Chain Reaction

My little sister and I dash across the grass, the sunlight like a warm shower mingling with the cold spray from the sprinkler. Tiny rainbows come and go. We’re laughing, shoving each other into the stream. Once we’re soaked and shivering, our summer dresses stained green from the damp lawn, Aunt Sue calls to us from the patio.

“Girls, you want to come dry off in the sun?”

We race toward her, our favorite aunt, waiting for us in the golden warmth with plush towels and a patio table brimming with treats.

It’s memories like these that surface after the phone call from my mother.

Memories of sleepovers and pancake-eating contests we never actually won—though when you’re allowed to eat as many pancakes as you want, haven’t you already hit the jackpot?

That phone call was a stone tossed into the quiet pond of my daily teenage life.

My sweet, bubbly Aunt Sue, always full of wild schemes. A woman who believed in things most people wouldn't. She would grab hold of the intangible and refuse to let go until she’d examined every inch of it.

We used to hang on her every word when she told us about waking up at night to find a shadow standing by her bed. She was never afraid. She’d just start a conversation. She talked a mile a minute, and usually, the shadow was so impressed that it forgot to be ghostly. It would sit on the edge of her bed, and together they would explore the borders between the here-and-now and the then-and-there.

On the other end of the line, my mother asks if I’m still there. “Yeah, Mom, sorry. Go on.” And she kept going.

My mother’s words felt like a nail being driven into my skull. Painful, slow, stroke by stroke. Aunt Sue. Bang. Doctor. Bang, bang. Lump in her breast. Bang, bang, bang. Malignant. Bang.

I close my eyes, but I still see her — and something else now too, something that shouldn’t be there.

She used to hop through the yard like a frog with us. We were the storks trying to catch her. She’d fill up a small wading pool and turn us into ocean voyagers, whales, or deep-sea divers.

Death was something she spoke about openly, just as she spoke openly about everything. But if death had a living, breathing opposite, it was Aunt Sue.

“Is she going to die?” I asked, without actually wanting to know the answer.

The line went quiet for a moment. “We're all going to die," my mother said cheerfully, and before I could respond, she was already talking about the weather forecast and whether we should have a barbecue.

But my sister and I had only one place to be: Aunt Sue's. We had expected her to be sad, or staying in bed—something that simply didn't fit her at all.

Instead, there she was, working in her garden, wearing that massive red-and-white straw hat. Her thick mane of dark red hair cascaded from underneath it like a waterfall. She waved at us and came toward us, laughing.

For a moment, I felt like that little girl again. Carrying my small red suitcase and wearing my bunny pajamas, full of anticipation for all the fun that was about to begin.

She hugged us. Her fair skin against my cheek—with its galaxy of freckles—smelled so familiar.

Her scent instantly transported me back to the night we went to the theater together. Her jumpsuit and high boots made me feel like I was walking alongside an exotic giraffe.

“So good to see you, girls!” she exclaimed. I could feel the chill that had settled in my body begin to thaw. “Now, wipe those long faces off; that’s not going to make me feel any better, you know.”

Typical Aunt Sue. Straight to the point, no dancing around it. We spent that afternoon on the patio with cold drinks and a platter full of treats. She told us how the doctor had just stared at her, saying nothing. So, she’d eventually just said it herself.

At the hospital, they had been clearer. It wasn't going to be easy. But Aunt Sue had taken every option other than fighting like hell, crumpled them into a little ball, and tossed them straight into the trash.

She was going to fight, and she was going to win. “Another cookie, girls?”

The treatment began. Aunt Sue got along famously with the hospital staff, and they with her. She cracked jokes about her illness and never forgot to ask us how a date had gone or how school was faring.

The treatment was long. The chemo was brutal.

The exotic giraffe transformed into a pale lady. Beneath the red-and-white sun hat, there were no longer any red waves cascading down. But Aunt Sue remained Aunt Sue. She still made pancakes for us—with the window and the door swung wide open and a bucket sitting on the counter.

Aunt Sue felt supported by her ghostly friends. They visited more often now, lying down on the bed beside her.

My senior year of high school arrived. Torn between textbooks and Aunt Sue, my brain refused to function. It didn’t exactly help my exam prep. Aunt Sue had threatened to "quit being sick" if I spent more time on her than on my studies. We talked on the phone constantly. She didn't mention that on the other end of the line, the pale lady was turning into a frail little bird. Nor did she mention that she was spending nearly all her time in bed.

My mother visited her daily, but she only saw what she wanted to see. The pale skin was just because she wasn't allowed in the sun. The fact that she slept so much was a good thing—she was resting up to get back on her feet. Aunt Sue’s endless optimism kept this lie alive.

Even though lying was the one thing that truly made her angry.

On the night of my graduation party, my mother handed me a box with a large ribbon. “From Aunt Sue,” she said. “She can’t make it, unfortunately.” The joy of graduation, the decorations, the happy guests... it all drained away, like water spiraling out of sight.

My mother fastened the gold four-leaf clover necklace around my neck. It felt like a spiked dog collar, its iron points growling defiantly at the outside world. This was now my most prized possession. No one was allowed to touch it. Aunt Sue not coming to my graduation party? That could only happen if she were dead, or well on her way.

Even the visit before my trip to Paris had been cheerful. She lay propped up against her white pillows, nearly absorbed by the whiteness—her fair skin almost transparent, her freckles faded. But she talked up a storm, fantasizing about how she’d climb the Eiffel Tower once she was better. She thought I didn’t see that she gripped an invisible hand on the blanket beside her. She took the clover around my neck between her thin fingers.

“Don’t let anything or anyone break you, sweetheart,” she said, as a brief rosy flush flickered over her sunken cheeks. “You deserve all the happiness in the world.”

I left her there in her bed, which sat, against all odds, in a patch of secret sunlight. Her hat rested on a chair beside her, ready for the day she’d be able to stand again. For a fleeting second, I thought I saw a shadow. It drifted slowly from her bedside toward me.

Our trip to Paris felt like wearing sunglasses on a rainy day. But Aunt Sue had forced those glasses onto my face. She wanted to hear every single detail when I got back. Most of all, she wanted a photo of us on the Eiffel Tower, so she could get a head start on seeing where she was headed.

The hotel room was tiny. Old. In a rough neighborhood. We dropped our bags and descended the creaking, peeling staircase into the streets of Paris. We wandered through squares and down narrow alleys. We looked out over the Seine and crisscrossed the city by metro. In Notre Dame, we lit a candle for Aunt Sue.

It was late by the time we collapsed onto our uncomfortable beds. A piercing pain began to bloom in my ear. Rain lashed harder and harder against the small, grimy window that overlooked an endless sea of rooftops.

The painkillers hadn't touched it. I didn’t have an earache—I was an earache. But I thought of Aunt Sue and felt like a fraud. Don't let anything break you, she’d said. Not by anyone or anything—and definitely not by an earache when you're in Paris, I added silently. The rain kept drumming against the glass. I sat up, my sister watching me with sleepy eyes. As I stretched, I felt something drop onto my bare leg.

Aunt Sue’s necklace.

The stabbing in my ear let up for a second. The rain held its breath. I reached for the clasp — it was firmly shut. My sister’s eyes reflected exactly what was racing through my mind; neither of us wanted to understand what this message meant.

The moment slipped away.

Paris s’éveille.

The breakfast nook consisted of two rickety wooden tables. A narrow, high window looked out onto an alleyway. The old cobblestones were receiving an incessant drenching, and the alley was beginning to turn into a small river.

The newspaper on our table ran bold headlines about the heaviest rainfall in a hundred years. With a few extra painkillers and the broken necklace tucked in my pocket, we stepped out into the downpour. The water reached past our ankles. But we had an Eiffel Tower to climb.

We visited as many museums as we could, staying dry and grabbing bits to eat and drink. We saved the Eiffel Tower for the evening, wanting to look out over the City of Light and truly see the sparkle.

By then, the water was eight inches deep in some places. Tourists were hunkering down in their hotel rooms. We, with soaked socks and stringy hair, walked straight toward the Tower.

The glass elevator hummed upward, lifting us against the falling rain, higher and higher above the alleys, the rooftops, and the tourists in their warm, dry beds. The lights turned into tiny stars in the raindrops on the glass.

We stepped out onto the second-floor observation deck. I didn't dare go any higher. We were almost alone. The view of the black sky and the lashing rain, illuminated by the city below, swallowed us whole, letting us float above a metropolis that had shrunk into a miniature village.

The rain forced us to find cover. We were drenched. We ran toward a dark niche and ducked into a phone booth—they were still everywhere back then. Our eyes met. We fumbled in our pockets for coins and heard our mother's voice through the cold metal receiver.

I squeezed the necklace in my pocket. “We’re at the top of the Eiffel Tower, Mom!”

My mother was silent. Voices in the background. “Mom?” “Sweetheart,” she whispered, “I’m with Aunt Sue.”

The necklace in my pocket slipped from my hand.

“She passed away this morning.”