Thirteen
Grant buys flowers from the supermarket at the last minute, because he isn’t sure what the right thing to do is but he’d rather err on the side of bringing something. The checkout lady smiles indulgently at him when he places the flowers on the conveyer and he feels uncomfortable at the thought that she’s misinterpreting the gesture.
He pulls past the wrought iron gates of the cemetery and sees the parking lot is pretty full. It makes sense, he supposes, that a lot of people would want to visit their loved ones during the holidays.
Helen waits outside her car in a woolen winter coat, and he feels bad that she’s been standing in the cold waiting for him.
“Sorry,” he says, and holds up the flowers. “I wasn’t sure whether I should bring something.”
“No, that’s . . . really nice,” Helen says. “It’s up this way.”
She leads them up the gravel path, past the oldest headstones covered in lichen and the craggy trees that must create a more picturesque scene in the spring and summer, but currently give the place a haunted winter feeling. The snow from a few days ago has melted by now, and the dirt beneath their feet is still wet and dark with moisture.
Helen wears heeled boots and he catches a glimpse of dark sheer tights under the swishing skirt of her long camel coat.
They reach the top of the hill and Helen slows her pace so they’re walking side by side, their elbows occasionally brushing as they navigate the bumpy path.
“How was your Christmas?” she asks.
“Good,” he says, then thinks about it, really. “Fine. Underwhelming. Just dinner at home. But I didn’t mind. I always get my fill of Christmas spirit in LA before flying back.”
She nods. “Christmas in LA seems like it’d be so different,” she says. “No snow.”
“There’s no snow here this year either.”
“Yeah, but there’s a chance of it and that makes a difference, I think.”
“There’s fake snow at the Grove,” he says, referencing an upscale outdoor mall in Mid-City. “They run it every hour or so, with soapsuds.”
“That’s not the same, though.”
“No, but it’s fun anyway.”
Helen smiles, then slows her walk. She points directly below them, at the nearest row of headstones. “She’s over here.”
Grant’s heart beats a little faster and his body tenses. Helen looks up at him with eyes that always seem to see too much.
“Come on,” she says softly, and slips her hand in his as she leads the way forward.
They stop in front of a dark marble headstone.
Michelle Zhang
May 24, 1992–June 7, 2008
Beloved daughter, sister, friend.
Helen watches as Grant crouches down and places the supermarket flowers across the bottom of the headstone. The flowers are wrapped in festive cellophane and it feels almost as if he’s saying Merry Xmas, Merry Xmas, Merry Xmas to her dead sister. She sits down on the grass in front of the headstone, and he sits beside her.
“Why did you come to the church that day?” she asks.
He hesitates and she becomes aware that they’re holding hands still. He studies their gloved hands as he contemplates an answer.
“I felt like I should,” he says. “I didn’t really want to. I just felt like . . . I owed it to her, or something. It was stupid, in retrospect. I was thinking about me and not how it’d make your family feel. My dad tried to talk me out of it, to be fair.”
“It must have been hard for you,” she says. He laughs mirthlessly.
“Hard for me,” he murmurs. “You lost your sister.”
Helen turns back to look at the headstone as he gives her hand a slight squeeze.
“My parents asked for my input on the inscription. I gave them the blandest, most generic one on purpose.” She studies the headstone for what feels like a long time before she looks at him. “You know if someone in your family dies by suicide, your chances of being suicidal increase?”
Grant turns to look at her sharply. Helen exhales.
“One of the school counselors told me that. I spent the rest of that summer paranoid every time I picked up a knife or scissors. Which was stupid, honestly. Because after all this time . . . I still don’t understand how she could do it.”
They stare out at the same view, as if an answer might materialize before them.
“After she died, I became so, so angry at suicide prevention organizations. I know that sounds strange,” Helen says. “Everywhere I looked, it seemed like there were messages to reach out if you were worried about someone, to tell them you loved them, to tell them they weren’t a burden, to help them find help. It infuriated me. The idea that they all seemed to believe there was something I could have done to keep Michelle from killing herself.”
Helen picks at the grass with her free hand, then presses her palm into the dirt.
“It’s the life-and-death stakes. Everyone wants to believe they could save someone else’s life, if they saw the right signs, had the right tools. Like maybe, if I say the right words, in the right combination this time, she’ll choose life. But that’s not how it happens.” She laughs, a short brittle one. “What happens is your sister withdraws and becomes distant, but not all the time, and you think, she’s just being a teenager, and then you find out she’s doing things you’d never dream of doing—she had a boyfriend and a drug dealer before I even had my first kiss—but you want to be cool about it, you don’t want to seem like you’re overreacting, and you don’t want to get her into trouble, and she’s a fucking asshole to you back, and you start checking in and checking in and she pushes you away and pushes you away and finally you’re like, Fine! And fuck you too! And then suddenly she’s dead.”
The letters on the headstone are still sharp and easy to read, and Helen has to look away.
“I refused to feel guilty, after she died,” she says to the ground. “And no one knew how to talk to me. Everyone knows how to say, ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ But if you say, ‘I know it wasn’t my fault, it was hers,’ people get uncomfortable. And maybe they’re right. Maybe—maybe it wasn’t Michelle at the steering wheel of her own body, that night. She died without ever having gone to a therapist, so I have no idea what disorders might have been driving her. She was probably an addict—she didn’t look like one, like how I pictured addicts before: desperate, homeless strangers on the street. She lived in our house. She was smart, and she had people who loved her, and it still wasn’t enough . . .”
Helen swipes away a frustrated tear. “I called a suicide hotline, the Monday after she died. I didn’t want to kill myself,” she says. “I just wanted to talk to someone who was used to talking to people who did. I remember asking him—‘Do you think if everyone on earth went through the training you did, learned how to talk about suicide without all the—the stigma and the self-consciousness, do you think then we’d live in a world where no one would ever kill themselves again?’ I wanted to see if there was a way to cure it, like cancer. And I’ll never forget—the man on the other end of the line said, ‘No. I can almost guarantee you, some of them still would.’ And I hung up after that.”
Helen draws a shaky breath.
“I took her suicide really personally,” she laughs, and it comes out a stifled, wet sound. “It felt like she took all the love I had to give and said, no, it’s not good enough. Which is probably not the healthiest way of looking at it. But—I am so sick of always being the healthy one.”
Her breath comes out in shaky spurts now, and Helen becomes aware of the warmth of Grant’s body, his left side pressing against her right as she commands herself do not cry. Grant shifts his arm slightly—not enough that it’s wrapped around her, but enough that she feels the support of it against her back.
“Did you know her at all?” she asks thickly.
“No,” Grant says, his voice hoarse. It feels like a long time since she last heard it. “She might’ve been friendly with some people I knew, but I didn’t really pay close attention to things like that, back then.”
“She was—loud and bright and unpredictable,” Helen says, thinking of squawking arguments in long car rides and sudden unexpected displays of sisterly affection. “It was like Michelle felt all her emotions, good and bad, at a higher saturation than anyone else in our family. She could be really funny too. We’d get into fights—you borrowed my sweater, you were a bitch about something when I was really upset, sister shit—and she’d come up with these incredible, really mean one-liners, just in the moment, that were so funny I’d have a hard time staying angry because I wanted to laugh so hard. She probably could have become a comedian, if she’d wanted. But I have no idea what . . . what she actually would have wanted.”
“Was there a note?” Grant asks, his voice quiet.
“Not a physical one,” Helen says, and feels strangely grateful for the chance to tell him. “But I always thought if she’d tried to write one, she would have done it on her laptop—she was so obsessed with that thing when she got it. I have her hard drive all backed up, and I’ve looked and I’ve looked but I’ve never found anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Grant murmurs, and she wonders what he’s apologizing for.
“We buried her in the Chinese community section of the cemetery. So she’s spending eternity with all the old grandmas and grandpas and Saturday-morning Chinese school principals who never approved of her. If ghosts exist, she’s probably giving them hell.”
“Do you think you’ll be buried here?” he asks.
It’s a blunt, existential question. One she’s thought of before.
“No,” she says. “I always liked the idea of having my ashes scattered in some significant place. The problem is I’ve never really felt that strongly about anywhere. I like a lot of places, but enough for eternity? Then again, it probably wouldn’t matter. I’m overthinking it, I know.”
“I read somewhere that you can get your remains turned into organic mush and they’ll plant a tree over your body,” Grant says.
It feels macabre to be talking about bodies turning into mush when he feels so warm and solid and alive against her. She drops her head against his waiting shoulder.
“What kind of tree would you be?” Helen asks.
“I don’t know,” he says, and she feels the deep rumble of his voice against her body. “I guess I feel the way you feel about places, with trees.”
Helen lifts her head slightly and studies Grant Shepard from closer up than she ever has before. “I feel like you’d be an oak tree. It’s like the golden retriever of trees.”
Grant laughs, a genuine laugh this time—the sound is jarring in the cemetery. Helen looks out at the view and tries to see a peaceful park instead of a final resting place.
“I haven’t been back here without my parents since the week we buried her,” she says. “I was really mad at her, for a long time. And it’s kind of depressing here.”
“Thanks for bringing me,” he says, and smoothly presses a kiss against the side of her brow.
They’re both quiet then, and for a moment she listens to their synchronized breaths, inhaling and exhaling with the wind.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says finally, and looks away. “We should get going, though, before it gets dark.”
He offers her a hand up and she takes it.
“Are you hungry?” he asks.
“A little,” she says, even though she isn’t.
The path is rocky and he touches her elbow lightly as she climbs back up the hill.
“You should come over for dinner,” he says. “There’s always too much food anyway.”
“Would that be okay?” She lifts her brows.
“Yeah,” he says. “Come over.”