Why?
And beneath that question, only others. Some of it meant, but all of it grief.
What were you doing on the roof? How did you get up there? (Didn’t I raise you with more sense than that?) Did she say that she was sad? Was it something we did? Was she mad at us? How could this happen? (Why weren’t you being watched?) Did you two get in a fight, did you push her? (You’re accusing my daughter?) What are we supposed to think? Why didn’t you stop her? (How could she?) Why would a child . . . ? How could a child . . . ? Is this our fault? (. . .) What do we do now? Where do we go from this?
After the ambulance departs (lights off), after the police collect their statements, after anyone can finally move from the shock, they go home. Ava twists in the backseat, watching the hotel fade behind her in the dark. She’d told them everything she knew, except the thing they can’t handle, the thing it’s kinder not to say. That of all the possible and conflicting truths, there is a smaller, much simpler reason Kiera chose to fall.
A: She wanted to know what it felt like.
V. Blood
She gets her period in the bathtub three days after they put Kiera in the ground. The blood is dark, more than just blood, solid red shapes bobbing on water. A low pain thrums through Ava’s stomach and the small of her back, but it doesn’t mean anything now. There’s no one to compare with. The whole thrill of it was to stand face-to-face with Kiera and feel, for a moment, that they were the same. But Kiera was always first in everything they did, even this. Ava realizes while she has played at death, it’s a thing Kiera owns.
Kiera was the one person who’d ever really seen her. She recognized something in Ava’s face, something kindred to herself, and came to name it. (I feel like I’m drowning.) Who would know her now? Not her mother, whom Ava stayed silent with because if she didn’t, she knew she’d scream, the howling erupting—an unstoppable, vibrant poison. Her mother didn’t say this to her, but she’d heard her talking to her friends: If they’da spanked that girl every now and then, maybe she’d be alive.
Ava takes a long, slow breath and sinks below the water. She keeps her eyes closed as her body settles on the porcelain bottom; her heart is a constant thud, a sound as well as a feeling. It fills the tub—comforting, disappointing, absolute. Could she be like Kiera? Open her mouth and let water and blood pour in?
She opens her eyes instead of her mouth and there is her mother standing above her, watching, face indistinct above the ripples. She shoots up, swallowing water in surprise, choking on it. Ava’s mother leans down and grabs her roughly by the shoulders. Her hands are firm even through the slips of water flowing down Ava’s arms. She squeezes her and makes her daughter look her in the eyes.
“That’s forever. Do you hear me?” she says, and Ava, for the first time since she’s been thirteen, sees a flash of recognition in her mother’s face, some bit of knowing. (What If she’s seen me all along?) This new idea disrupts Ava, rattles something loose inside her, and the tears come hot and fast with the pressure of the empty emptying out. She sits and shakes with her mother’s fingers pressing into her arms, and it feels so good to hurt.
“It’s okay,” her mother says. “Let it out.”
Her mother grabs a towel and lifts Ava to her feet, dries her, and after showing Ava how to use a pad, leads her to the living room. With Ava sitting between her legs, she detangles her daughter’s hair and oils her scalp, massaging it with her sure fingers. She braids the hair into a crown and all the while she lets Ava cry, saying nothing. Ava wonders at this new emotion, of feeling cracked open—like a small, big thing is happening inside of her, making room.
“I’m so sad, Mom,” she says, and though this word doesn’t mean what she wants it to, when her mother places both her hands over Ava’s eyes, catching wet and salt from her tears, Ava feels like her mother knows exactly what she means.
When people ask what happened to her friend—whenever she mentions Kiera, recounting some silly thing they used to do, tame things people won’t hurt to hear—she’ll think back to gym class, that first time they met. When they ask her, How did your friend die? she’ll tell them, She drowned.
In time, Kiera’s broken body on the hotel concrete is not what she returns to when she thinks of her friend, and she’ll think of Kiera often, especially in such moments where she is now and forever first and only—first high, first car accident, first sex. (That particular bit of guilt will settle and smooth into something like peace.) On her wedding night, she’ll dance chest-to-chest with her husband—a man whom she’s not sure but thinks she loves. A man who sees her, and doesn’t try to tell her what she needs. Swaying close, their bodies generating comfortable warmth, Ava will remember a day near thirteen’s end.
On what would have been her friend’s fourteenth birthday, she snuck into Kiera’s backyard and down to the retention pond to watch the sun set, water and sky burning pink; to stand on the same bank where she and Kiera had scared the tadpoles, where they had laughed and preened. The place where they—two monsterish girls—had owned the entire world. After the sun slipped under the lip of the horizon, Ava left the way she came, tripping up into the backyard, the sky darkening, all quiet until she heard something small and strangled cutting through the dusk. Kiera’s mom was slumped in a patio chair in the corner of the yard, face in her hands, bathrobe twisted around her, exposing one milky, blue-veined thigh.
This is the image Ava returns to on her wedding night and many others: walking toward Kiera’s mother; standing in front of the woman and placing a hand on her shoulder; how her mother’s whole body seemed concave, as if consuming itself. She’ll think of the way she opened the woman’s robe and pressed her body into hers, their skin suctioning together where it touched, forming a seal. How she stayed there, silent, as time collapsed around them, wondering if Kiera’s mother could feel her daughter’s blood pumping hard in her veins—a howling, creating heat.
There is only moonlight, a spill of it across Heath’s shoulders, illuminating how he lies on his side, turned from me, and also the pair of miniscule hands floating above the curtain rod, the fingers small as the tines of a doll’s silver fork. When I call my husband’s name, my voice splinters from my throat and Heath wakes immediately, turns on the bedside lamp, leans in so close I can smell the sleep on his breath. He checks my pupils, then lays the cool back of his hand against my forehead.
“Do you have any pain?” he asks, and I want to swallow my mouth—to fold in my lips and chew until they burst—to keep myself from laughing. I place my hands on my stomach and nod. Heath reaches underneath my sleep shirt to test the tenderness of my skin.
“What hurts?” His fingers keep pressing, like I’m clay.
“Everything,” I say.
He looks at me then, and in the look I can see him envisioning how I will be at some point in the future, ten years from now or twenty. I am a vague imprint of the girl he’d thought I was when we married, my mouth a black cave, ugly and squared.
“Rayna, you’re fine,” Heath says. “Everything’s okay. It was a nightmare.” He turns the light back out, and I don’t correct him, don’t mention the tiny hands that are still climbing up and down the drapes. We are both pretending. It’s the only way we sleep.
This thing with the body parts makes sense to me, this fixation with scale; I blame all those baby tracker apps for that, measuring the growth of my child as compared to produce—kumquats and
