I am constantly forgetting details and circumstances, a product of my brain trying to protect itself, but when it comes to you, I can only think of how perfect you were. My brain won’t let me recall much else. This is self-preservation.
I showered on your deck behind a trellis of green vines. The concrete was warm where the sun shone on it all day, and the water was cool. I watched you swim the whole time I rinsed myself off over my bathing suit. Your long hair plastered in strands to your back and arms and water clung like diamonds to your eyelashes.
Maybe it’s a blessing this is all I can remember of you. You might be older now, and grown up, but my mind only remembers you as a silent, perfect thing. Like a fine china angel in gilt gold, like the one my Catholic grandmother gifted me one Christmas. It’s easier for me to think of you underwater, the unattainable daughter I wanted and wished I could be all those years ago. You were as a girl should be, and you died there.
You didn’t cry when you got your first period, just sat in the bathtub and asked me to leave, voice kitten-quiet. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but it wasn’t malicious. I wasn’t sure where you were and had gone to find you. Your skin was soft and smooth in the warm light and I remembered the deep shame I felt when I got mine too: dirty brown stain in the gusset of my underwear, something I’d done, oxidized blood.
Today I strip screwheads with nicotine-stained fingers and think of you, how if you saw me now you’d be horrified. Of course, I was never clean enough for you. But you would never be clean enough either—for yourself, but especially for your mama. Your one reassurance is that you are the antithesis of your tomboy younger sister who your mother calls her failure child. By a thread, I am holding on to you on the basis of solely my grades, and we are both the same substance morphing for mothers who hold our lives on a leash. So of course, we were doomed from the start. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. I think that’s the worst part.
I’ll be gone by the end of the summer and I will have no excuses to see you. No Latin grammar practice, ballet skills, sewing projects, discussions about 19th century women’s literature. I don’t like any of these things but you like them and that’s enough for me. It’s okay. I can learn to like a lot, just so we can have something in common. You know what that’s like.
You’re perfect, the moms at church would always say. Like an angel. I smiled while they touched your golden hair and hoped by proximity I could be desired, too. I was no better than those gawking parishioners.
Before we got in the pool you took me to your bedroom and showed me the new decorations your mom had bought you: glow-in-the-dark stars plastered on the ceiling. A set of five vintage spellers piled on your nightstand in a neat stack, and an illustrated book of manners with a colorful table setting illustrated on the front sat on your bed. I never learned anything real about you and that frustrates me.
There is this feeling that haunts me and my mind tries to conjure up an image to match it now. I’ve been taught that love is a choice, something built on intention, effort. I loved you effortlessly, but I couldn’t imagine not loving you, because it was as easy as water flowing downhill. Even when I hated you I loved you—when I couldn’t stand your silence, your deference, your conformity. But that’s easy, too, like gravity: being the girl you are supposed to be, a perfect projection of what everyone wants from you. You can’t help it.
Blood stands starkly on the bathtub tile, pinpoint flecks scattered across the inside of the shower liner like a night sky full of stars. You cry in the bathtub where you got your first period and you say you are scared, voice shaking. I’m not supposed to be here. I wasn’t sure where you were but now I’ve found you. Your skin is clammy and blotchy under the cold light and I remember the hot, constricting feeling when I braided my thick dark hair and it didn’t taper at the ends like yours.
Some years have come and gone but I am still in your pool. The sunlight spears the water and touches my body like fork tines and I am screaming for help but there is no one to rescue me. I am staring at your hands on my wrists and your frozen smile, your deep blue eyes, as you kick hard. We touch the bottom of the pool together. We are both drowning. At the end of the day, no one will hear us.