How the Light Gets In by Katy Upperman

Author:Katy Upperman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

* * *

Very late, I prepare.

I smoke as scantly as last night. I dress in leggings and a sweatshirt. I wrap up in a blanket. I’m not sure how much they matter, but I gather my sister’s things. And then I resume my post on the porch, stretching my awareness to the far reaches of the yard.

It’s easier this time, connecting with her.

She appears, again, in her yellow dress, something she never would have picked for herself. My mom bought it two days after she died, a tear-soaked journey to Nordstrom to shop for Chloe’s final ensemble. Both my dad and Lucy volunteered for the task, but Mom insisted, and I went along. Honestly, I was scared she wouldn’t make it back to the house on her own.

“You look pretty in that dress,” I tell my sister now, because she does, and Mom would want me to pass along the compliment.

She wrinkles her nose. “You guys should’ve buried me in my running shorts.”

I smile.

“I’m serious,” she says, hovering before me. “That could’ve been my final act of defiance where Daddy’s concerned.”

“He misses you,” I tell her, solemn now. “Mom, too. So much.”

We’re quiet a moment, watching each other. I imagine my expression matches hers: love spun with wonder and disbelief, because holy hell, this is incredible.

It’s also unnerving. The version of Chloe standing before me is different: so still, so much more introspective. In life, she was always in motion, always speaking before thinking. I’m not sure if the change has to do with death or how she spent the last 364 days.

I ask the question that’s been on my mind since we said goodbye last night. “What’s it like?”

“This?” she asks, sweeping a hand through the air. Her movements are different, too: slower, more graceful. She used to remind me of a fawn, but now she’s all doe: fluid, elegant, and sure.

“Yeah. Do you feel…?”

“Dead?”

“I was going to say different.”

She rolls her eyes, so quintessentially Chloe my throat swells with wistfulness. “I don’t know. I hardly remember what it’s like to be anything but dead. Like, the basics are there: I was a daughter and a sister and an average student and an athlete. I liked to watch movies with Dad and help Mom with her garden and, more than anything, I wanted to be like you. But life? How it felt to be alive?” She shrugs. “Time passes differently now—I have no real sense of it. I mean, I exist. I watch Lucy and the waves. I wander the beach and the town and the woods. But it’s all peripheral, like I’m observing a girl who looks like me. I don’t even know how long it’s been—days or weeks or months.”

It’s like pressing hard into a bruise, hearing her talk like this. I’m not sure whether to give her the truth, even about something as inconsequential-seeming as the time line.

But then, the last time I lied, something terrible happened.

“It’s been a year,” I say. “A year tomorrow.”

She nods once.

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