Page 91 of The Last Thing You Said

Or what was said to me.

“Did she say that I did?” I ask.

“No, darling, I’m sure it was awkward for her.” Mum smiles again. “We had a wonderful visit.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her this happy.

God, I’m a real piece of shit for a son. All those days she couldn’t get out of bed, all the times she sat in Trixie’s room and cried, all those hours she spent in her garden, missing her dead daughter—would those days have been better if I hadn’t been such a shit to Lucy and kept her away?

I take a deep breath. I should tell her that I didn’t say a word to Lucy, that I haven’t kept my promise.

Lucy came back on her own.

“That’s nice, Mum,” I say.

“Are you okay, Ben? You seemed upset when you left.”

Am I okay? I think I’m better, at least. “Mum, I’ll be in my room, okay?”

But I don’t make it that far. Trixie’s door is open, the late afternoon sun streaming across the floor. There’s a fresh vase of wildflowers on her desk.

I haven’t set foot in here since before Trixie died.

But I do now.

I walk into her room, over to her bed, crisply made, half a dozen decorative pillows propped up against the headboard. Her alarm clock, an empty glass, two unwrapped butterscotch candies, a paperback copy of The Outsiders facedown and splayed open to the page where she’d stopped reading. Lucy always scolded her when she did that.

I turn to the window, run my finger along the sill. There is no dust.

Trixie’s desk is cluttered, papers and pencils and books scattered across its surface. A bulletin board above the desk is filled with movie ticket stubs, postcards, photos of her and Lucy through the years. School dances, with Emily, at the beach, on the pontoon.

In all these photos, Trixie’s face is lit and sparkling and wild, and that light carries across to Lucy’s.

I peer closer, to one of the two of them at the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth last summer, and I can see that I’m wrong. I remember Lucy’s excitement, her joy, and I realize that the light of her smile is her very own.

They were good for each other, those two.

Lucy was good for me, too.

A composition notebook lies on the corner of Trixie’s messy desk. I recognize it, the notebook that Trix and Lucy scribbled in constantly.

The words The Book of Quotes stretch across the cover, written in blue bubble letters.

I sit down at the desk and gently open its tattered cover. Colorful letters fill each page, each quote written with a different, bold-hued marker. Song lyrics. Movie quotes. Funny things they said to each other. Long passages from The Great Gatsby, Jane Austen. Sketches and doodles fill the edges of the pages: flowers and stars and hearts.

I hold on to the words that my sister loved enough to write them down. I feel closer to her here, in her room, the same as it was the day she left us, everything exactly as it was that last morning she lived.

She died doing what she loved best. She died in the lake she loved.

I turn another page and there, in bold purple letters, Trixie wrote this:

Life is short, so live it.

I can almost hear her say the words the day I bought the Firebird.

Her life was short, but she did—she lived it.

I close the notebook and set it back down on the desk, feeling a familiar sinkhole in my gut.