A Family Affair

(Please note that this was a last-minute submission just for fun. Not good writing nor a sensible plot! Simply uncertainty. Enjoy!)

My mother wears an unfashionably long black cap-sleeved shift dress with lace at the cuffs. It’s from Zara, a store she sets above from the rest because it’s “hip,” yet the eighty dollar frock is 95% polyester. The boatneck collar settles uncomfortably on her collarbone, and she readjusts her appleseed diamond necklace every five seconds, a nervous tic. Her hair, styled in the same chin length bob and bangs that she’s worn since I was an infant, frizzes from the mid-July humidity. Her icy blue eyes, a shade lighter than my own, bear shadows of the week’s events. She’s surrounded by the throng of her three sisters, each talking over the other about God knows what. My mother’s face is pale despite the years of sun damage from summers spent in the Carolinas. She’s oblivious to the conversation around her; she might as well be a million miles away, or thirteen feet under.

I decide to move on.

Across the room is my father, nursing a tumbler of gin and tonic, evidently not his first of the evening. He’s cornered by Dina McMichaels, a book club friend of my mother’s. She laughs a touch too loud for the occasion at something my father says. It couldn’t be that funny. My father used to laugh so hard at his own jokes that he’d be in tears before his words even made it into the stratosphere. He specialized in impersonations; Dina, spotting him on the 6:43 train from Penn Station, was his best. “KEEGAN!” he’d squeal in her chihuahua voice, “Come over here! Let’s send Jan a selfie!” During his interactions with Dina, I could usually picture the wheels turning in my father’s head as to how he would reenact the conversation later. Now, I see a blank wall.

My three brothers are glued to the east wall, tugging at their too-tight matching red ties, surely bought by my father at Macy’s late last night after my mother reminded him three times. They look like young Republicans, ready to drone on about the price of gas or the prospect of “illegals” finally being evicted from this ever so beautiful country. My oldest brother, Todd, stares at his phone, swiping through What-I-Eat-In-A-Day videos. The middle child, Asa, talks to my cousin Lyle about his new job in CBD marketing. He’s on his fourth major change in three years, a fact which doesn’t excite my parents all that much. My youngest brother, Brian, hums an unintelligible Penelope Road tune, his fingers thrumming to the beat. He stares at his scuffed penny loafers, wanting to be anywhere but here.

Living up to what I always refer to as her wealthy widowed aunt style is my sister, her paper thin glass of white wine poised in the air, dangerously close to spilling on the gray carpeted floor. She wears a black eyelet Reformation maxi dress with a white cardigan artfully draped over her shoulders. She speaks quietly with my cousin, Jeannine, and her baby daughter, and a wan smile is painted on her face. Her eyes tell the true story, though. Glassy and dilated, they appear to be the color of a murky pond rather than their usual chocolate brown. I half-expect her to slide her sunglasses down onto her nose in an Anna Wintour fashion, despite being indoors. It would track.

My grandmother, affectionately referred to by her brood as Grammie, holds court from an upholstered green velvet couch far opposite the double doors. She holds the soft, tan hands of my childhood best friend Kathryn in her own blue-veined hand, a gesture known to all as her Death Grip. Her other hand cups Kathryn’s cheek as she recalls the quibbles she’d overhear between me and Kathryn at recess in the fourth grade. Kathryn laughs softly, through tears. We had always had a sort of twin intuition, even though we didn’t share a drop of DNA. Even now, I can feel her mind-deafening pain in my side. It amounts to an ache greater than the heartbreaks of our high school relationships and unrequited crushes of years past. More than a decade of sisterhood, gone, just like that. Blink, and you missed it.

I shake off the eerie feeling and take in the room as a whole instead.

Throngs of aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, and classmates, along with a smattering of faces I don’t recognize, mill about, picking at cubes of Manchego and dunking piggies in a blanket into the communal ramekin of ketchup. A cloud of sadness, to say the absolute least, hangs in the air, yet there is something more. Confusion, maybe? After all, if you received the following text at 2:10 AM on a Wednesday, you’d be pretty dazed as well:

Hello. Bonjour. Hola. Namaste. Guten Tag. Ciao. Nǐ hǎo. Privet…

Anyhoo, you get the idea. I always thought I’d get to visit at least as many countries as the individual languages I just spoke, but obviously, I won’t, so I figured this was my next best option. I’ll get to the point. If you’re not Kathryn opening my dozenth TikTok of the night, you’re probably wondering why I’m messaging you. I’m usually asleep at this time, curled up under my flannel sheets, nightmares of missed exams coursing through my unconscious mind. Instead, I am sitting on a bench in the City, the only visible light being the one emitted from my cell phone screen. I don’t have time to explain where I’m going, but I will tell you this: it is for the best. I cannot stay for a moment longer than I have. Living this life has tortured my soul inexplicably, and I have caused so much pain to you all. I know that that pain will be heightened in the coming weeks, but eventually, it will begin to diminish. Day by day, it will be a lesser load, trickling down to a glimmer that one day subsides to nothing but a memory of a feeling. That feeling, I hope, will be warm and bursting with nostalgia. Most of all, I hope it brings you peace. I am happy. You will be happy. It may not seem like it, but we will be happy together. So please, do not look for me as I plunge gently into the dark night. Do not look for me, do not mourn me.

Let. Me. Go.

The police never did find my body. They partnered with the phone company to track down my cell signal, but it just led them to the abandoned bench on Bleecker Street. Their investigation was fruitless, resulting only in the discovery of a phone wiped of prints. The case was closed, the story was written in the local paper, and my family was left grief-stricken.

Now, as I look around at the room of people gathered around to remember my eighteen years of life, I feel a niggling sense of guilt. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left so soon. Or, maybe, I should have sent handwritten letters rather than shooting out a quick text message. Children these days don’t even learn cursive, so my younger cousins would need their parents to decipher the message for them. So, a text was the right way to go.

Nevertheless, I admit that I just may be in the wrong here. Parents, along with grandparents, should not be forced to cope with the loss of their children. It is not morally right nor emotionally fair.

So, I dust off my jeans, turn off the monitor, emerge from the coat closet, and open the double doors.

A gasp ripples through the room as my parents, siblings, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, see with their very own eyes, the girl they have come to mourn.

They see Me.

“Hi!”

The end?