Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

“I love forts,” you said. You were too old to love forts—you were sixteen, a girl with a learner’s permit and a boyfriend now. But I didn’t remind you of this, because that was the fun of being sisters. Sometimes, you got to be younger than you were, and I got to be older.

Yet they went up to the pulpit and declared you an angel, a shining star, and then Priscilla leaned in real close to the mic and said, “I know Kathy is now the light of the sun and in the songs of the birds,” and I didn’t even realize how much this all bothered me until I described it to Billy online. It just makes no sense, I wrote to Billy. I mean, you can’t be an angel and a shining star and a bird all at the same time.

He left with the sodas. The door dinged, and I looked around the store, as if you might materialize, as if your love for your boyfriend was so strong it could bring you back from the dead, and I half expected it to. But you didn’t appear. And Billy walked to his car with some other girl. I was left standing alone in the mini-mart, and the guy behind the register was like, “Um, can I help you?” “No,” I said. “You can’t. You really can’t.” I threw up all over the floor. The guy behind the register wasn’t even mad. He just sighed. Like this was always his fate. Like his life was a bad movie and he had seen the vomit coming from the very first scene. No matter what he did, he could never keep this gas station clean. I offered to help, but he just said, No, please, like it’d be better if I just left. I paid for the gas, and some gum to get the bad taste out of my mouth. And then one of those waffles wrapped in plastic. Your favorite.

“Did you know that my sister’s face used to be shaped like a heart?” I asked Valerie. She didn’t. “Is mine a heart?” “No. You’re an oval.” Valerie looked disappointed, the way I had been when you announced that God had made me an oval. “Why can’t I be a heart?” “Because God didn’t make you that way, I guess.” “But that’s stupid. Why wouldn’t God just make everybody a heart?”

Can a person really do that? Withhold love from a person they truly love? I already knew the answer. If I have learned anything in the years since I’ve seen Billy, it’s that you can stop loving someone if you need to. You can stamp love out of your brain like a tiny fire.

I tried to explain. I tried to tell him my story. I tried to tell him about my beautiful older sister, who loved me so much, who told me secret things late at night, but my pants were off, and he was hovering above me, and all I could bring myself to say was, “I don’t know, my sister is dead,” and then I pressed my face into the pillow and cried some more. The guy was always very understanding, whoever he was. But in the morning, as he put on his jeans, I hated him for all that he had seen.

The woman is struggling to grab all her luggage. The dog is out the door on the subway platform, not waiting for his owner. The woman shouts louder and louder, and I can hear in her voice that she knows she is losing her dog. Frankieeeee! That is how these things happen. One footstep at a time, one wrong glance left instead of right, and soon it’s not her dog. One swerve right, one deer in the road, and soon you are not my sister.