Death May Disagree

Chapter 1

Although Rosaline struggled inside my arms, I kept on hugging tighter. If she were capable of asking why, I would have smiled and said she was spared a great sadness, but only because I knew the deceased very well. He wouldn't have wanted us to grieve, said Mom, as though Dad wanted to die without saying goodbye. I know he wanted to say goodbye. I know.

Squirming still, my one-year-old sister surveyed her surroundings. In a sea of grievers, familiar and new, she was the most clueless. I was the second. My paternal cousins, with their genuine condolences, remarked how they knew Dad's condition was bad but not as bad as Mom had detailed in her eulogy. It's going to get better, they said, like they knew what it felt like not to know your Dad even had a heart condition.

I remember Mom crying for a whole week after the burial, and then crying some more the week after that, so I knew I couldn't be mad at her. But I had to be mad at someone, because all I got was Dad's "Have fun at school" the morning of and Mom's sobbing call after lunch.

I remember thinking that the tears streaming down Mom's face were the tears I was supposed to shed with her, but couldn't. It didn't feel right to feel more rage than loss, to fixate on betrayal at a time for compassion, and to cry in pain unshared. It also didn't feel right to freeze up and let her burst into tears every night, but when the weeks turned into months, it became less uncomfortable.

The year Dad died was the year we spent Halloween indoors, declined Thanksgiving with the in-laws, and celebrated Rosaline's second birthday, which is her first birthday without Dad. In school, I avoided everyone like the plague, as if seclusion was the only ticket into heaven. By the beginning of the Christmas season, I felt a profound loneliness and looked to Mom, figuring that it was borne from the loss of our connection. I had the sudden urge to forgive her then, but I didn't.

The scary thing about anger is that it demands an outlet. Typically, mine was to cry for hours on end, or for however long it takes to dispel the anger. If I wasn't crying, my second outlet was to keep it in and to bury it deep where it could never be heard from again. Dad compared me to an electric kettle whose automatic shut-off function only works sometimes. I could keep burning, seething with anger, with no way of signaling to anyone that I'd like to pour out my tears.

My school counselor said certain actions can reconfigure the body, like how smiling in the mirror tricks you into thinking that you're happy when you're not. She suggested I try it, so that I feed my brain with good chemicals instead of bad, angry ones. It was during these exercises that my body revealed itself to be stupid. For all the times I've been mad-crying in the past, my body had believed me to be sad-crying, my anger interpreted to be unhappiness.

I had been crying myself into depression. And when I found I couldn't cry, the depression stayed. And the loneliness that accompanied it was not from the loss of a connection with Mom, but from a connection with Dad.

When New Year's came, I contemplated suicide for the first time. It was an idea borne from nothing and no one, but it entered my mind because my body couldn't decide what to do with my bottled-up tears. I mentioned this to Mom out of fear for my life, and she replied, saying, Are you trying to hurt me? I wasn't so angry anymore by then, but Mom must have thought I still was and that this was my way of seeking retribution.

Mom cracked shortly after and then things started to happen in a blur. She had episodes of shouting and episodes of silence that developed into hair-pulling, shoving, and taking my things away. All my anger was spent, making way for self-blame. Why had I thought of putting my family through another death? How could I have been so stupid? Did I really think it would bring me closer to Dad?

I was painting a self-portrait one April day when I felt a fountain of water stream from my eyes and down my cheeks. Mom had left a welt on my arm the night before, the first visible injury since her transformation. Examining the blood spots beneath the purple bruise made me tremble and recall that first thought of suicide. I tried to recall how it even came to mind. Perhaps in my depression, I had imagined it to be a cool party trick, a disappearing act that left people in a better mood than when they first sat down for the show.

I forgave myself for that silly presumption. I had been to a funeral, seen the lamentations, and watched the attendees get into their cars with their GPS set to the nearest fast food. Death would not be a cool party trick. Death would be purple and spotted with blood, where a lifeless magician lays where seconds ago, he stood holding his wand. I knew then and there that death could never be the solution, no matter how unhappy I was becoming.

That night, during dinner, Mom asked me if I had been crying. I averted my traitorous eyes away because the reason behind their puffiness would have been misinterpreted. I didn't so much as cry because I wanted to kill myself and couldn't, as I did because I realized I lost my solution to unhappiness. I hesitated, too tired to explain but too tired to lie, and in those tense seconds before I could say anything, Rosaline started to cry.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Mom grip Rosaline by the shoulders. Why doesn't anyone ask me how I feel?, she said, digging her nails deeper into my sister's skin. The urgent need to scoop Rosaline up out of the seat and out the door was strong, overruling my fear of another beating. Only this time, I was afraid that Mom would beat Rosaline.

I'm glad to say that nothing ever did happen to Rosaline, although the weeks that followed were a traipse for anxious suspense. It wasn't long before the stress of it all drove me to fantasize about my window and the store of macabre possibilities. To hell with Mom's feelings and with whether or not I find happiness on the other side! I was too tired. With a hammer in one hand and my sister in the other, I sought a permanent refuge.

If our deaths made the news, there would be headlines saying how repulsive a big sister I was for murdering Rosaline and then killing myself, but I would rebut with saying babies don't know how to commit suicide. The trauma of watching your big sister off herself would also not bode well for her mental health, so the order of our deaths needed to stay as is - her first, then me. I swung the hammer twice at my window and picked out the largest shard, then pointed the sharp end of it at the nape of Rosaline's neck.

In my head, I counted upwards to three, awkwardly pinching the shard between my thumb and fingers. The palm of my free hand shakily rubbed a few tears away from my eyes. It may not have been holding the murder weapon, but it shook as hard as the one that did. I knew I wanted to use the glass shard and finish with a jump out of the window, but without a firm grip to plunge the shard cleanly into Rosaline, this was going to be a recipe for screaming and pain. I should first suffocate Rosaline, I decided, walking over to get a pillow from my bed.

Rosaline was examining the glass shards still hanging from the top of my window frame, like a set of jagged teeth, when she giggled softly to herself. I tried to smile, wishing I could tackle this moment with lightheartedness, too. After wrapping a sock around my murdering hand, I knelt behind her, propping the pillow in front of her face. From this angle, I could see the light from the streetlamp bouncing off the hanging glass, but I saw something else, too - a man peering at us from above the dormer.

With the past few days replete with sleep-deprivation, if a side effect were to exist, I wouldn't be surprised if the side effect was him, an imaginary man. He looked like any ordinary man, except that he didn't blink or express alarm for having been seen, and there were wisps of black smoke emitting from his body. We locked eyes as I wondered who would call the cops on whom first.

"Hey, I saw you!" I whispered aggressively. "I'm going to call the police."

The man rolled his eyes, frowned, and vanished.

"You're holding up the line, missy. Just do it and be done with it." The man had appeared from a cloud of black smoke and was now sitting in my chair.

I covered Rosaline's mouth as she screamed, but not a second later, she waved my hand off and giggled. I grabbed the hammer and pointed it at the man. "I'm calling the police," I said without much conviction, challenging the man's bright brown eyes with my own nonetheless.

He groaned. "Look, you won't ever see me again if you just do what you've set your heart on doing tonight."

A beat, during which the wisps of smoke cleared. He murmured something under his breath with some dissatisfaction. Then, he stood up and walked towards the window. "Alright, this has been fun, truly. But I'm going to go," he said. He paused in front of Rosaline, just within arm's length, and something like sisterly love possessed me to get up and stare him down. I didn't even reach his shoulder. "You need to sleep more," he added, running a finger across one of his eyebags, and disappeared.