Jennifer Longo - Six Feet Over It

“Don’t look !” I pour more soap, swish the water around.

She rolls her eyes, laughs. Still in her track shorts. The sun is nearly set.

“Did you walk?”

She shrugs. “Not dark yet.”

“I told them—”

“Oh, awesome.” She smiles at the mirror. “I am a girl!” Six months, three days of remission and the dandelion fluff on her head is just now growing back in silky curls, different from the stick-straight it used to be and finally long enough to hold back with a barrette. I’ve missed her hair: fair like Meredith’s, her eyes as dreamily blue. “I’ve got chemo curls and chemo boobs,” she says, clutching her definitely bigger bosom through her sports bra. “It was good for something. ”

Of all of us, you’d think Kai would be maddest about living here, but she’s just—not. Yes, she misses the ocean, too, but she is able to attend school again at last, and she loves this big house; having her own room instead of a towel-covered sofa near a plastic vomit bucket is her actual dream come true. Living in the cemetery, she’s never felt so alive.

“Well, sure. That and the whole ‘not dying’ thing. Close your eyes.” I sigh and stand up in the lukewarm water. She smiles, blindly wraps a towel around me.

“You’re too skinny,” she says.

“Look who’s talking.” An empty thing to say. She is not skinny. She is Meredith all over—small but not wiry like Wade and me. Lean. Two years my senior, but I’m three inches taller so people always assume she’s younger.

She ignores me. Gnaws at my admittedly bony elbow.

“Go put a sandwich in your piehole, dummy. I need a shower.”

I have mortgaged my sanity for hers. I’ll sell graves every day forever keep her this happy.

I pull on clean pajamas and summon the energy to eat a bowl of cereal, get in bed, and finally make a decent effort to try to figure out what the hell Ovid is getting at. Because it is true—I do have a quiz tomorrow.

“OHHH, LOOK AT THAT goddamned angel!” Wade says. “We need that one!” It’s early Saturday morning, and we’ve left Meredith and Kai sleeping, sun not yet above the dense hillside pines above Hangtown’s Main Street, hiding Rivendell Nursery.

I yawn. The angel probably wants to, too. It waits patiently beside a perplexing gate made of what looks like bent willow branches, soon to be one of millions of weeping angel statues that Wade, the vocal atheist and self-proclaimed card-carrying Communist, has become obsessed with sticking all over Sierrawood. It’s getting a little hackneyed, not to mention crowded, but he insists. “People love that religious shit!”

I follow him along a winding forest path over a rickety bridge to a heavy wooden door. Rivendell Awaits is set deep in the stone wall of what was once a mill house for the creek flowing beneath our feet. Sagging, toothless jack-o’-lanterns ooze white wax; gauze ghosts swing from low branches. It was Halloween last night.

Still no mention of my birthday.

Tiny brass bells ring in the hazy, pine-filtered light of the mill house and the thrum of a choir of angels… Wait, no. It’s just Enya. Plants everywhere, dusty boxes of bulbs crowd beneath rickety wooden tables laden with pots of flowering vines, shiny, waxy leaves and blossoms. In the thick glass of every window sparkle crystals suspended from silver threads spinning lazy circles in lavender-scented air; rainbows skim across the ceiling, the mossy stone floor, my hands—everything very definitely alive.

“Wade! How’s things?” Overalls Mom steps from a dark recess to shake Wade’s hand. I follow as they climb over the plants and out a back door into a wide expanse of grassy field, maybe an entire acre—encircled by a ring of tall, tall trees. Mostly pines. I close my eyes and breathe the cold, dusty morning air.

“Leigh.”

Wade, arms loaded with six-pack planters of blossoms, jerks his head toward more flats stacked in the grass. “Little less daydreaming, for crap’s sake. Let’s go!”

Overalls Mom lifts flowers into my arms. “Everything okay?”

I nod.

“You’re Wade’s oldest, right?”

I shake my head. “Just taller.”

“Oh yes, you’re the one in the office.” She tips her head back and yells, “Hey! Elanor! You two are the same age; you should get together— Elanor! Where is that girl…?”

She drifts off to search and I make my escape, lugging the flowers back through the cloud of Enya, over the bridge to the truck. I set them gently inside and make a move to get in the cab, but not before—

“Leigh!”

She knows my name. Princess Leia rushes out the door, still the tall boots, still the white apron, but this time over an orchid print dress, dark braids still wound behind each ear. She’s fourteen ? Looks twelve.

Over the bridge she comes, wide smile. “Hi!”

Emily.

Out here in the daylight it’s even more evident; anyone could see the similarity not just in her face, but also… sort of exuding ?

I can’t breathe to speak.

“I saw your dad. You look just like him!”

I nod.

“Come inside, we’ve got cider from last night.”

Wade is nowhere. “I think we’re just here for the flowers, we need to get back to Sierra—”

“You’ve got a minute. My mom’s showing your dad some angel fountains. If my dad wanders out there and gets going, you might have an hour.”

She reaches out. I pull back instinctively—she grasps my hand in both of hers.

“Oh my gosh, you’re freezing!”

She leads me stumbling back over the bridge. Inside the mill house she pulls down rubber bats hanging from strings tacked to the ceiling and tosses them onto a pile of fabric on the counter. Heaping it all over a sewing machine in a corner beneath a stained-glass window, she goes to a hot plate behind the register, pours cider from a pot, puts a clay cup in my hands. No handle and a wobbly rim. She sees me notice.

“My brother made that. Sorry. He’s not the greatest potter. Boys.”

The cider is sweet and clovey.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Of course! Did you guys go out last night? Bet you got tons of trick-or-treaters.”

There were limp festoons of toilet paper all over the Manderleys this morning, a few soda-can bongs, and a smashed pumpkin beside the pond. All in all Wade was thrilled by the narrow extent of the vandalism.

“We stayed in,” I say into my cider cup. “Watched movies.”

She nods. “Us too. We watched The Shining … well, I listened to it. I was at the door handing out candy. I hate scary movies, but it was on so loud I heard the typing and redrum and all that. I thought I’d be okay not actually seeing, but it may have been worse. I had horrible dreams all night.”

The back door sends the brass bells swinging for a tall, black-haired boy—an older, male version of Elanor, probably the potter, who calls over Enya, “Where are they?”

Elanor smiles brightly. “Dad says, ‘Get out back and finish training the pumpkin vine before it dies or you’re in so much trouble I don’t even know what.’ ”

“Elanor, I swear to—”

“Balin, this is Leigh. Her parents bought Sierrawood.”

Balin the Potter pushes his hair away from startlingly blue eyes and reaches to shake my hand. “Lucky you.” He climbs over baskets of flowers to search the counter. “Give them back. I don’t want you touching them; I need them right now!”

“Oh, need !” Elanor rolls her eyes. She pulls a velvet pouch from a metal cash box, tosses it to him and misses. A clatter of tiny things rolls across the stone floor. Balin is horrified.