The Good Sister by Jamie Kain Page A

as if he’s holding on for dear life. Here is my evidence of strong emotion, and I’m satisfied to see it.
    I realize now, I came here looking for something more than an end to this thing we’ve been doing. I want to see him beg for me to stay. And if he doesn’t, then what?
    â€œThat isn’t what I was going to say,” he says.
    â€œIt isn’t?”
    He shakes his head, frowning. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I was going to say now.”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œI … I was going to ask you if you wanted me to take you out there … to the trail where she fell.”
    â€œOh.”
    This is what I am supposed to be consumed with—my sister’s death. Still. Maybe forever. I am, sort of. Breaking up with David was supposed to be part of getting on with my life, wasn’t it? Making right some of the shit I’ve done wrong?
    â€œI just thought, maybe you’d like someone to go back there with you. So you could get some closure.”
    Closure. As if that were something that happens to people like me.
    The cliff where Sarah died is the last place I want to be right now, even if I do feel like it belongs to me. I am repelled from it like a burn victim from fire.
    â€œThat’s sweet of you to think of it. I don’t think I can go there now though … it’s too soon.”
    â€œYou really want to stop seeing each other?”
    I open my mouth to say yes, but no sound comes out.
    If I knew what the hell I wanted, life would be so easy, like a menu with only one choice. But it’s all the options that trip me up. I am dazzled by the endless possibilities.
    I know how to be unhappy. It never feels the same way twice. It is an emotion full of nuance and variety, nothing like happiness, which always feels the same and never lasts long.
    â€œNo,” I finally say, and it’s like peeling back a scab, finding the tender, unhealed flesh beneath. “I don’t know why I said that. Guilt, I guess.”
    He scoots closer, puts an arm around me, and I don’t pull away. I lean in, kiss him softly on the lips, as if picking at the scab some more, hoping to see fresh blood.

Eighteen
    Sarah
    Watching, watching, I am watching life without me go by, an endless movie. I have lost the remote control.
    Watching Rachel and David together should be more painful than it is. It should be torture to see her lean in and kiss him now. She is there, and I am not. She still has a life to live, and I don’t.
    Instead of its feeling painful, it’s bittersweet. I wish I could turn back time ten years or more. I wish I could remake our history into one in which Rachel was given what she needed instead of feeling like she had to take it. She used to be a sweet girl sometimes, always mercurial but occasionally lovely, the sister who, when she wasn’t being a brat, brought me handpicked flowers in the hospital and sat beside my bed reading to me from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, skipping over the boring parts and pausing to make fun of Ma when she acts like a racist.
    But slowly, time and lack of attention let Rachel grow wild—a garden overtaken by weeds. She was always precocious, but once she discovered her power over the opposite sex, she changed.
    Do I regret what I did to her?
    Was it revenge for David?
    Such questions are not as easy to answer in this strange afterlife as you might expect.
    My favorite memory of Rachel is from our early days back in Marin, before I got sick.
    We shared a room because Asha still slept in bed with our parents well past her fourth birthday, and Rachel used to have nightmares about a man climbing through the window and taking her. Whenever she woke up after one of those dreams, she would climb in bed with me and ask me to tell her a story to help her fall back to sleep.
    One night, I was tired and cranky from her waking me up, and I couldn’t think of a story. I’d always told her tales