What Becky Knew

“We buried you,” my mother said.

Becky stood outside the screen door wearing the yellow dress we had chosen for her funeral. There was dirt in the pleats and a small brown leaf caught in her hair. One shoe was missing.

Behind her, the sprinklers ticked across the lawn. It was barely six, and the neighborhood was waking up around us.

My mother reached for the latch.

“Wait,” I said.

She pushed past me.

Later, I would remember that hesitation. My sister had come home, and I had wanted to keep the door shut.

Mom wrapped her arms around her. Becky let herself be held, her hands hanging beside her dress. She looked over Mom’s shoulder at the kitchen, where the coffee machine was making the same choking sounds it had made every morning of her life.

“Chip,” Mom said. “Get her a chair.”

Becky had been dead for two weeks.

I got the chair.

***

My sister was a flight attendant. She measured distance in hours and thought nothing of flying to another continent because someone had invited her to dinner.

Her phone was full of swimming pools, rooftop bars, people whose names she couldn’t remember. She had once sent me a photograph from Yacht Week in Croatia with the message: You should try leaving the house sometime.

I sent back a picture of my electric bill.

We understood each other.

The photograph the newspapers used was different. Becky stood on a beach wearing a white shirt, her hair blowing across her mouth. Mom liked it because she looked happy. I hated it because I remembered taking it. She had been telling me to hurry up.

Three weeks before she died, Becky had been vacationing in Miami. She was staying at The Savage, a hotel where every public room looked as though a wealthy man had misunderstood a history museum.

There were spears above the elevators, crossed swords behind reception, and a Viking longship suspended over the lobby bar. Its carved dragon’s head reached toward the mezzanine. Guests posed beneath it with cocktails.

Becky was there when it fell.

Twelve people died. She helped pull a woman from beneath a table and stayed until the paramedics took over.

For days afterward, she called at strange hours.

“Did they say anything about the contractor?”

“Who?”

“The man who put it up.”

I told her to stop reading about it.

Three weeks later, they found her in the water near a marina. She had been drinking. That was what everyone kept saying, as though it explained how a woman who swam before breakfast had drowned beside a ladder.

***

Mom warmed congee and put it in Becky’s favorite bowl.

“You need something in your stomach.”

Becky sat with her knees together. She watched the spoon travel toward her mouth and opened it when Mom touched her lip.

She swallowed twice. The third spoonful stayed on her tongue until Mom took it back.

“We should call somebody,” I said.

“And tell them what?”

I looked at Becky.

She had a dark mark under her jaw that the funeral makeup had concealed. There was dirt packed beneath her nails.

“A doctor.”

Mom wiped my sister’s mouth.

“They already had their turn.”

I called anyway. When I tried to explain, the woman on the phone asked whether Becky was breathing. I watched her chest.

“Chip?” the woman said.

Mom took the phone and hung up.

At eleven, Becky stood.

She walked through the kitchen and out the front door. Mom followed her, calling her name. I caught up at the corner.

“Becks. Hold on.”

I took her elbow. She stopped and looked at my hand until I let go.

Then she kept walking.

We lived in North Miami, three miles from the water. She walked the entire distance in the remaining funeral shoe. At a crossing, I had to stand in front of a delivery van because she stepped into the street before the light changed.

She stopped outside a locked marina gate.

Beyond it were white boats, blue canvas awnings, polished railings catching the sun. Becky raised her arm.

At the end of the pier sat a motor yacht with dark windows.

“That one?” I asked.

She pointed.

“What about it?”

Her arm stayed up until I lowered it.

***

For five days, we took turns following her.

She never hurried. She never sat down. At the marina, she stood against the gate until the security guard told us to leave.

“Your sister can’t keep doing this.”

“She’s had an accident.”

“I’m sorry. But this is private property.”

I asked who owned the boat.

He looked at Becky, then at me.

“You need to go.”

At home, Mom washed her feet in a plastic basin. A split had opened beneath one heel. There was no blood. Mom wrapped it anyway.

Her skin grew paler while her lips became a deeper red, as though the color leaving the rest of her had collected there. She would sit at the kitchen table all night without turning on a light.

Once, coming down for water, I found her standing outside Mom’s bedroom.

“What are you doing?”

She turned toward me.

I could smell the flowers from the funeral home. The same sweet, crowded smell that had clung to my suit.

“Let her sleep,” I said.

Becky returned to the kitchen.

After that, I slept on the couch.

Mom brought in the priest from her church. He prayed beside Becky and left without drinking his tea. An aunt recommended a woman who read cards. The woman took one look at my sister and returned the money.

There were others. Mom stopped telling me how she found them.

Finally, an old Haitian man arrived carrying a grocery bag.

His name was Marcel. The woman who gave Mom his number had called him a witch doctor.

He wore a neatly pressed shirt and ordinary brown sandals.

When he saw Becky, he set the bag down.

“Oh,” he said. “You came home first.”

***

I shut the front door behind him.

“What does that mean?”

Marcel looked at Mom.

“Please sit down.”

“Who are you?”

“The man you asked to come.”

Becky had turned her chair toward him. It was the first time I had seen her show interest in anything besides the water.

He took an envelope from the grocery bag. Inside was a photograph of a man holding a little boy on his shoulders.

“The man died at the hotel,” Marcel said. “His wife hired me.”

“To do what?”

“Ask your sister a question.”

Mom made a small sound.

“Becky spoke to her after the accident. She said she knew something about the installation. She promised to send it.”

“She could have hired an investigator.”

“She did. Your sister died before they met.”

I looked at Becky. Her hands rested flat on the table.

“You dug her up?”

Marcel did not answer quickly enough.

Mom stood.

“Get out.”

“I will. But you need to hear me.”

“You put her through this?”

“The woman wanted the truth.”

“And what did Becky want?” I asked.

For the first time, he looked away.

Outside, a lawn mower started. The ordinary noise made me furious.

“Make it stop,” Mom said.

“I cannot send her back with the work unfinished.”

“What work?”

“The man who killed her is responsible for the people beneath that boat. She has found him. Now someone living has to understand.”

I thought of the yacht.

“She can’t even speak.”

“The dead do not return with everything we ask for.”

“You should have thought of that.”

“Yes,” he said.

Mom pulled out the chair beside Becky and sat close enough that their shoulders touched.

“When can she rest?”

“When what she knows is brought into the open. When he can no longer hide behind her death.”

“And then?”

Marcel folded the photograph along an old crease.

“Then she will be allowed to sleep.”

***

I went through Becky’s things that afternoon.

Mom had packed everything into boxes but hadn’t sealed them. Uniforms. Hotel slippers. Little bottles of shampoo from places I would never visit.

In a canvas tote, beneath a book she had reached page thirty of three years earlier, I found a folder.

There were photographs from Yacht Week. Becky on a sunbed. Becky holding a bottle by the neck. Becky with a man whose expensive watch had slipped halfway down his hand.

His name was Pierre.

She had written it on a cocktail napkin with a Miami number.

I remembered him then. She had called from Croatia and talked about a contractor buying champagne for everybody.

“He hangs ridiculous shit in hotels,” she’d said. “Apparently there’s a fortune in it.”

Inside the folder were printed emails and two invoices.

One invoice listed the suspension fittings specified for The Savage. The other listed what Pierre had bought.

Becky had circled the difference in price.

Forty-eight thousand dollars.

There was an email from her to him.

You told us those things were just for show. You said nobody ever checked what was above the ceiling. I thought you meant you were charging too much.

His reply was two lines.

You’ve misunderstood a conversation we had while drinking. Call me before you do something stupid.

Behind it was a printed screenshot.

Come down to the boat. I’ll show you the engineer’s approval. Then you can apologize.

Below that, Becky had written a berth number.

I sat on the floor with the papers spread around me.

For five days, she had been taking us to the place where he killed her.

***

I photographed everything and sent it to the detective whose card was clipped to her death certificate. Then I called and left a message.

When I looked up, Becky was in the doorway.

“I found it,” I said.

Her lips parted.

For a moment, I thought she might say my name.

Instead, she turned and walked downstairs.

Mom was waiting with the basin.

“Not now, sweetheart. Your feet.”

Becky passed her.

I followed her outside, still holding the folder.

This time, when we reached the marina, a man was wheeling groceries through the gate. Becky went in behind him before it closed.

“Hey,” he said.

I caught it with my foot.

She walked past the fuel pump and the fishing boats, past a couple eating lunch beneath an awning. Water slapped against the pilings. Somewhere a radio played a song Becky used to sing badly on purpose.

The yacht’s name was written across its stern in silver letters.

No Regrets.

I saw it in one of the photographs in my hand. Pierre and Becky on the rear deck, his arm around her waist.

“Becks.”

She stopped at the beginning of the last finger pier.

There was movement behind the yacht’s dark glass.

I took out my phone and called the detective again. While it rang, I watched my sister’s hands. Her fingers were opening and closing at her sides.

The cabin door slid back.

Pierre stepped out carrying a mug. He was barefoot, wearing pale shorts and a shirt unbuttoned at the throat.

He saw me first.

Then he saw Becky.

The mug struck the deck.

My sister lowered her head, planted her ruined foot against the boards, and ran toward him at full speed.