I stuttered, “Uh, uh, uh, n-no. Probably not coming, but thanks for the invite.” I was lost in the conversation. I wanted to jump up and down and shout 'YES' to the whole student body. I wanted to go to his party. I wanted him to continue staring at me the way he was.
"Please." His blue eyes sparkled.
I shook my head and turned away. I ran/walked as fast as I could. I needed space from him before I just grabbed his face and did what I'd always dreamed of. I would put my hands up into his hair and pull his soft-looking lips down on mine.
My face was crimson. I needed a cold shower. Being around him had grown harder in the past month. I noticed him at every turn. He was always there.
Why did he want me to come to his party? I never went to parties. Mostly, because I never got invited. My sister's boyfriend inviting me didn’t make me feel better about the invite. I didn’t understand how they were together, but they were.
I shut my brain off before I spent my day thinking about him. It couldn’t be helped; he was so sexy and sweet. He didn’t belong with my sister; she didn’t like him for the right reasons. She liked that he was popular and his life was filled with drama. She thrived on drama.
Gahh, I had to stop thinking about him.
I avoided my mom's spot and took the bus home. I didn’t want her to see me crushing on my sister's boyfriend, even though my mom would have understood. She knew I had loved him since I had been old enough to understand boys and girls were a different species altogether.
When I got home my dad was in his office, closed up tight. He had become a hermit. I wasn’t certain how vacation and bereavement leave worked in the real world, but I assumed eight months of not even trying to show up to work was bad. I grabbed a yogurt and went to my room to study.
I fell asleep instead of studying.
The dream was the same every time. Fog covered my eyes, but I could hear the people around me panicking. I put my hands out, trying to reach out to them. No one took my hand. When the fog cleared I saw faces of people I didn’t know. They were calling for me. They were crying out. Disaster had struck the city I was in, and I had a terrible feeling it was my fault. I heard someone calling and looked up to the sky full of debris. His face was there. I cried out to him and tried to get him to take my hand. He pulled away from me, horrified for some reason. I shouted his name repeatedly, but he wouldn’t look at me.
“Wake up, Aimee." I knew the soft voice. It was my mom who whispered to me.
I woke startled, feeling my own embrace and the beads of sweat that soaked me.
I had fallen asleep in my clothes again. I sat up for a moment and pulled my sweater off as the night’s cool air brushed against me.
I looked around dazed, expecting to see someone. I had been certain that voices had woken me. Perhaps it had been my mom trying to talk to me. I rolled on my back as I slipped off my jeans and pulled the blankets around me. The enveloping darkness was a warm comfort inside my bed.
I fell back to sleep and dreamed of him again. In the new dream I floated, staring at him with my parents and my sister. I was unable to float down to touch the ground or move at all. I floated in limbo, watching them.
The breakfast table the next morning felt grim as I contemplated my dreams. As usual, I remembered very little. I didn’t have garden-variety teenage girl dreams anymore. Nothing about my life in eight months had been garden variety.
Tragedy had struck.
I felt myself get lost for an eternity within a second. I fought with myself as I remembered our family's worst moment.
My mom had died.
I spent a few minutes remembering the day she died. I had walked home from school the long way. I felt a warm wind hit me. It was a cool day. I looked around at the swaying trees and branches. A brief thought about it being the Santa Ana winds from California coming up the coast filled my mind. I shivered at exactly the same moment my cell phone rang.
Everything slowed.
I pulled out my phone and answered.
My sister screamed into the phone.
My legs ceased to exist.
I crumpled on the side of the road.
My soul literally made an attempt at leaving me.
My chest felt as though it ripped into a million tiny shards.
I had actual physical pain paralyzing me. For the first time in my life, I felt my heart's exact location. Her death took my breath and my sanity, simultaneously. I sat on the cold concrete and rocked back and forth in an attempt to block myself from the truth.
I knew hope was taken from my world. At that moment, I didn’t know just how large of a piece it was.
I didn’t know if I would ever recover.
I convinced myself I would be fine as long as I didn’t leave that spot on the road. The spot where I'd felt the warm wind. No doubt it had been my mom brushing against me. It was her one last time to tell me how much I was loved. Of this, I was certain.
My father found me on the side of the road. He left the truck running in the middle of the street, and he ran to my side. He sat there with me, wrapped around me.
He had searched for me for hours. When he finally found me, I was devoid of every feeling. I knew if I acknowledged one pain, I would have to face the others.
I knew my father was touching me. I refused to feel him as he cried on my shoulder. He shook my body with his sobs. He tried to get me to stand, but I rejected his attempts.
I knew nothing was special about that place on the side of the road on the way home. If I left it, I would never again find it. It was the last place my mom had touched me, and I needed it.
I shivered at the memories and looked down at my mushy cereal.
I didn’t like to think of such depressing thoughts before breakfast, but that morning seemed to feel worse than most days. I had been certain that I had started to come around, but the bad dreams hadn’t helped.
“Earth to Aimee! How does this look?”
I looked up from my lost gaze to see my identical twin, except for hair and eyes, frowning at me. She posed as she modeled a pair of black leggings with huge grey boots and a silver sweater that hung off her left shoulder.
I rolled my eyes at yet another piece of silver clothing. I wondered where she got them all. I had a terrible feeling she was stealing them.
Alise, not Alice, has always been stunning. She had been beautiful at birth. Which sucked, because we were complete opposites. Where she had dark, black hair and silver eyes like our mom, I had blonde and blue. My eyes weren’t even an attractive blue, more like grey. It was as if they tried to become silver like my sister's, but quit part way.
We shared every other feature, which seemed to work on her. On me, it looked uneven and plain. We were both five feet seven inches, one hundred and thirty-three pounds.
“You look fine. Why do you even care?” I asked with a hint of disapproval, well, maybe not a hint.
Alise rolled her eyes and grabbed a banana. “Oh my God, Aimee. Mom isn’t going to judge you for having some fashion sense."
I flinched at her saying the 'Mom' word, as if she was giving me motherly advice. Seeing the suffering on my face, she relented.
She tilted her head and continued in a less-harsh tone. It was more like patronizing, unless you were three-years old. “She’s watching us from Heaven, and she’s going to worry about you if you don’t snap out of it. You’re going to disappoint her by not living, not the opposite.”
I gave her my best blank stare, which made her storm out the door to her car.
Alise's words stung. Not only did the double negative bother me, but I hated that she was right. Even though I knew it, I couldn’t make myself move past what had occurred eight months prior. I felt the walls starting to close in around me as the air got heavy.
I ran up the stairs to my room and dove onto the carpet beside my bed. The carpet rubbed against my elbows.
In a panic, I fished the secret envelope out from under the bed.
Once the treasure was in my hands, I opened it slow and methodically.
I didn’t want to tear the plastic bag within the manila envelope. As always, I was careful when I opened it. I paused, letting it release its contents into the air. I held the plastic bag under my nose and let the fragrance fill my nostrils. The sweet smell that filled the air around me became my oxygen.
The walls started to come down a little, as if I was somewhere else. I was somewhere safe, where the smell of my mom made all the bad feelings small again.
“You existed, you loved me, you existed, you loved me,” I chanted.
I was grateful the perfume had maintained its strength—thanks to the protective plastic bag. My heart beat out of my chest, but I closed my eyes and let the world stop. I needed to feel her. Even if it was for a moment, she was there. I opened my eyes, relieved, and closed the bag, as always, being gentle with it. I put it back in the manila envelope and tucked it under my bed again.
I decided on the way back downstairs that I would visit my mom after school and see if I could just get a small feel of her again. Sometimes, being at the side of the road where I had been when my mom died made me feel her in the air. It was like a hug sent in a letter, where even though it wasn’t real, the intent made you feel warm just the same.
Inpatient as always, Alise honked the horn of the car at me. My heart warmed to see my sister's glare through the windshield. She shouted at me but I ignored her. Instead, I took an extra-long unnecessary second to lock the house. It was small victories like that that got me through the day.
I never spoke to my sister about our mom. I wanted to. I wanted to tell her that being a little sad wouldn’t kill her. Or tell her that acting like it had in fact impacted her life wouldn’t make her look weak. If anything, it would make her seem more human.
I hated that she had seemed to cruise past our mom’s death like nothing had happened. She cried a modest amount at the funeral on Saturday and shopped with friends on Monday. I had stayed in bed for two weeks. Well, until my father threatened calling my grandma to come help me through it. I resented his wanting to be the only one suffering.
I slumped into the seat of my sister's car. I turned away from her, watching the road blur by the window like an impressionist painting left out in the rain. Alise talked in a steady and unyielding stream on her Bluetooth. The whole ride was a series of 'OMG' and 'seriously' on both their parts. I often wondered if it was a modern-day Morse code.