A Million Miles Away(16)

And it was, when she was a kid.

But every time she and her father tried to comfort each other now, they ended up just forcing words into a thick silence. Because they reminded each other of Michelle, she guessed.

Kelsey, especially, was a reminder to him. She was a reminder to everybody. She had no choice. People in the hallways, people on the sidewalk, people in the grocery store. Their eyes widened and they drew in breath. Their mouths tightened in pity and they looked away, as if it were too hard to look at her. Try looking in the mirror every morning, Kelsey wanted to tell them. She was used to being mistaken for Michelle, but Michelle used to make people smile, not cringe. The only person who still smiled at the thought of Michelle was Peter. Maybe that’s why she did what she did.

Kelsey blew out a thin breath at the thought.

She sat up and stood on her mattress, shaking out her arms and legs. She cleared a space on the floor covered in dirty clothes to do a sun salute, then some splits, and some butt-bouncing in the mirror for good measure. She put in her gold studs. She put on a cardigan and tight, dark jeans. She straightened her hair and layered on blush and mascara until she was unmistakable. She pointed and flexed her toes. She was put together.

She was Kelsey. She lifted her arms over her head and let her belly breathe. No need to explain. She let her body do the talking.

When her parents pulled up to the entrance of City Market to let her out and park the car, Kelsey was hit by the sounds of laughter and other languages, the smells of cinnamon and pine. Christmas was close.

Both she and Michelle had always wanted a real tree, and their mother had always refused, giving excuses. “Out of respect for your Jewish grandparents,” she would say, or, “The kind of gifts we give you don’t fit under a tree.” It was true. They had always gone on trips at Christmas, and when they remembered to put one up, it was a tiny artificial tree from Walgreens that sang carols until it was out of batteries.

After getting a cup of hot cider, Kelsey searched for her father’s uncut hair towering over the crowd. She shuffled around young couples wearing large glasses and small, stumpy women with carts, wandering toward the butcher’s booth.

Michelle’s ghost was everywhere, her baggy plaid coat darting in and out of a line of people. Her sister always got sulky on these trips to the market. Kelsey could grin and bear the hours for tradition’s sake, for the sake of her mom and dad humming happily to every corner, but her sister would burn out. Now was about the time she would start moaning for money to go to the thrift store or keys to the car.

But Kelsey missed that, too. She was slowly finding out you don’t just get to miss the parts you liked about someone who had died. You had to feel the whole weight of them, tugging at you.

She found herself in the middle of a makeshift grove of trees standing crooked in their asphalt pots. When the two of them appealed to their dad for a Christmas tree last year, he took them out to the garage, pointed to an ax, and invited them to go to the river and chop one down themselves.

Kelsey felt a smile come on at the memory of Michelle taking the ax from her father and swinging it with enthusiasm, almost cutting off a limb. She could feel her sister laughing next to her, see her breath in the air, urging her to Get one! Get one! Mom and Dad will understand.

She approached the salesman, a gangly kid in a KU pullover, much younger and taller than her. “How much for that one?” She pointed to a sickly pine tree about her height.

“On sale for twenty,” he replied.

“If you help me carry it to my parents, they’ll pay.”

“No way.”

Kelsey stared at him for a long moment, inching closer. She mouthed the word Please, and gave him a wide smile.

Bridged by the skinny tree, Kelsey and the boy parted the City Market crowd in a trail of needles. She imagined her and her parents sitting around the lit-up tree in the living room, with syrupy, old-timey Christmas music in the background. She could feel her blood getting warmer.

“This will be the first time our family has a real tree,” Kelsey called back to the boy, searching for the Maxfields’ car.

“Cool,” he said, his breath heaving.

“What’s your name?”

“Kevin.”

“Kevin, this tree is special. It’s kind of a tribute. To my sister.”

Kevin said nothing. He was too busy lifting his end over the hood of a car. She could barely get a word out to her parents, her friends, but people like Kevin didn’t feel the remotest bit of sadness for Michelle to begin with. Unlike her, they could only see Michelle in what she told them: from far away, an outline.

“We used to come here every month. She used to pick up onions and tomatoes from the booth and ask for the price in French, just to practice. No one could understand her. It was embarrassing.”

Kevin still didn’t care. She kept going.

“When we were eight we snuck into a concert they held in that pavilion,” she told Kevin. “It wasn’t even fun. It was just a cello. But we were proud.”

As they crossed the street, Kelsey called back to him, “Once I caught her reading aloud the steamy parts of my mom’s romance novels to her Barbies.”

That one got a laugh. Or at least it sounded like a laugh.

After ten minutes of wandering through the neighborhood, Kevin put his end of the tree down and made a noise that was supposed to be exasperation, but sounded more like a malfunctioning blender. No sign of the Subaru.