Kate

      2010

T HERE SHOULD BE A STATUTE of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, butonly for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you haveheard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk;take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass—if only because it cutsyou fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way weonce measuredher birthdays.

For a long time, afterward, my father claimed to see Anna in the night sky. Sometimes it was the wink of hereye, sometimes the shape of her profile. He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved they weretraced in constellations, to live forever. My mother believed, for a long time, that Anna would come back toher. She began to look for signs—plants that bloomed too early, eggs with double yolks, salt spilled in theshape of letters.

And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault. If Anna had never filed that lawsuit, ifshe hadn’t been at the courthouse signing papers with her attorney, she never would have been at thatparticular intersection at that particular moment. She would be here, and I would be the one coming back tohaunt her.

spaceFor a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then, inexplicably, I began the long steep climbupward. It has been eight years since my last relapse, something not even Dr. Chance can understand. Hethinks it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy—some contributing delayed effect—but Iknow better. It is that someone had to go, and Anna took my place.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the toplayer off a family. And the under-belly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to mymother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn’t have tocome home to a house that felt too big for us.

Then one morning, my mother realized that we had eaten everything in the house, down to the last shrunkenraisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat downto watch TV and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh.

Immediately, I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse,sitting beside me on the couch, who said, “She would have thought it was funny, too.”

See, as much as you want to hold on to t............