Page 3 of What You Never Knew

At times, undetermined by me, I slip from the nothingness and into the living realm. There, just by thinking it, I’m able to move from one spot in the room to another, where I spread into things or hang in the air like dust particles. I am aimless and powerless, but there’s this feeling that I’m there to do something and I just don’t know what it is yet.

When I’m in the living realm, memories appear in my consciousness like scheduled commercial breaks—unbidden and determined by something outside me. As though it’s all part of a greater plan, one that I have yet to be made aware of. This is death, knowing all and knowing nothing at once.

The first time I shifted from the nothingness to the living realm, I arrived in June’s bedroom. She was rolled up in a mess of sheets on her bed—a sloppily constructed cocoon of sorrow. The blind was pulled down against the daylight, but a stubborn thin line of sun at the bottom broke its way into the warm, stuffy room.

I remembered that I’d seen her like that before. After her divorce. She’d left the family home, moved into a townhouse, put the bed together, and then she hadn’t gotten out of it for almost two weeks.

I went to say her name but quickly learned there’s no such thing as talking when you’re dead, so the word came out like a thought. Still, she lifted the covers, revealing her messy short black hair. Her blue, puffy, bloodshot eyes darted around the room. I thought her name again, concentrating even harder this time.

She squinted. “May?”

June. I’m right here. Words so clear and loud to me did nothing to penetrate the silence of the room. She pulled the covers back up over her and moaned like a wounded animal.

I stayed in that room as long as I could, talking at June, begging her to get up. I called her names, apologized, soothed her, challenged her. I tried every tactic until I became depleted by the effort and started fading away from the space.

I didn’t understand how June couldn’t hear me. Alive, we could practically read each other’s minds. Being dead doesn’t mean you don’t feel things. In fact, your feelings flow out all over the place until you feel like you’re drowning in them. So why couldn’t she pick up on them?

Frustration, desperation, sorrow—they crashed through the space I was occupying like tidal waves. The fading away brought some relief. It happened quickly, as it always does. Like a sleep brought on by strong drugs.

Before I evaporated from the room completely, June threw back the covers, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

“Okay, May. I’m up.”

JUNE

I would never tell anyone this, but I’m pretty sure my sister is haunting me. Sometimes I hear her voice and am sure I smell her. Every person has their own scent, and I know May’s better than anybody’s—even my own children’s. Their smells change from one age to the next, each new stage introducing something foreign. May’s is warm skin and cinnamon—always has been.

Haunting isn’t the right word. I don’t believe in ghosts. Plus, May would never haunt anybody; she’d watch over them, protect them. It’s more likely, though, that it’s just pure longing that conjures her voice and smell, the imprint of her on me so strong it has residual effects.

But one day a few weeks after she’d died, in the middle of the afternoon, I was sure I heard her tell me to get out of bed. Not so much heard it as felt it. May’s always been bossy, in that older-sister way that makes you feel loved and repressed at the same time.

Imagined or not, it got me out of bed. I showered for the first time in days and ate something. When my girls came home from school, the relief on their fourteen-year-old faces almost made me cry. Twin girls should have understood better than anybody the devastation of losing a sister, but for some reason they just didn’t grasp my debilitating sorrow.

I faked my way through the making of dinner, the helping with homework, the watching of a sitcom. Just enough to give them back some sense of normalcy. Then I sent them to bed, intentionally ignoring the devices they had subtly tucked away in the pockets of their hooded sweat shirts so they would comply.

Once the house was in darkness, I closed my bedroom door and released the dam of tears that had accumulated while I was playing at normal. The next morning I slept through their departure to school and slipped right back into the dysfunctional zone.

The next attempt to get me out of bed was made by my ex-husband. He walked into the bedroom, as though we still shared one, and pulled at the blinds. They snapped back up into their tubular homes, letting light charge into the space. He might as well have thrown a glass of cold water on me. He’s never been one for gentle tactics. At one point, when I still considered myself a writer, he’d been my editor as well as my husband, but that fact had never protected me from his brutally harsh editing style or, for that matter, his equally harsh husbanding style.

“What the hell, Leo?” I said, grabbing at the sheets to pull them over my head.

“June. You need to get up.” I felt his weight land on the end of the bed. He’s always careful not to get too close if he doesn’t have to. I think it’s because he still has the urge to wrap his hands around my neck and squeeze until the breath leaves me.

“You can’t tell me what to do anymore, Leo. Remember we’re divorced?”

He sighed with impatience, and I assumed that the girls had put him up to it. “May would want you to get up. She wouldn’t want you wasting away like this. Or neglecting the girls.”

Using the two most precious things in the world to me was a low blow. I swung my leg out in a vicious kick, but the tangle of sheets trapped it before it connected with his body.

He reached out and patted my foot as though thanking it for not hurting him. “Also, I got the paperwork for May’s will from Jim.”

Jim is our lawyer—mine, Leo’s, and May’s. He’d also been a family friend when Leo and I still made a family—a touch incestuous, but we got a decent discount. He shouldn’t have given those papers to Leo, but it wasn’t the first time he hadn’t stuck to proper lawyer protocol.

“He said you weren’t answering your phone or returning his messages.”

“I’m in mourning,” I mumbled through my wall of sheet.

“June.” I hate the way he says my name, as though he can barely bring himself to utter it. “It’s been a month. You’ve got to get back to the living. The healing can only happen when you start moving forward. Putting one foot in front of the other.”