Lourdes
Lourdes turned off her phone for a week. Her parents were worried at first— “Don’t isolate yourself!” “You don’t want to talk to your friends?” “Mi sol, you cannot hide from the world.”—but backed off once they realized the reality of why she needed this time.
Taylor was her mentor, but over five years she became much more than that to Lourdes. All of them—Deja and Soleil, Justus and January, Loch—were friends, or friendly. They were all older. And they had grown to love Lourdes, some of them, but in more of a sibling way than a friend way. They baby her. They treat her with kid gloves. Taylor never did that. Taylor was a confidant and a friend, and now she’s dead, and Lourdes can’t ask her what she should do.
Lourdes drags her toes through the sand on the downward arc of the swing. She’s spent nearly every day of the last week out here, away from her home and her hovering parents. It’s also a convenient alibi; if Deja calls her house, her parents can truthfully say she isn’t home right then, call back later.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to Deja. God knows she loves the girl. But Deja was Soleil’s best friend, even though Soleil and Lourdes were close, too. Deja is Justus’ sister, his twin, his other half. Deja lost more. There’s no way around it; of everyone in that car, Lourdes suffered the least.
To her, though, the answer is obvious. They’ve been gifted with a solution. A perfect, painless solution. All they have to do is accept.
This is the part Taylor would have helped her with. Figuring out how to tell the others that choosing anything else is the stupidest thing she’s ever heard.
A burst of laughter floats up to her from where a group of middle schoolers bounce around on the rocks at the edge of the beach. She itches to tell them to be careful, that the rocks are slipperier than they think, she knows, she has a scar on her ankle from falling.
The jagged scar on January’s arm is staggeringly similar in shape. It cuts in a slant down her pale skin, forked in two places, each tine of ripped skin a little thinner and shorter than the next. This is the part that bothers Lourdes the most. How the hell did they all go through so much, so viciously, get permanently altered by it. . . and now hesitate? What is it worth to them to remember? What’s the point? Taylor and Soleil won’t be less dead because they forget they were in the car with them when they died. They can all still grieve the loss, but they don’t have to feel like they’re losing themselves in the process.
“Hey,” a voice says behind her. “Your parents pointed me this direction. Do you walk all the way up here?”
Lourdes spins the rope of the swing to turn and face Justus, standing with hands in pockets at the edge of the sidewalk, and who looks a bit mystified by her choice of escape.
“Usually. Sometimes I ride my bike.”
He makes a face.
“What?”
“Sometimes I forget how young you are.”
Any warmth Lourdes might’ve felt at knowing he cared enough to find her curdles, and her next words are sour. “It’s not like I’m twelve, Justus. I’ve seventeen. I have my license. I graduate high school next year. But my parents didn’t see the point in buying a third car and I didn’t want to drive, anyway. It’s not like any of you do, either, but you have to.”
He shrugs and the corner of his mouth curls up. “Yeah, but none of us hang out on swing sets anymore, either.”
She pauses, and against her will her own smile tugs to the surface. “Fair point. You should. I bet you forgot how great it is.”
He glances over his shoulder, down the steep steps to the parking lot.
“Is Deja waiting for you?”
Justus stares off for a second more before he answers, “No.”
By the time he meets her eye again, he’s already pumping his legs very slowly back and forth on the twin to her swing. He wobbled while he tried to find his balance on the flat piece of wood, and he clenches the rope like he’s trying to strangle it, but he’s steady, now. She offers what she’s sure is a grimace in encouragement.
“It’s really only helpful if you go high.”
“Makes sense.”
Lourdes gives up. Justus, Deja has told her, gets like this. Gets in these ‘funks.’ He wants to talk, he has something to say, but he can’t keep himself from stonewalling. He has to guard his own emotions, build barriers between himself and the rest of the world, before he finds himself able and willing to finally say whatever it is he needs to say.
So what do you do in the meantime?
Lourdes swings.
He doesn’t bother to match her climb, and she doesn’t care. The air whips her hair back and forth in opposition to the gravitational forces waging war with her determination, cool and invigorating compared to the heat that has begun its slow domination as the town inches towards summer. This is why Lourdes comes here. The defiance of the ascent. The relief in the fall. The rush of air against her skin. And, depending on when she comes, if she leans far enough back, she can pretend she’s flying, sinking into a sea of stars.
This is the closest Lourdes comes to feeling invincible other than when she plays her violin.
She tilts back. The world tilts with her until all she sees is sky. Opalescent. Streaked with clouds that look like they were a brushstroke on a gauzy canvas left behind by an absent-minded artist.
Gravity pulls her back, and she exhales on the same beat as her fall.
“Find any clarity up there?” Justus asks.
Lourdes drops her feet and drags them through the earth until she’s mostly even with him. “Did you find any down here?”
“I don’t think there’s any anywhere,” he says, and a black cloud attaches itself to the words.
Here we go.
“Deja send you to talk to me?”
He snorts. “No, Deja’s barely talking to me.”
“Why?”
“Because we disagree on the. . . the treatment.”
Lourdes says nothing. She stares out at the lake, glistening in the sun. The middle schoolers who had played so recklessly on the rocks earlier have gone, and now there is only the quiet lapping of the water at the shore.
This she will not admit. This little viewing spot, this serene reprieve, is the only place she does not still hear Soleil’s dying breaths in her head. This is the only place that drowns out the moment that snuffed Taylor’s life.
“Did you know that hearing is the last sense to go?” he asks suddenly. “When you die?”
Lourdes can’t look at him, afraid she will drown in his dark gaze. “Yeah,” she says. “I did.”
In her periphery, he drags his toes through the dirt. Creates grooves where there were none before, like he’s running in place. They refuse to look at each other.
“Do you think she heard us screaming?”
Whether he means Taylor or Soleil, it doesn’t matter.
“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”
Justus takes the next few minutes to gather himself into an impenetrable fortress again. Lourdes doesn’t hurry him, because now she understands why he sought her out apart from the rest. He needs to know where everyone else is, and why. He’s too lost in whatever he holds inside himself. When he turns inward there are no answers.
“Wanna take a walk?” he asks. Lourdes nods, and they abandon the swings to pick their way across the precarious wet stone.
“I fought with my mom this week,” she tells him.
“About what?”
“Music. She says that there are more important things. That I can’t obsess over music forever.”
He nods, as if he understands. He can’t, but that’s okay. Justus and Lourdes are the least likely pair to ever understand each other, and yet here they are. He was the only one to think to ask her what she wanted to do. He was the only one who cared to look for her. He doesn’t need to get it. “Does she really think it’s just an obsession?”
“I don’t know. I think she wants it to be. I don’t think. . . I don’t know if she wants me to forget.”
A muscle in his jaw tightens, and he sways where he perches on his rock, jutting defiantly out of the shallows. Lourdes raises her arms to find her balance as she hops from one outcropping to the next, balancing on one foot.
Don’t fall.
“Do you really want to?”
Lourdes almost hopes she falls. The scar on her ankle was proof of what happened to her when she finally made it home to her parents, weeping and bloody, limping beside her bike. She had evidence that she had gone through something, that there was an injury. She pointed to it, and they believed her because they had to.
It is so much harder to make people understand the wounds they can’t see in her. They think because she made it out of that car physically unscathed, she isn’t hurt. But she is. She’s bleeding every bit as much now as when she fell. Sometimes so much that she’s not sure how she’s still alive.
Lourdes lowers herself onto the rock she last alighted on and rests her chin on the tops of her knees. She glares at the lake like it’s the fault of some god that she’s here right now having this conversation.
“I don’t get how you guys don’t want to,” she offers in answer. “I’m so. . . stuck. I’m stuck in those minutes. In the hours, I guess. From the minute we got hit to the minute Soleil actually died. This is just it. There’s nothing else. I can’t play. I can’t laugh. I can’t live.”
Hopefully he understands this part. She can, obviously. She does all those things. She has no choice.
What she means is she can’t without the crippling guilt that accompanies it all.
“I know,” Justus says, surprising her. “It was awful. We survived something awful. But we survived, didn’t we? We get more time, which is more than a quarter of us can say. We survived, without any real bad effects. We should be grateful.”
“Can’t we still be? Even with the procedure?”
He doesn’t seem to know, because he never does answer the question. The next time he speaks, it’s to ask how she found this place. How long she’s hidden it. What else she hides. If this is where she secretly practices to get so good? Does she make sacrifices to gods for her talent out here?
He drives her home, bike shoved unceremoniously in his trunk, and she still doesn’t have his answer.
*
“This is all I have, Mamá! This is it!”
“That isn’t true,” her mother cries in response.
Lourdes drops her head in her hands in disbelief. How many times have they had this same fight over the years? How many times in the last two months?
God, she suddenly understands all the jokes her dad made about marriage.
“Mamá, I don’t want anything else. This is who I am. This is the only person I’ve ever been! You supported it my whole life, you pushed me into this, you hired Taylor. Why is it suddenly so surprising that I would choose it over everything when that’s all I’ve ever done?”
“This is different, Lourdes, don’t pretend that it’s not.”
“But it isn’t! I gave up all the normal things kids are supposed to want! I didn’t go to dances and parties because I was practicing. I went to symphonies instead of mini golf or the movies. I saved for instruments, not designer jeans. I am choosing the same thing I’ve always chosen.”
“You do not choose music over people,” her mother snaps. “That is not what I pushed you toward, that is not who I raised. You went through something terrible, and I am—I am so sorry you did. I cannot tell you how sorry I am that we didn’t drive you ourselves. I wake up every morning and wonder what would have happened if your father and I had insisted you go with us. I regret that choice every single day. But listen to me, Lourdes. Forgetting? Choosing to pretend that you didn’t go through that, didn’t see that, didn’t feel that loss? It’s not the answer. It’s dishonoring the memory of someone who was important to you, and it’s a disservice to yourself. You’re strong enough to get through this, baby, I know you are. This is the wrong choice, and if you go through with it, you will regret it. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but eventually. You will regret this.”
Her mother is halfway across the table at this point, hand extended toward Lourdes, but Lourdes clenches her fingers in her hair and ignores her attempt at contact. She grinds her teeth and stares down at the notched hole in front of her, where she once got overzealous with a fork and an apple and forever scarred the wood.
How does she make her mother understand? She won’t regret it, because she won’t even know she did it.
Unless her mother ruins it for her, or her father, or Deja, or whoever knows the truth. The only way her suffering isn’t mended by this treatment is if someone else forces her back into it.
“Mamá,” she says, and her voice breaks. “I can’t bring her back. Remembering doesn’t do anything for anyone. It just. . .” She glares at the hole and swallows her tears. “Memory just means the wound never closes. I’m going to walk around permanently fucked up by this? Because someone else made a bad choice? Why? Why would I do that to myself?”
Her mom is quiet for a long time, and Lourdes wonders if it’s because she noticed the tears that escaped and now slip onto the table like miniature bombs, betraying the depth of her pain, or if it’s because her words have finally gotten through. Or maybe she’s just preparing her next argument.
“She deserves better.”
The hopeful bubble of relief that started to rise in her shudders and vaporizes, and suddenly Lourdes can’t hold the dam any longer.
“God,” she chokes, and drops her hands and meets her mother’s eye even as tears pour from hers. “Don’t you think I know that? I know she deserved better. I know that. She didn’t deserve to die, and not like that. You didn’t see her. Her face. Do you want to know what it looked like? Because I know, because I had to crawl past her body to get out of the car. And I can’t even talk about it because January and Loch told me not to look, and they don’t talk about it because they think I didn’t, and they don’t want to tell me what it was like for them to see that. And you guys already treat me like I’m broken, even though you don’t know what it was like.” Lourdes hands curl into fists on the table and her voice rises, both in pitch and volume, and Lourdes knows, she knows she’s losing control, she’s spiraling back into the darkness she’s held at bay since she was hospitalized for exhaustion, but she can’t stop. “You want me to honor her by remembering? This is what remembering looks like! Let me share it with you! Let me tell you all about how her jaw was halfway off her face! How her nose was completely flattened into her cheeks, and she was so bloody she looked like she belonged in a fucking Saw movie!”
“Lourdes,” her mother gasps, and Lourdes stands, her chair meeting the floor in a startling crash. Anita jumps, a hand rising to cover her mouth, and Lourdes can barely see her through her tears.
“I don’t deserve this! She didn’t deserve any of it but neither do I! At least she doesn’t have to wake up every morning wishing it was her instead!”
Even if her mother tried to say something, Lourdes doesn’t hear it because she turns and runs. She takes the steps up to her bedroom two at a time, banishes the thoughts of Taylor trapped in the embrace of her seatbelt with her mutilated expression, eyes still open in surprise, abandons them behind her fleeing feet like shriveled and smoldering prayers on the marble floors of church, left in offering to appease a vengeful god.
But there is no escaping that.
She screams into her pillow, and it feels melodramatic. It is, of course it is, everything she’s done since that accident belongs in a drama movie montage. Somber, pensive music would swell over the slow-motion collapse of her life. The chronicle of her insomnia, her complete shutdown, her fury at her friends and the bridges so close to the lit match in her hands, her shrieking at her mother in the kitchen—it tugs at the heartstrings. It is over the top. It demands exaggeration.
And yet it’s all real.
She screams into her pillow because she has to scream. She has to put this rage and this grief somewhere, and there is nowhere else, and so it tears from her throat the same way her tears cut vicious tracks down her cheeks.
Taylor was an orphan when she died. Her grandfather, knocking on death’s door himself, chose to cremate her. He didn’t hold a funeral.
Lourdes screams, because she didn’t even get to say goodbye.
That’s what haunts Lourdes the most. Every night she failed to sleep, every time she goes to meet with Deja and they talk about everything but what they actually want to talk about, every time she picks up her violin to play and finds she still can’t--- that’s the one thought she has that crowds out all the rest. It’s as steady as her pulse. Probably more so. She didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Before all this, there was one thing that brought Lourdes joy and peace that some people spend their whole lives searching for and still never find. Lourdes, like January, loved playing her instrument. It is—was—a piece of her, as integral and automatic to her as breathing. Unlike January, Lourdes has nothing else. How did she get here? How did she lose so much in one fell swoop? How does she find her way back out of this hole that just seems to be dragging her deeper and deeper without losing more people she loves?
Does she sleep? Maybe, but if it was sleep that she fell into, it was as fraught with bloodied women and crushed metal and screaming friends as her waking memories are, and she feels every bit as raw and exhausted, her face stiff with tear stains, when she hears a knock at her door.
Her mother doesn’t knock. Definitely her father.
“Mi sol?” he says as he cracks her door, voice so soft she aches, almost as much as she does at his nickname for her. That doesn’t just cause an ache, though; it spears through her. “May I come in?”
Lourdes sniffs, drags herself upright, brushes her palms down her cheeks, and then clutches the bear she’s too old to cuddle but cannot stand to part with to her chest. “Go ahead.” Her voice scrapes out of her throat and emerges broken. She swallows, but that hurts, too. Everything hurts.
“I brought you tea,” he offers as he steps in. Steam curls from the lip of the fragile cup he focuses on while he makes his way toward her. It’s almost enough to make her smile; her stocky, labor-hardened dad with his calloused fingers gingerly gripping an eggshell fine mug Anita is sure to kill him for breaking if he drops it, almost tiptoeing toward her so as not to spill the hot liquid. His eyes dart from Lourdes and back to the mug. When her hands finally accept the gift from him and he’s free of his burden, a pleased smile flashes across his lips. . . until it melts into a sad one, and he settles onto her bed beside her. Lourdes stares into the steaming liquid before finally setting it aside on her nightstand.
“So,” he says, and his eyes shine at her in a way that makes he feel like he’s wept for her before this moment, “what do you want to do?”
Everything hurts. From her heart to her churning stomach to her cheeks to her hands, pain builds, pain forces its way to center stage. She can barely breathe around it.
“I don’t know,” she mumbles, and clutches her bear tighter to her chest.
“You don’t know, or you don’t want to ask for it?”
She doesn’t answer him, and drops her eyes from his to stare instead at his hand on her comforter, inches away from her. When was the last time he was in her room like this? When was the last time she let them in?
She has a vague memory of her father carrying her to her room the day she collapsed. Laying beside her while her mom called the ambulance.
“The way your Mamá and I see it, you have a few options,” he starts, and part of her tenses while another part wilts in relief. This tone she recognizes; this is the version of her father who gave her the choice between failing out and getting a job keeping the books with Anita at his construction company, or sitting up with him until she got her math homework done instead of playing her violin. He always framed it in terms of longevity. Which would make her happier for the longer amount of time? A life where she stayed on top of her bills, but had time for little else—including that thing she loved above all—or a few hours of frustration so she could take another step toward the life she wanted, devoted entirely to her passion? “First, you go to therapy.” He pauses, like the words pained him and he needs to brace himself for the rest. “You go to therapy, you consider giving up the violin, we work on finding you some new hobbies and friends.”
“Next option,” she croaks, both because the idea of permanently giving up the violin is abhorrent, and because this is clearly not the option her dad hopes she will choose.
His fingers drum against her comforter. “Second, you play. As hard as it sounds, you need to play, even if you cry the whole time you do it. You have to start trying to move on. So you play, and you invite your friends over for dinner instead of shutting them out, and we talk about Taylor and we pay our respects, and we do the work ourselves to cope with this.”
Lourdes almost wants to laugh, but it’d be the hysterical kind. Invite Deja over for dinner to chat about Taylor and Soleil? Have a little duet between her and January, when January can barely sit upright, let alone touch her instrument?
It would kill January to see Lourdes playing when she still can’t.
“Got anything else?”
“You can forget,” he acknowledges. “You can replace the memory of the car with a regular school day, and we can build a new story about Taylor’s death that doesn’t hurt you so deeply.”
“But you and Mamá don’t want me to choose that one,” she says, an edge of bitterness attaching itself to the words, and her father doesn’t dignify her attitude by acknowledging it.
“Or you can keep going the way you’re going,” he says. “You can allow yourself to stay stuck, and you can become an angry person. Angry at what happened, angry that you felt there was no good choice so you didn’t make a choice at all, angry at your friends for experiencing this pain differently than you. You can let that car accident claim the girl you were, and you can become someone else.”
The silence following his words is terrible. Her slowly turning ceiling fan stirs the words around them, traps them in a bubble. Her room becomes, in one instant, a void. It belongs to someone else. Someone happier. Someone braver. Someone her parents loved.
“You think I want to feel like this?” she finally asks, and even though she thought she would yell at him as she did her mom, her voice comes out icy. “I don’t want to die with her. But I do. I feel like I am dying every day.”
“Mi sol,” he murmurs.
“Please don’t call me that!” she cries, and throws her bear across the room, flings it from her like it was strangling her. Her dad tracks the trajectory of the bear—and now she remembers; he got it for her, it was the first present she ever remembers explicitly asking for, he got it for her for her first recital and he cut up one of his own shirts to put on the stuffed animal before he presented it to her—and stares at it where it fell. It’s an old, almost ratty thing now. The head flops about, one of its eyes hangs loose in its position. Its mouth is all but gone. Now it lies, despondent and abandoned and so much like Soleil that Lourdes might throw up, in front of her closet door, staring sightlessly into the darkness.
“Lourdes,” her dad says, and takes her hand. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Mamá doesn’t want me to do it,” Lourdes sniffs. “You think she’ll just let me and that’ll be it? Never in my life has she let something she feels that strongly about go.”
He considers her in silence, and there is something about the weight of a father’s gaze. She had forgotten. There is a measure of hope, pride, disappointment, love. Every look carries a different emotion and when it settles on her skin, she feels it deeper than anything else. The burden of being loved is so great.
In this second, there is only understanding. Compassion. It seeps into her, and the vise around her heart loosens for the first time in months.
“Because you are not eighteen yet, the company that provides this procedure requires the signatures of your guardians. I do not think your mother will give you hers. But,” he says, and he must have seen the despair lance across her face, caught the way she shriveled, because his hand squeezes hers, “you turn eighteen soon. . . a month and a half before the cutoff. Your mother may be disappointed, but she will always love you. And we will support you if that is what you choose to do.”
Lourdes blinks, trying to dispel the tears fogging her vision, but then she abandons the effort. For the first time since she was a young girl, she falls into her father’s lap, and cries while he holds her.
