I am alive and well.

My sister died in 2022 while jaywalking.

I live with the impact of her death. My ribs ache as I imagine the tires of the SUV mauling her. Was her face gone, her legs broken? She’s no longer able to bend her wrist in a hello.

News of her death came in a 2am call from my niece, Charlie. I have no idea how the police got Charlie’s number. It was brief, our phone call. There wasn’t much to say. I expected Stacey to die young from drugs and prostitution or maybe the harshness of living homeless on the streets.

Men used to flock around her before her current lifestyle stole her looks, leaving her with cracked lips forming little o’s and wrinkles deep enough to house dimes. In the beginning, prostitution provided her with a good income. She bought a baby blue corvette and a home with four bedrooms that overlooked a park.

She was a high-class call girl and then came the drugs. She ended up giving men blowjobs in dirty alleys and hand jobs in late model cars. I found her a place to live for a year, room and board free. All she had to do was get clean. She said no. She didn’t want to give up crystal meth.

Her death left me angry at God. But then, I thought her death a good thing. She was no longer a broken picture frame with a muddied head shot. However, God did leave me stuck in the image of her walking alone on Thomas Road, two blades of light reaching through the darkness for her.

I pray for her soul to settle someplace safe, someplace peaceful, a place she could not imagine in her last years. Do my prayers for her mean I have forgiven her for having sex with my boyfriend?

I have not forgotten the midnight call, her boyfriend’s voice on the other end like a crowbar prying open the door to my safety, his words a thief rushing in. She had been having sex with my boyfriend for the last year. I looked at him lying next to me. The phone hadn’t woken him. I hated that he slept so soundly. I bit into the flesh of his bare ankle, drawing blood. His ankle smelled like rotted sock. I didn’t bite hard enough to disturb his sleep.

I remember Stacey as a ten-year-old writing number one in black ink all over her body, smiling into the camera I held. She held the state record in swimming for ten-year-olds in the fifty-yard butterfly. She was pretty, a winner, the youngest of us. When I think of her I am brought to tears, the tears I couldn’t shed over her when she was alive. She’s my bouquet of tulips that blossom for days and then waste away leaving the water and stripped leaves to sour in the vase.

For eight years my hatred rubbed her into invisibility until she finally become part of my regrets. I could have been a support for her, someone to talk with and eat with. I could have occasionally given her my couch to sleep on. I no longer see her only as a cheat. My hatred for her no longer appears randomly in my mind easing God out. It has dissolved as protein powder does when poured into giant tumblers of water. I wish her the best in death, hoping that there is something to the afterlife where she may flourish, dance wildly and care for a poodle.

I imagine the woman Stacey could have become. She could have been a good mother to her three children and live in a beige house surrounded by saguaros with a job as a bank teller. The imagine is a dull throb in my mind. I pause, say I love you to her memory and zip my jacket, the breeze rifling my hair, whistling into my ear.

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