All That Was by Karen Rivers

Author:Karen Rivers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

NOW

Mom knocks and then comes in without waiting for me to answer. She puts a cloth on my forehead. The cloth is wet and ice-cold water seeps into my hair. I’m already too cold but I don’t know how to tell her. My mouth isn’t making the right words.

“Mom,” I start, and then I’m crying and crying and choking and crying. I’m strangling on sadness. “I don’t know what happened,” I say around the impossible lump that’s in my throat. “Tell me what happened to her.”

She shakes her head; she strokes my cold, damp head.

“I’m sorry, Slo,” she says. “I’m so, so sorry. It’s the worst thing. It’s an awful thing.”

“Tell me,” I choke.

She gets up and opens my curtains. My eyes slam shut. It’s too bright. So much sun. How can there be sun when Piper is dead? Mom sits back down, and she strokes my hair like she used to when I was little. A crow lands on my balcony and starts to caw. I feel like he’s telling me something. His feathers gleam in the sunlight.

“He’s trying to tell me,” I say.

“Honey, it’s a crow,” she says. “It’s only a crow.”

But what if it isn’t? I think but don’t say, What if it’s Piper?

It’s not, says Piper. God.

“Mom, Piper is dead.”

“I know, shhhh.”

The crow caws again.

“Shut up,” I say ferociously. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” I am clawing at my ears and I hear the crow and Piper and I can’t make them stop, either of them, and Mom is pulling my hands away.

“Stop,” she says. “You’re scratching yourself! Honey, no.”

The crow stops suddenly, like a slamming on of brakes. The silence is hard and huge. There is my breathing and Mom’s and the breeze rustling the curtain and the sound of my heart lolloping crookedly. On my bedside table, the battery light on my camera is flashing. I swallow bile. The crow stretches his wings. I can hear the tock-tock-tock of his feathers separating from one another, and my heart is pounding so wrong and so faintly that I think for sure I’m going to die, too.

I want to.

I can’t do this without Piper.

I need her.

Come with me, Piper says. She twirls in the water, making it look pretty. My mouth tastes like salt.

“Leave me alone! You aren’t real.”

So why don’t you know what I’m going to say before I say it? I’m real.

“I don’t believe in you.”

You don’t? I know. I mean, I knew. I knew you didn’t. You didn’t even like me anymore.

“Mom,” I struggle to say. “Help me.”

But what comes out is not that. What comes out is a scream. The scream starts somewhere in my core and I can’t stop it and it splits me in half and I’m turning inside out and I want to know what happened and I don’t want to know what happened and I’m thinking terrible things, all of the terrible things that could have happened and I’m maybe saying out loud, or maybe not, what happened what happened what happened.

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