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  for cassie wright

  october 25, 1966–november 26, 1998

  in dazzled memory

  prelude one

  TRESSA

  My mother doesn’t know that Luke comes through my bedroom window. How could she? He never makes a sound.

  My room is on the third floor. There’s no trellis, no neighboring oak tree for him to scale. It’s not logical to think he would appear, his hands on my windowsill, followed by an ankle, and then his whole entire self. He leaps through the window as clear as morning, exactly the way I remember him. He lands on my carpet and glides across the floor to sit on the edge of my bed. If there’s moonlight (and when he comes there’s always moonlight) it shines cleanly, without ever casting shadows across his face.

  Carlo lifts his sleek head and thumps his tail on the wood floor in greeting. My poor pup used to sleep beside me, on the bed, but these days he’s too old and creaky to haul himself up. So there’s plenty of room for Luke.

  In the early days, when Luke first reappeared, we would try to touch each other. I could see my hand pushing his hair behind his ear—it’s always too long—but I couldn’t feel the impossible smoothness except for in my memory. I could see his hand, the uneven knuckles wide across my knee, but there was no warmth, no sense of skin on skin, only the painfully lovely sight of it.

  So we’ve stopped trying to touch. It’s just too sad, seeing without feeling. And it’s the opposite of sad, the two of us together again, cross-legged on my bed, facing each other. Our own hands on our own knees, talking through the night.

  There’s never any noise from downstairs—no stirring footsteps, no water rumbling through the pipes. When Luke appears, every anxiety disappears. There’s only me. There’s only him. There’s only us. I never recall that exact moment when he exits and sleep enters. I just open my eyes minutes before the alarm sounds, and I know everything else—his presence, his words, his promise of return. I don’t feel tired, though I can’t have slept more than a few hours.

  I feel, in fact, wide-awake, far more alert than after nights when he hasn’t been here. I can still see Luke’s fingers, hovering tactfully above the paper-thin skin on the inside of my wrist, and I know that he’ll be back. I know exactly what’s brought him here, and I don’t feel afraid or ashamed. What I feel is alive, and in love, and I am almost ready to start remembering.

  prelude two

  LUKE

  It may feel like I’m back, and I am, sort of. I can tell you anything you want to know about the past. But when it comes to now, or the time just after? I don’t get it, not at all.

  Tressa and I try to talk about it but that never works. There’s no problem when she talks about the past. I can understand her fine. Then all of a sudden she must be talking about now, what I’ve taken to calling the after-Luke, because everything gets muffled.

  “Tressa,” I have to say. “I can’t hear you.”

  When Tressa talks about the after-Luke it’s the same as trying to touch her. I see her lips move but I don’t get the words. She might as well be speaking French. Tressa actually can speak French, and back in the day I used to like that. Sometimes I’d even ask her to speak French, and I would sit there listening without knowing what she said. But now everything’s different, and if I’m honest it drives me crazy. I want to know what she’s saying but I can’t, just like I can’t feel her cheek or her hair or any other part of her body. It’s funny, because when I reach down to touch the dog I can feel him lick me, and I can feel his fur. Maybe if Carlo told me about now I’d understand what he was saying.

  I know it must bug her, too, but she never acts like it. Probably she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. When we were little kids, her grandmother was always saying, “Tressa, gentle!” Not that Tressa wasn’t gentle. It was just the kind of thing you say when a kid tries to touch something breakable. But her grandmother said it so much, I thought that was her name.

  “When will I see Tressa Gentle?” I was always asking my parents. At some point I figured out it wasn’t really her name, and I stopped calling her that for a long time. But then when we got older, and things got different, I started again. I called her Tressa Gentle when we walked by the river. Back when I could feel her skin and hair.

  These days when I come through her window, I want things to be the way they used to. So I smile and say, “Tressa Gentle,” and she smiles back. I can see the old maps she drew, tacked on the wall. I try not to think about the blank spots, where new ones must be. If I don’t worry about what I don’t have, maybe I can just be glad to see her, and be here in her room, talking about the past.

  I can’t visit anyone else, not my dad, or my sisters or my mom. I want to visit them but I don’t know how. I can only get to Tressa.

  When I’m not with her I must be somewhere else, but I can’t tell you about that, either. I can tell you about my life, and I can tell you about Tressa’s life, because she pretty much told me everything. I know what happened to both of us from the second I was born right up until those last seconds in the river.

  I wish I could tell my mom that those last seconds weren’t so bad. But I can’t tell Mom anything. Not anymore. All I have left is me and Tressa, so I come back to her every chance I get.

  part one

  piecing it together

  ( 1 )

  TRESSA

  I, of course, can tell you about now. It’s everything else I don’t like thinking about. Not that now is so terrific. It just happens to be my only option—a concept that concerned doctors, therapists, teachers, and most of all my mother have worked very hard to impress upon me. So for their sake I am here, in a bizarre limbo, living with Mom and her husband in the southwestern part of Colorado.

  Rabbitbrush is a tiny little Christmas card of a town nestled in the San Juan Mountains. My mother grew up here and then spent most of her life—and most of my life—trying to escape it. The town is very pretty, but it has a bit of an inferiority complex. Although we’re not far from Telluride, we’re not quite close enough to share its tourists. Local developers and the town council are always trying to dream up new ways to entertain visitors, especially in the summer, since building our own ski area isn’t realistic.

  Paul, my mother’s husband, wants to build a drive-in movie theater on the parcel of land near town that my grandfather deeded to my mom, years ago, so that one day she could build a house there. Now of course she has Paul’s house, but Grandpa says Paul will use that land commercially over his dead body, and then he looks over at me apologetically. I shrug to tell him it’s okay. Nobody likes to say the word “dead” around me anymore, as if avoiding the word will help me forget the concept. I never realized how often some version of “dead” appears in everyday expressions until people tried to stop saying it. Last week my mother used the word “mortified,” then clapped her hand over her mouth, as if that Latin root might send me running for the medicine cabinet, or the graveyard, or wherever they think I’m going.

  Certainly not to the graveyard, where Paul had half of Luke’s ashes buried. The other half belongs to Francine, Luke’s mother. It used to bother me, this weird division of something that used to be whole. Used to be Luke. But now that I know those ashes aren’t Luke, not at all, I think: let them do whatever they need. My sister Jill told me that Francine plans to
scatter her share from the top of the Jud Wiebe Trail in Telluride on the anniversary of his death. This sounds much more like Luke than the quaint but lonely graveyard, which I haven’t visited since Luke—the real, whole Luke—started coming back. If anybody notices I’ve stopped going, I hope they find it comforting.

  But truthfully, nothing could be comforting enough to stop my mother from worrying about me. This afternoon she stands waiting for my school bus at the end of Paul’s driveway. Ordinarily it’s Carlo who waits there, and with a sinking feeling of dread, I wonder where he is. The past few days he’s seemed more sluggish, not at all his usual self.

  I can see my mother from where I sit in the very back row. It’s late November, the week after Thanksgiving, and I know I should probably feel embarrassed. I’m eighteen years old and riding the school bus for my second shot at senior year, which I am repeating, not—thank you very much—because I didn’t finish that last month but because the school officials, like Mom and Paul, are determined to keep a close eye on me. Even though I took all my exams and passed them, nobody could stand to let me graduate and go to CU the way I was supposed to. And even though I’ve had my driver’s license for more than a year, nobody wants to let me touch a car. Nobody ever says I’m not allowed to drive; they just come up with some very good reason why I can’t have the car when I ask. So I’ve stopped asking, and they all seem relieved.

  All this means that what was supposed to be my first year of freedom has turned into a thinly veiled version of house arrest, which actually is fine with me. “This isn’t meant to be a punishment,” my mother said back in the summer, when I was still at the hospital and she told me that I couldn’t graduate. I nodded, not because I didn’t want to be punished but because if I were to be—and if I could choose my own punishment—it would be a whole lot graver than an extra year of high school.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say as I step off the bus. She smiles and presses a steamy mug of hot cocoa into my hands. I look down into the mug and see a fat marshmallow bobbing and floating. That marshmallow looks so hopeful, refusing to be dragged under or melted by the thick, hot liquid surrounding it. Mom must have timed it out very carefully for the cocoa to still be hot and this marshmallow un-melted. This kind of domesticity is new to her, and it always makes my heart hurt a little, especially when it’s directed toward me.

  I glance at my mom, who wears maternity jeans and a baggy, wheat-colored Henley shirt that probably belongs to Paul. She’s got one hand resting on her huge, blooming belly. Her hair is long and tousled and bleached almost the color of her youth. Mom has always been a wiry, athletic woman; her collarbones still protrude and her arms are corded and toned from prenatal yoga. She has a good face, my mother, with wide blue eyes and high cheekbones, a face that moves without creasing. If I squint, I can block out the weariness she still carries from last year, and the loss of elasticity along her jaw. I can almost believe the illusion of young mother-to-be.

  In reality my mother is forty-five years old with three grown children. Almost as soon as she and Paul remarried, they decided they wanted another baby. This meant a long stretch of fertility drugs and in vitro, followed by two miscarriages, followed by an egg donor and this about-to-be sibling who shares exactly zero of my DNA. My sister Jill says she finds it ironic: our mother, at this late date, having a child she actually intends to parent, and it’s not even related to her. Mr. Tynan, my English teacher, says that “irony” is the most persistently misused word in the English language, but I know that in this case Jill’s using it correctly. Every time my mother turns down a cup of coffee, I picture her pregnant with me—a joint in one hand and a shot of tequila in the other. With Jill and Katie, Paul’s daughters, she was more conventional—probably a cigarette and a glass of wine.

  Still. When I see my mother trying so hard—putting so much heart into this latest transformation—I can’t help wishing her well. I know what it feels like to long for last chances, even when you know you might not deserve them.

  The bus pulls away, and my mother still stands there, looking hopeful and expectant. I want to ask about Carlo, but I’m afraid of her answer. So I bring the cocoa to my lips and sip. To my surprise, it tastes amazing: rich and chocolaty and exactly the right temperature.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I say. “This is delicious.”

  “Do you like it?” she asks. “I made it from scratch. I got the recipe off this great food blog.”

  I stare at her. There are times, lately, when my mother seems completely foreign, as if some alien being has entered her body and turned her into the exact kind of mother I used to think I wanted. In these moments I perversely want the old one back, and luckily, she has a way of obliging. For example, right now she sees the expression on my face and realizes she’s gone too far, so she laughs—like the old transient Mom making fun of this new Happy Homemaker.

  I want to laugh, too, but worry about Carlo prevents it. Mom must suspect this, but she doesn’t say anything, just hooks her arm though mine. We start walking up the hill to Paul’s house. It’s a big place, not too over-the-top but still impressive. Paul made a lot of money buying land in Telluride before its big boom in the late eighties, right after my mom left him the first time.

  “Where’s Carlo?” I finally ask. For a second the words hang in the air, and despite everything I learned last year about worst-case scenarios, I can’t stop hoping for a happy answer. Carlo’s sleeping upstairs in that sunny spot by the window. Or, Look, there he is, waiting on the porch.

  But Mom says, “Carlo’s at the vet.”

  I stop. She stops too, and I try to read her expression. “Why? What happened?” I force my voice to stay calm, then ask the hardest question. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “Well,” she says carefully, “he looked very bloated this morning, and he wouldn’t eat, so I brought him in. Dr. Hill said he had a lot of fluid in his belly. He drained it, and now he’s running some tests.”

  “Why would he have fluid in his stomach?”

  My mother looks at the ground for a minute. She does not love facing reality. For example, she’s had an amnio and a million ultrasounds but will not find out the sex of her baby. She says she wants to be surprised, but I know the real reason. She is hoping against hope to have a boy for Paul and can’t bear being disappointed a moment too soon. When you have three girls, you probably think your body’s not capable of producing anything else. So I know it’s a feat of strength on my behalf when Mom looks me in the eye and tells me the truth. “Dr. Hill thinks it’s congestive heart failure.”

  “Congestive heart failure,” I echo. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds so ominous. We start walking again. Mom puts her arm around my shoulders, and we go through the front door in silence. Inside, my eyes travel past the foyer into the dining room, with the long table and its multitude of chairs at the ready for a big holiday gathering, and the sideboard crowded with family pictures. It’s exactly the sort of room I thought I’d never have in a house where I lived with my mom. Most of the pictures are of Jill and Katie, my older sisters, but crowded in there somewhere are one or two of me. There are no pictures of Luke. I wonder if Paul would like to retrieve old ones from wherever they were stashed, years ago. Probably he does want to but doesn’t do it, because of me. If he thought about it for even a second, he would realize that upstairs my computer files are crowded with hundreds of pictures of Luke. I wish I could bear to open them. I could print one out and sneak it into a frame. Place it here with the rest of us.

  Even though Mom just told me that Carlo’s at the vet, I realize my ears are waiting for the click clack of his nails across the wood floors. Mom sees the look on my face and says, “Tressa. Dr. Hill didn’t say anything. He didn’t offer any prognosis. But Carlo is old, he’s very old, especially for such a big dog.”

  My heart constricts in a panicky way. Carlo is twelve years old, half-Newfoundland and half-collie. I know my mom is right. I also know, standing there in the foyer with the in
fantile school bag over my shoulder, that I don’t care how old Carlo is, or how long a dog his size is supposed to live. I just want him with me. I want everyone I love with me, well and safe, right where I can touch them. In my head I make a quick and terrible calculation. If Carlo dies now, it will be just about exactly six months between them.

  I put down the mug and twist my ring—the pearl ring Luke gave me—around my finger. “Remember,” I say to Mom, my voice verging on wobbly, “when I was a little kid, how whenever I drew a picture of myself, I’d also draw a picture of Carlo standing right next to me? I couldn’t draw me without drawing him.”

  My mother hesitates for a fraction of a second, and I can tell she doesn’t remember this at all. My grandmother would remember. Her sewing room is decorated with pictures and maps I’ve drawn; the oldest ones are going yellow and crinkling around their thumbtacks. But Mom just nods, her face completely blank.

  “Hey,” she says, steering me toward the kitchen, toward the consolation of food. “Let’s not be all doom and gloom. Maybe he’ll be okay.”

  I think—I don’t want to think, but can’t stop myself—how Paul will feel, how he’ll look at me if Carlo dies so soon after Luke. But my mom is staring. She has arranged her face so carefully. She wants so badly to be optimistic, and young. I know exactly how many cracks in that illusion are my own doing. I know this, and I understand that I am far from blameless, and that the least I can do—apart from staying alive—is pretend to believe in her version of our life together.

  * * *

  We go to Dr. Hill’s before closing and pick up Carlo. I don’t want him spending even one night in a cage on cold linoleum. While Mom talks to the girl at the front desk, I go in back where the dogs are kept, half expecting someone to stop me. But nobody does, not the techs or the assistants. It’s a very small town, and everybody knows my story. I imagine they want to sneak peeks at my wrists, which are covered, as always, by long sleeves pulled up to the middle of my palms, but when I accidentally meet a tech’s eyes, she’s not looking at my arms but at my face, and her eyes are full of sympathy. And it has nothing to do with my wrists. I look away, not meaning to be unfriendly, just not wanting to cry. Not here, in public.