an indie band. Michelle would probably say, “Yeah! I loved the… guitar.”

“And? It’s better than Weast, right? But it still has that sixties sound.”

She kept going. “No way. I’ll never give up on the sixties.”

Peter laughed. “It’s so nice not to talk about supply trucks that I’m not going to argue with you this time.”

It was that easy. All of this had come out of Michelle’s mouth so many times, it was impossible to forget. Kelsey had a strange, brief feeling of relief. As if Michelle were next to her, telling her what to say.

“Can I say something else?” Peter asked.

“Sure,” Kelsey said. Slowly, the guilt crept back. She shouldn’t have said that. She should have stopped him.

“You look so beautiful. I know you hate it when I say that, but you do.”

Kelsey closed her eyes to him. She couldn’t look at his face. She didn’t want to picture it on the screen, how it would fall when he knew the truth.

“Look at you,” she heard him say softly. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

Maybe Kelsey could just keep her eyes closed when she told him. Peter, she would say to the darkness, I lied to you. But he seemed sensitive already, showing his fears and doubts to her. She didn’t know what to do.

When Kelsey opened her eyes, a figure darted into the tent behind Peter, yelling at him to move. Crackling sounds, like fireworks, rang out from somewhere in the distance.

“Okay,” he said, turning back to her. “I have to go.”

“What’s going on?” Kelsey asked. But she knew. He was under fire.

“I have to go. Write me back.”

“Peter, I have to—”

“Tell me you’ll write me back.”

He was looking at her straight through the screen, his scared eyes digging into her, begging her. She would have to write as Michelle, but then again, she didn’t know if he would ever get it. She didn’t know if he would even make it through the next half hour.

“I’ll write you back,” she said.

He swallowed, taking her in for one last second, and smiled. More shouts echoed behind him, and the rumble of an engine. The call ended.

For a moment, Kelsey didn’t quite know where she was.

Panic seized her. She rubbed her face with her palms. Her identical face. Michelle’s cheeks. Michelle’s eyes. Michelle’s nose. What would she do? Michelle would protect him, at least until she could find a way to let him down gently. This wasn’t a text message breakup situation. Michelle had loved him. Peter had one of those smiles that could transform everything else about his face, his eyes, even the air around him. Kelsey didn’t know how, but she wasn’t going to take that away from him. Not now.

She was left alone in her sister’s room with the sound of absolutely nothing, which was different than silence. It was the sound of being covered with a blanket, of falling with no end, of being very deep inside something, so deep you can’t see a way out.

CHAPTER NINE

Kelsey woke up to a naked ceiling, her covers gone, feeling like she had been kicked by a horse. She struggled to hold what she knew to be true and so very, very false. Peter saw Michelle when he looked at Kelsey. In Peter’s mind, he had talked to Michelle. But Michelle was nowhere.

A noise at her door made her jump.

Her father’s face poked in, beard first. “City Market day,” he said, a little hoarse.

“What?” They hadn’t made their monthly roadtrip to the Kansas City farmers’ market since the summertime. They used to buy oddly shaped produce their mother sliced and put in salads, useless trinkets the girls collected and eventually gave away at garage sales, cuts of meat her father used on burger specials.

“City Market day,” her father repeated the phrase louder, as he did lately, instead of giving an explanation. He closed the door.

When they were very little, his grizzly-bear body was their playground. He’d stand in the middle of the living room, feet apart, knees bent, hands on hips, and she and Michelle would put their feet on his knees and become mountaineers from either side, racing to get to his shoulders.

They used to pretend to go to bed, but wait until he got off work from the restaurant late at night, and surprise him when he got home by sneaking into the kitchen and leaping up from behind the counter.

“Who are these girls?” he used to say, pretending to be shocked.

“Michelle! Kelsey!” they would scream.

“Who?” His eyes would go wide, trying not to smile.

It was fun to tell him the story of who they were, what they meant to him. “I’m Kelsey and that’s Michelle! I’m your daughter, silly! You love me and all that! Remember?”

Then the moment when he remembered, even though they knew it was coming, ended in glorious hugs and kisses, as if he were remembering them after such a long time. As if eight hours away from someone you loved was such a long time.

And it was, when she was a kid.

But every time she and her father tried to comfort each other now, they ended up just forcing words into a thick silence. Because they reminded each other of Michelle, she guessed.

Kelsey, especially, was a reminder to him. She was a reminder to everybody. She had no choice. People in the hallways, people on the sidewalk, people in the grocery store. Their eyes widened and they drew in breath. Their mouths tightened in pity and they looked away, as if it were too hard to look at her. Try looking in the mirror every morning, Kelsey wanted to tell them. She was used to being mistaken for Michelle, but Michelle used to make people smile, not cringe. The only person who still smiled at the thought of Michelle was Peter. Maybe that’s why she did what she did.

Kelsey blew out a thin breath at the thought.

She sat up and stood on her mattress, shaking out her arms and legs. She cleared a space on the floor covered in dirty clothes to do a sun salute, then some splits, and some butt-bouncing in the mirror for good measure. She put in her gold studs. She put on a cardigan and tight, dark jeans. She straightened her hair and layered on blush and mascara until she was unmistakable. She pointed and flexed her toes. She was put together.

She was Kelsey. She lifted her arms over her head and let her belly breathe. No need to explain. She let her body do the talking.

When her parents pulled up to the entrance of City Market to let her out and park the car, Kelsey was hit by the sounds of laughter and other languages, the smells of cinnamon and pine. Christmas was close.

Both she and Michelle had always wanted a real tree, and their mother had always refused, giving excuses. “Out of respect for your Jewish grandparents,” she would say, or, “The kind of gifts we give you don’t fit under a tree.” It was true. They had always gone on trips at Christmas, and when they remembered to put one up, it was a tiny artificial tree from Walgreens that sang carols until it was out of batteries.

After getting a cup of hot cider, Kelsey searched for her father’s uncut hair towering over the crowd. She shuffled around young couples wearing large glasses and small, stumpy women with carts, wandering toward the butcher’s booth.

Michelle’s ghost was everywhere, her baggy plaid coat darting in and out of a line of people. Her sister always got sulky on these trips to the market. Kelsey could grin and bear the hours for tradition’s sake, for the sake of her mom and dad humming happily to every corner, but her sister would burn out. Now was about the time she would start moaning for money to go to the thrift store or keys to the car.

But Kelsey missed that, too. She was slowly finding out you don’t just get to miss the parts you liked about someone who had died. You had to feel the whole weight of them, tugging at you.

She found herself in the middle of a makeshift grove of trees standing crooked in their asphalt pots. When the two of them appealed to their dad for a Christmas tree last year, he took them out to the garage, pointed to an ax, and invited them to go to the river and chop one down themselves.

Kelsey felt a smile come on at the memory of Michelle taking the ax from her father and swinging it with enthusiasm, almost cutting off a limb. She could feel her sister laughing next to her, see her breath in the air, urging her to
Get one! Get one! Mom and Dad will understand
.

She approached the salesman, a gangly kid in a KU pullover, much younger and taller than her. “How much for that one?” She pointed to a sickly pine tree about her height.

“On sale for twenty,” he replied.

“If you help me carry it to my parents, they’ll pay.”

“No way.”

Kelsey stared at him for a long moment, inching closer. She mouthed the word,
Please
, and gave him a wide smile.

Bridged by the skinny tree, Kelsey and the boy parted the City Market crowd in a trail of needles. She imagined her and her parents sitting around the lit-up tree in the living room, with syrupy, old-timey Christmas music in the background. She could feel her blood getting warmer.