*
The day after Zoe died, Jake and I went to school.
‘You don’t have to go, kids – you can stay home,’ my father had said the night before. ‘It’s just …’ His voice faltered. ‘It’s meant to be better if you try to do the things you’d normally do.’ The psychiatrist in him speaking. ‘I’m going back to work, but Mum will be here if you don’t want to go to school.’
Keeping up the rituals of normality was decided upon as the best defence against grief, and we got up from bed and ate breakfast at the kitchen table, and then caught the bus from the end of the driveway as we had on every other school day of our lives. I’d left Jake behind at primary school, so it was the first year we weren’t catching the same bus. For me, the day was a swimming carnival, and I dressed up in my house colour. In a bright yellow sundress I was a sad-eyed, drooping daffodil. On the bus I watched the faces of the kids around me, wondering if any of them knew. No one spoke to me, though they didn’t look away either. Finally I turned to the girl behind me, an old acquaintance from primary school.
In a bright yellow sundress I was a sad-eyed, drooping daffodil. On the bus I watched the faces of the kids around me, wondering if any of them knew.
‘My sister died yesterday.’ My voice came out a strangled, husky whisper.
‘What?’ The girl could not decipher my words.
‘My sister is dead.’
‘Which one?’
‘Zoe.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘No.’
My friend looked at me, stunned, uncertain. ‘She’s been overseas for a while, yeah?’
‘Yeah, almost a year.’
‘How’d she die?’
‘She killed herself. In Holland.’
Silence grew around us and I turned back and faced the front. Trees flicked past the bus window, skidding strips of green. My face felt numb and I reached up and pressed my fingers into my cheeks, hard, until the bones beneath my eyes began to hurt. Tears sprang up – I could taste them, wet and salty, in the back of my throat.
The swimming carnival was loud and echoing. Screaming kids lined the grandstands, pompoms and streamers springing furiously in their arms. I hung back in the very last row of benches, hoping to go undetected among all the cheers, a single thought on repeat in my mind.
This is the first day I will live when Zoe is dead.
A teacher approached me, her hair tied in two messy plaits and laced with yellow ribbon. Her face was set in lines of irritation.
‘You’re not swimming today?’ she asked. ‘That’s a pretty party dress. Bit much for a swimming carnival, though.’
My mother had made the daffodil dress when I was still a child at primary school, and though it hugged at me now with all my budding curves, I felt myself in it. Running my fingers through the pleats in my dress, fanning the yellow fabric out around me, I was comforted. The teacher looked me up and down with disapproving eyes.
‘Why aren’t you swimming? This isn’t a day for being lazy, for just hanging out.’
I said nothing.
‘What, you can’t talk either? Won’t swim, can’t talk.’
‘My sister’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘My sister died yesterday. She killed herself. In Holland.’
Stepping backwards, the woman looked away, her lips pressed together tightly.
I had transgressed, speaking those words, and as I stared at the part zigzagging down the back of the teacher’s hair, I wondered in what way I could possibly speak the words right.
My sister passed away.
My sister passed on.
She took her own life.
She breathed her last.
She departed this life.
I tested these phrases beneath my breath, shaping them with my mouth, trying them out.
Gave out. Expired.
Broke down. Perished.
Suicide. Crashed.
The cheers of the surrounding kids surged around me, and I lifted my hands to cover my ears.
When she turned back to face me, the teacher’s mouth had not softened. ‘Well, at least try to look as if you’re having fun.’
I nodded in cautious reply, dropping my arms to my sides. I didn’t know if I should stand or sit. I didn’t know if I should speak or keep silent. The whole world was filled with uncertainty. Nothing was clear. I was lost in this new terrain, where Zoe was dead and there were no words to speak right.
On the way home, I stared out the bus window and thought of my mother’s face and how it might look. I remembered Jake’s imploring eyes from the day before when they’d pulled him out from under the bed. On hearing Zoe was dead, I had run and my brother had hidden, as though the shock had physically propelled us. Animal instinct. I thought about the crease between my mother’s brows – how hard it suddenly seemed, frightening instead of reassuring, as though her face was held in a tight mask to keep it from collapsing inwards.
I thought about the crease between my mother’s brows – how hard it suddenly seemed, frightening instead of reassuring.
Through the windows, the silhouetted mountains disappeared from sight as the bus neared my driveway. I imagined my father’s slapping shoes on the bricks of the walkway as he arrived home from work to find the house so filled with our silence that we could all barely breathe for the sadness.
Again I lifted my hands and cupped them over my ears.
The bus door opened to let me out, a hissing, clanking slide, and I wandered slowly down the driveway, prolonging that awful moment when I would see the loss of my sister reflected back at me in the eyes of those who made up my family.
