“Okay. Then let’s … Two of Cups the shit out of today.”
She laughs a little. “I can’t believe you just cursed in church.”
“The library understands. It’s a special occasion.” I hold out my hand and she takes it.
“I’m sorry about the playlist,” she says.
“It’s okay. I understand.”
I’d asked Nah to make one of her famous playlists for the slideshow I put together of Mom and Dad. That was going to be her contribution to the funeral. When she’s not on pills, Hannah is the family DJ. She would make Mae Is Stressed About AP Tests playlists that had funny things like the Cookie Monster song on it. Or a Dad Has Physicist Enemies playlist, where it was just all the villain songs from movies. Mom got a playlist called Music Smudgefest after some famous lady came to her studio and was totally awful. Micah got Surfer Boy playlists with songs about the ocean.
But Hannah’s on pills, which means no playlists, not even for today. Opiates aren’t good for creativity. They aren’t good for anything but relieving physical pain and ruining lives.
We walk toward our family.
I’ve always liked Nora. She’s got Mom’s brown eyes, like good soil in the garden. When the Karalis women cry, their skin gets all blotchy. Aunt Nora and Hannah look like checkered picnic blankets right now. It’s Hannah who really looks like my mother. Except for the eyes—she has Dad’s eyes. So green. Sometimes, if I look quickly, I could swear she’s Mom, back from the bottom of the ocean.
Uncle Tony is Boston Italian, the odd one out, with his thick North End accent and insistence on lasagna at Thanksgiving. He’s stocky and usually jovial, but he doesn’t muster up a fake smile now, and I really love that about him. Nate is a sophomore at MIT. Nah gets annoyed with us sometimes, when we’re together. Says no one can get a word in unless they understand quantum mechanics. That is probably true.
“Hey, Buzz,” he says, sliding an arm around my shoulders. “Fucking sucks.”
Nate’s been calling me Buzz—after Buzz Lightyear, of course—since we were kids. My parents picked up the habit, too. I hope Nate calls me this forever, for all the times they can’t.
“Yes,” I say. “It does.”
He’s wearing skinny jeans and a blouse trimmed with lace and pearl buttons, and his dark brown eyes stand out even more with his mascara.
“I hope your mascara’s waterproof,” Hannah says.
“Of course.” He picks up her hand and studies her nails. I never paint mine, but she always has a different color. “I’m giving you a mani when we get home.”
“Don’t you know chipped polish is all the rage here in LA?”
“Ah.” He nods sagely. “Of course. Us Bostonians are so provincial, you know.”
I appreciate Nate for not being saccharine or using a grief voice. It is an actual tone of voice I am becoming familiar with. Hushed, underscored by a pitying whine.
Hannah starts to cry. I don’t know why, maybe because Nate isn’t being grief-strange. My cousin drops his arm from around my shoulders and places his palms on her cheeks.
“You are going to be okay. Not for a long time, but someday,” he murmurs, the way you speak to a spooked horse, an agitated dog.
Nate’s sister died when we were little, so he knows. I remember how awful it was, watching Annie waste away at Boston Children’s, her little head shaved, the cancer eating through her day by day.
Nah swallows. “Promise?”
He holds up a pinkie and hooks hers with it. “Promise.”
“This family has such shitty fucking luck, I can’t even,” Nah says.
Micah comes up behind my sister and wraps his arms around her waist. He doesn’t say anything, just buries his nose in her neck. That anger in her dissolves, like he’s a chemical solution pouring into her. It’s always been this way. Hannah’s got that Karalis fire and Micah’s all water.
She reaches back with her hand and rests it on his tanned neck. “My Temperance card,” she murmurs.
“Which one is that again?” I ask.
She smiles just a little. “Balance of energies.” Fire and water.
When we told Micah they were dead, he tried so hard not to cry, not to turn into water. Because they were his parents, too. His family.
We sit. The slideshow starts playing, with “Starman” in the background. A picture of Dad and me comes up, early on. I love this one. We’re at the Kennedy Space Center and I’m sitting on his shoulders, looking up at the Atlantis shuttle. I’m pointing my little finger at it, my mouth in this huge O. Nate squeezes my knee, and I give him a wobbly smile.
Hannah bolts up and leaves about halfway through the slideshow, when it shows our favorite picture of Mom: Nah had caught her dancing in a rare thunderstorm, her mouth eating the sky. I think maybe I should follow my sister, but then Micah gets up, so I stay.
I want a Micah. Someone who will come find me when I run away. I might have had that once with Riley, but he’s on the other side of the world. Literally. His family moved to China. It’s hard to have a boyfriend or girlfriend who lives in a different day than you.
Maybe I’ll be like Dr. Stone in Gravity when she says that she has no one to pray for her and that she can’t even pray for herself because no one taught her to pray and now I’m realizing that no one has taught me to pray except Gram that one time but I wasn’t paying attention and so what if I’m in space in a Soyuz with no thrust and I can’t get back to Earth?
They will ask me about this, about the wave, at my astronaut interview. At the psych eval. They’ll be worried I’ll be like Dr. Stone and have to reconcile with the death of a loved one while in imminent danger in space. And then they’ll reject me. And I will never see the Ganges from four hundred kilometers above Earth.
I want to cry so bad, but tears won’t come. I am wrong—there’s something wrong with me. Who doesn’t cry at their parents’ funeral? This might be something that comes up in the psych eval, too.
After the service, I hurry to the bathroom. When I get into a stall, away from all the staring eyes, the grief voices, I pinch my skin, hard, and the pain zings up my arm, but my eyes stay dry.
“Those poor girls,” someone says as the bathroom door opens.
I go still, trapped in the stall.
“Hannah’s the spitting image of Lila. I almost thought it was her!”
“Isn’t she? It’s uncanny how much they look alike,” another woman says. “Except for the eyes, of course. All Greg there. And Mae … Can you imagine being orphaned twice? Jesus.”
“Oh God, the whole thing is so horrible.”
There’s the sound of running water and the whine of the paper towel dispenser. How can they talk about us like this while they redo their makeup, like we’re small talk, the weather?
“But do you think this is a little easier for Mae, though—dealing, I mean? That sounds bad! But you know what I mean? They weren’t really her parents. But Hannah…”
They weren’t really her parents. Is that why Uncle Tony made sure to say that the inheritance would be split fifty-fifty? Would he have felt the need to say that if I weren’t adopted? Does everyone in my extended family see me like these women do?