Sera
Two weeks later I’m back at home in Northport. Dad is back to teaching, so he’s staying in Brookline but coming down to the Cape when he can. I just feel closer to Luke here. I keep to my room, my bed a rather ripe-smelling cocoon even though the visiting rehab nurse, a gentle middle-aged woman named Kathy, washes the sheets every three days. She’s the only one who seems to understand how much I just want to be left alone. We exchange no more than five words every visit. She doesn’t attempt to make me smile or see the bright side. She just does her job, and I exist, and it’s the saddest, most perfect thing.
Daily, Mom comes up and insists I walk on the treadmill if I won’t go outside so I don’t end up back in the hospital. Eventually Paula comes by and we sit, and we cry, and I forget all the words she says to me as soon as she says them. I can’t hold them. I can’t bear any of it. I don’t understand how she can even look at me.Ican’t look at me. I’ve thrown blankets overthe two mirrors in my room. The French braid a nurse at the hospital did before I left is still in, loose and greasy, until Kathy wordlessly guides me to the bathroom one day and washes it out. I don’t want to shower. I sponge where it’s necessary. I don’t see the point to anything. I watch mindless reality TV that Maddy texts me about, and I walk on the stupid treadmill, and I cry and I sleep and I think about Luke. This is enough of an existence for me. This is all I deserve.
Abbi comes down for a day and tries to bully me into seeing reason, but she’s missing vital evidence—anything that shows I’m worthy of taking Luke’s future. He’s the one who had plans to revitalize his town, to be there for his brothers, to give a seemingly unending amount of love to the people close to him. The only thing I’ve prepared for is my stupid little paintings and my death. And it’s been denied me.
My next visitor is Iris. She smells like paint and has two easels with her. A standing one for her, and a portable one that fits on the bed for me.
“I thought we could paint together,” she says calmly, like I’m a sick kitten she’s trying to coax into a carrier to be taken to the vet.
“No thanks.” I can’t imagine making anything new, anything vibrant.
She stays, hovering, a paintbrush twirling between her fingers. “Okay. Can I tell you a story, then?”
I shrug. Everyone has been trying this too. I think it makes them feel better.
“When I was fourteen, my twin sister, Ivy, died of leukemia.”
I feel a deep twinge of guilt and sadness for Iris. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Well, no, it’s not, but I’m okay now.”
“You weren’t before,” I agree. That makes sense.
“No. It seemed like a cruel twist of fate—a mistake—that we’d be born together and she’d get so little time. She was my best friend. She was funny and kind and had an amazing singing voice. I was totally lost without her. And for a long time, I was convinced I wanted to die too.”
Iris goes quiet, playing with the long sleeves of her linen tunic.
“I’m not considering that,” I admit, “even if Ifeeldead already.”
She nods, clears her throat, and keeps talking. “My parents put me in an outpatient program. One week we had a professional artist come and run a workshop on oil painting.” She smiles, thinking back on the memory. “Picking up the brush and combining colors gave me the same feeling I used to get listening to Ivy sing. I was young, so I called it a sign. But now I think that artist was just the right person there at the right time. She gave me the tool I needed to pull myself back into my own life.”
“I don’t have a life,” I mutter.
“Life is for the living, Sera. I had to learn it, and you will too. I had to learn that my sister loved me as much as I loved her, and that she wouldn’t want me not to live just because she wasn’t with me. I wouldn’t have wanted her to waste her life, her talent. Why wouldn’t she feel the same toward me? Just because it was hard didn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying.”
She sounds like Luke, upset with me for not imagining ourfuture simply because I wasn’t sure I’d get one. Challenging me to live while I could instead of just planning for it all to end. Tears prick the corners of my eyes as I nod.
Iris stands up. “I’ll leave all this with you. Maybe there’s a tool here that will help, but maybe you’ll find that somewhere else. Just be open to it, when it comes.”
I finally find my voice through my tears. “How am I supposed to take the life that was his?”
“Oh, Sera. I don’t think he’d begrudge you that. I don’t think he’d know the difference between your happiness and his.” Iris is wistful, her eyes drying. She gestures toward the easel she brought me. “I’ll go. But think about it. Okay?”
When she’s gone, I let the tears out until I’m drained and find a kind of calm. I don’t want to work on my own art, but I do want to see Luke’s. I crawl out of bed and, from underneath it, pull out a bin where I’ve been keeping things from the summer. Rocks and shells and the gifts from the kids, but also all the drawings Luke was throwing away and all the posters he’d designed for events that I found around town. I smooth them out gently, line them up in a circle until I’m surrounded by the bold text and sharp black lines of his beautiful work.
The way he captured the world, always in motion, always moving, shifting, changing.Living,a tired but reawoken part of my mind whispers.
I shuffle through the sketches. The seagulls, herons, and crows. A small bird I think might be a finch. A drawing of his brothers and his mom; one of me, half-finished, asleep; another where I’m standing by the edge of the water at our beach. One of a teammate halfway through a swing. A few close-upsof shells, their insides swirling with history. My window from his room, which sits dark and quiet across from me now. The waiting room in Boston, the museum, the sea and the sea and the sea.
There are more of the harbor than I remember. The abandoned buildings on Harborside Main tucked into each other for support, but not lifeless. Never lifeless. I pick up one of Frappie’s, and the first bloom of an idea takes root like a seed in my heart.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Sera
Nine Months Later
