A Lily in the Light

by Kristin Fields

There was rhythm in everything really. It helped her understand what was coming next, a quiet part or a crashing part, like in a symphony. Playing with Lily in the lobby had been a quiet, resting

She cut strips and then small pieces, pulling the threads apart, but stopped at Speedy. He hadn’t seen anything, but he’d felt her heart beating. It hadn’t been the same kind of beat as when she raced down the sidewalk, bike streamers flying, or when she double dutched, legs high and feet floating through swinging ropes until she couldn’t believe how long she’d jumped, and the light-headed, big-smile feeling made her skip a step. No, today’s heartbeat made her sick, as gross as dried piss on a toilet seat. She cut Speedy in half and stuffed him down the kitchen garbage, burying him under crumpled paper and salad scraps so he’d never tell anyone what had happened.

Lily wasn’t here. Someone had cut away a piece of time. They were suspended like dust in the air, rolling over and over slowly.

She wanted to snap the rosary in half and let the wooden beads roll out everywhere because praying wasn’t the same as doing.

Their normal world was hiding here somewhere, a lost sock in the dryer.

“Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things, so maybe it depends on the choices we make. Even good people can do bad things for good reasons.” “Like stealing to feed hungry kids.” “Exactly. Everyone can be both. It just depends on how we look at them. Sometimes how we look at people is decided by law or religion. Bad things wouldn’t be bad if we lived in a world where they were good, right?”

everyone orbited each other, boxed into their own private worlds, swirling with unnamable emotions. They were looking at each other through glass cages at the zoo or aquarium tanks, together and not. What were they now, she asked, studying how they paced and fretted. Madeline was a horseshoe crab, dragging along the bottom of her tank. Nick was a betta fish, fine alone but ready to attack a mirror. Nothing had changed in two weeks. No news. Her parents were the worst. They were fish who’d forgotten how to swim.

Then she wouldn’t feel like she’d caused what had happened because she hadn’t even finished a simple story for her little sister, and now she never would.

She closed her eyes and imagined Lily was tucked into the space beside Esme, warm as a potato in her slipper-feet pajamas. “Lily?” Esme whispered. “I’m scared.” “It’s OK,” Imaginary Lily whispered back. “It goes away.” Before Esme could ask how she knew, Imaginary Lily had vanished too.

The stage and dancers were now a black spot. The music that was supposed to echo in her bones was gone. She pressed her eyes closed. Where were the flashes of white tulle turned blue, flowing and sweeping behind a trail of gracefulness? It was just over. The show was over, but worse than that, all the dancers would go home. The orchestra and Paul would go home. The message they’d been trying to spell out for her onstage would be wiped away before she knew what it meant.

“Look at your mother. No matter how sad she feels, when she sews, only beautiful things happen. She makes a lot of people happy because of it. That’s what’s inside your mother, beautiful things, whether she always feels it or not. You and her are the same. There’s only one outcome, Esme, because once you’re in that room and the music starts, you’ll do what your heart wants even if your head is confused, and it will be beautiful too.”

San Francisco Ballet was her dream company. She’d wanted it for so long she couldn’t remember why anymore. Her father’s hand closed around hers. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted, but he had other things instead. It was impossible to have nothing.

“We don’t always choose our choices, but they’re ours. Am I happy?” He sighed. “Look around. This is a beautiful place, the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time. I’m here with you, and I’m happy to be. We can’t be everything all the time. That just wouldn’t be life.”

Her father was right; she’d been calm during the audition, and as soon as the music had started, she’d moved with it. It was more than just muscle memory. Dancing let her soul breathe. It had always been that way and always would be.

There was a poem she’d read once about grief, the only one that got it right, that told the world to stop clocks and put away the stars and the ocean because life was over.

Lily had shifted again from a thing that had happened to them and back to a little person.

She was a liar, impersonating Lily’s pain onstage, twisting it into some public thing she could use for herself, for the Waltz Girl, tapping into a cheap well of things she wasn’t willing to think about or talk about unless it benefited her. This was the big sister Lily would come home to: someone who hadn’t looked sorrowful or done any of the right mourning things, who’d skipped almost every memorial, every new search, because she was dancing and traveling while her sister lived in a basement. When they were little, she’d made up stories for Lily not just because Lily enjoyed them but because it made Lily easier to control. It kept the peace. The whole thing was a lie. She’d never worked hard for Lily to worship her. Four-year-old Lily couldn’t see that, but real Lily would. Real Lily would see everything.

I missed you so much, but I lived my life anyway. I made you into a make-believe friend so everything I did or didn’t do would be OK. I forgot you were ever a real person with real feelings, pain, dreams, because there wasn’t room for you, Lily.

it was easier to ride away with someone on a motorcycle in the middle of the night and regret it afterward than it was to sit alone with eight years of grief, easier to push and push and push until her body was physically beat than to feel that missing piece of her life.

Everything was suspended in time. If this was really Lily, and it might be, there’d be another line drawn through her life again. Lily before, without, with. She wanted to linger a little longer before the line was drawn.

Whether Liz was Lily or not, Esme was ready to let that story be carried away. She’d finally had a place to tell her story without words but with an audience to listen. Carrying it alone again would be unbearable, so she tucked the pain into all the old familiar places until she was just Esme again, pure white from a distance.

an eleven-year-old girl brave enough to leave home and chase a dream, too young to realize that one decision would unfold her future so quickly she wouldn’t even question it. She was filled with longing for that unwritten life, that same foolish bravery.

The house was partitioned with invisible barriers because it somehow kept them going. The thought of Lily climbing over and under the emotional labyrinth her parents had built, if she managed to at all, was unbearable. Esme prayed there was enough of four-year-old Lily left to trample through the rules they’d made for themselves and didn’t need anymore, if they could only admit it.

Esme’d read something once about introducing pets through a closed door for the first time so they could become familiar with the other’s scent. This wasn’t the same, but if it took time for animals, it would take time for them too.

Talking to plants might help them grow, but Esme suspected it would help Lily grow, too, whispering secrets in the garden. Esme pushed away the part of herself that wished Lily would whisper secrets to her. If Lily wasn’t ready to talk, at least she’d know Esme was there, patient and still as a shadow until the sun traced her somewhere else.

Please let her love us, she prayed, however long it takes—because the thought of keeping her captive again was worse than losing her the first time.