By Jennifer Mills

My sister arrived at my front door with a casserole at seven o’clock in the morning. She’d woken me up, though that wouldn’t have occurred to Elizabeth. Waving The San Francisco Chronicle in her hand, she said: “You got wonderful reviews! Wonderful!” 

I’d had my first solo exhibition, which opened at the Fitzgerald Gallery the day before. Suspicious of her elation, I blocked the door. “You’re using your chirpy voice.”

“I’m happy for you!” Even on a Saturday, she was dressed for work: navy suit, heels, copper-red hair blow-dried. I wore a nubby pink bathrobe, dark unkempt hair streaked gray. “Let me in!” 

“Tell me the date first.”

She glanced at her cradled casserole.  “Of course I know what day it is.” 

The cars swooshed along California Street, suddenly deafening now. “It’s March 1st. Since you can’t say it, I will.”

“Your show was a great success. Why can’t we enjoy that instead of…”

“Remembering them?”

She looked away. The traffic’s flow roared in my ears. Rarely was Elizabeth at a loss for words: she was a lawyer–a good one, promoted to partner already at 38.  

“It’s cold out here,” she said, and I relented, turning sideways for her to pass. 

My two-bedroom was a garden flat. In the kitchen, sliding glass doors framed a tiny patio with a Japanese Maple. As Elizabeth’s heels ticked, I gazed at the tree’s bare branches, black in the dim light, loving how they reached toward the light, fragile and curious. I must have painted the tree a hundred times.  Elizabeth had commended my choice of apartment due to its location, size, updated kitchen, but I loved the Maple best. Still, I had not yet captured its longing on canvas, and it tugged at me, an unborn child. 

Elizabeth set the casserole inside the oven.  “Broccoli and cheese.  No ingredient has ever insulted a cow.” (She hated that I was vegetarian.) ”Oven’s set at two-fifty. Should be ready in an hour.  Please. Eat. You’ve lost weight again.” 

“Do you ever sleep?” The maple tree’s branches had already shifted into a dark purple–how quickly the light changed!–my fingers twitched, yearning for a paint brush.  “I’m going to paint something for them today.”

Elizabeth drew close, words pressing against my back:  “Zoe, please don’t. You had all the stress from the opening.  Give it a few days.”

Our parents, driving south on 101, visiting friends who lived in Burlingame. I always picture my mother in her favorite dress of cobalt silk and my father in a wrinkled Oxford. A car cut them off, their car flipped, and they died.  Twenty years later, and I continue to be amazed that this simple chain of events destroyed my childhood.  I was fifteen; Elizabeth, eighteen, and from that point, our lives were divided: Before the Crash and After the Crash. 

My mother’s sister became our guardian after our parents death, and Aunt Catherine frequently declared: “They died instantly,”  as if an advocate for some strange justice I couldn’t register. I nodded vaguely, muted by grief.  But my aunt and sister grew louder, railing against civil injustices at dinner, near shouting matches while I played with my food, imagining myself by a stream, in a meadow, anywhere beautiful and far away. 

I glanced at Elizabeth now, trying to register a confidence I didn’t feel. “I’m going to paint something for them today. Try not to worry. It will be good for me.”  

This wasn’t true. I’d slipped into darkness on March 1st last year–not sleeping for forty-eight hours, drinking cheap scotch, I cried for seven days straight. The painting got nowhere. A car, swerving, flipping, crashing.  Ten seconds, maybe less. How was I to capture such a thing? Didn’t I belong in that Toyota Camry somehow? 

Elizabeth, digging into her thousand-dollar purse. “I brought you something.” 

A photograph of our parents? Of our old house? 

She extended a bottle of pills. “Two Restoril. To take the edge off.” 

“You don’t get it.  I want to feel something. That’s what artists do. Good ones, anyway.”

She set the bottle on the kitchen counter. “Let me offer you a bit of context, Zoe. First: the Crash happened twenty years ago. Second, last night you had amazing professional success. It’s time to celebrate, not self-sabotage, not–”

“–sink into the past.  That’s what you always say.”  

She reached for me, but I spun away, heart banging inside my skin.  She wanted to forget, I wanted to remember. Simple as that. Why couldn’t I let it go? 

A breeze whispered against the sliding glass door, and beyond, the maple tree waved slightly.  Its branches now a deep and, lovely red blurred by my tears. Oh, God. Maybe that was how I’d paint them. The car-crash had always been a distilled moment for me. But for them? Muddled confusion, panic. Nothing defined or clear. 

Elizabeth said, “Call me if you need anything.” Her heels clicked down the hallway, and I followed, my slippers whispering along the hardwood floors. “I’ll call you,” she said, hugged me, and stepped into the brightening day. How very lonely it must have been for her, how very exhausting.  

Before I could thank her, she was half way down the block. My sister, so good with words, never lingered with goodbyes.

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Jennifer Mills Kerr is the founder & lead teacher of A World in a Line, an organization that connect poets from around the world through virtual workshops. Lit-amorous, she’s on a perpetual quest for the next amazing poem to read, savor, and share. Connect with Jennifer at http://www.JenniferMillsKerr.com.