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Here’s a secret: you wish she was dead, sometimes.
It makes you feel sick with guilt to think about, but it’s true. You think, maybe, that’s what you’ll tell people, when you finally leave for college.
I had a sister. Her name was December. She died when I was ten.
You try on different explanations, alone in your room, to see how they feel in your mouth.
I had a sister. She had cancer, and she died six months after it was diagnosed.
I had a sister. She was murdered and they never caught the person who did it.
I had a sister. When I was ten, she killed herself.
You wish she had a grave. You wish you didn’t have to walk past her room every day and know everything is as she left it. You wish that everyone in town didn’t know about what happened, that they didn’t look at you the way that they did sometimes.
You wish that you could mourn her properly.
No one knows how to talk about her. When she comes up, they always say something like, I couldn’t imagine. I could never go on if I lost my sibling like that, not knowing what happened. You’re so strong—
But it’s not a choice, to go on. It’s not because you’re strong, because Angel knows you’re not. You go on because you have to go on. You go to school, even on mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed, and you get good grades and make yourself smile like there’s nothing wrong at all. Your Mom and Dad are already dealing with enough. You can't fall apart. There’s no other choice. There never has been.
(You’re doing better now. You are. Sometimes, you can go a whole day, and realize you haven’t thought about Dess once. You try not to feel guilty about this.)
(But for those first few months, it was all nightmares and food you could hardly keep down and the therapy appointments in the city that Mom dragged you to. You slept in your parents’ bed. You cried so much that sometimes you physically couldn’t stop until your body ran out of tears. You pretended not to hear Mom crying too.)
(There was this recurring nightmare you had during those first few weeks. Dess, alone and scared in the dark, calling out for someone, anyone, to help her, and wasn’t that ridiculous? Your sister was never scared of the dark. Your sister was never scared of anything. You woke dread gripping your heart and tears streaming down your face anyways.)
You had a sister, once, and the thing that really keeps you up at night sometimes is that you’ll never know if you still do. You still have nightmares about it. If she’s out there, somewhere, suffering, trapped in some sicko’s basement like on those true crime documentaries that Mom doesn’t know you watch-
(You’ve tried to imagine her out there, somewhere, choosing to stay away. In some big city, maybe, playing music. Happy, and not thinking of you at all. You google her name sometimes, imagining her showing up one day as headlining some punk band you’ve never heard of. But it never feels as real as the nightmares do. It’s strange. You can imagine your sister dead, your can imagine her angry, her trapped and in pain, her regretting everything—but you can’t imagine her happy.)
You turned sixteen this year. You’re the same age as she was the last time you saw her. Next year you’ll be older. You don’t know what to do with the thought that it’ll keep happening. Every year is a wider gulf between you and your sister. Ten more years, and you’ll have lived more years without her than with her.
You wish that what happened hadn't poisoned your memories of her, but of course it did. Even an innocuous memory can become a knife in your back that twists without warning. The way she'd protect you from Kris' stupid pranks when no one else ever did. The afternoons where she let you try on her cool clothes and let you feel like a grown-up. You still can't think about how you spent days playing terrible browser games with her without crying. You wonder how other people do it, how they talk about the people they’ve lost and they don’t fall apart. How they remember them and they smile.
Dad still talks about her almost every day, and he always uses present tense. Like she’s just living somewhere else. Like he has complete faith that one day she’ll show back up at the door like nothing at all happened. He does it more now that he’s sick.
It used to give you hope. Now, when you listen to him talk about her like that, you feel nauseous. How does he still think that’s what’s going to happen? How could he talk like that would be okay? Like she could just show back up one day and everything would go back to normal? Like everything she did could be forgiven, just like that?
(Here’s another secret: you’d forgive her. You’d forgive her the second you see her. You’d forgive her instantly, immediately. You’d forgive her for anything if she just came back.)
You don’t know if it’s better or worse than how it is with Mom. The day after they called off the search, she stopped saying your sister’s name. It felt like you became an only child the day Dad went to the hospital and never came back home. You don’t know how to talk to Mom about Dess. You never did.
Maybe that’s why she left. Maybe if you’d been a better sister, if you had been able to convince Mom to let up on her-
As the years go on, you don’t know what’s worse: the people who talk about her like they understand, or the people who act mortified when anyone so much as implies that you ever had a sister.
It hurts the most from Kris. They hardly talk to you now, like you were never even friends at all. You'd even take one of their dumb pranks, if they just started to look you in the eyes again. Maybe you weren’t really friends. You don't know. You try to be understanding. What happened, with their Dad and Azzy and everything was hard for them. They didn’t do anything wrong. You have to keep telling yourself that. They were Dess’ friend, despite everything. Dess cared about them, loved them like the annoying little sibling you both never had. They have a right to mourn her.
But a part of you wants to scream, I was her sister. When do I get to mourn her?
You've tried, a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, to imagine her coming home. You try to remember her smile, to remember the way she said Elly. To imagine her apologizing, explaining, to imagine your family together again. It never feels real. A part of you knows it never will be.
Here’s a secret: sometimes you wish she was dead. You’re not really sure if you can live with the alternative.