Upon Impact

I remember that summer before junior year, how Catherine and I lay side by side on a grassy knoll in downtown Charlottesville, watching the Fourth of July fireworks, whispering between booms. Children of rural suburbs, we felt stranded, too far from downtown to get mixed up in the college-kid mayhem and not deep enough in the foothills to lose ourselves in the actual wilderness. We were good girls, by choice and by circumstance, though we weren’t always happy about it, certain some- thing was happening just beyond our reach. At fifteen we yearned to be grown—to date, travel, make art, sell it. What we had were our learner’s permits, but soon, if we passed our tests, we’d have our licenses. Like unsparked pyrotechnics, potential pooled inside us. We wanted free- dom the only way we understood it. We wanted to drive.

My parents sat nearby on a blanket. They’d driven us there and would later take us home. But for now they left us, blissfully, alone.

Above us a firecracker splashed. “A beauty,” said Catherine. “Like a chandelier.”

“They’re all beauties,” I said.

“Not true,” Catherine replied, ever ready to share an opinion or obscure fact. “Some don’t go off. The chemicals aren’t right. The techni- cians blow them up on the ground so they don’t explode later.”

Catherine, the youngest of our friends, squeaked into our grade days before the age cutoff, and perhaps because of this, she strove more than the rest of us to think harder, feel deeper. A born intellectual, years ahead in math, she had a brain that operated like a chess guru’s. Her focus branched several moves ahead as she considered reactions to hypothetical scenarios. As a result she was chronically over- and underprepared, at times so caught up in what could be that she failed to notice, or care for, what was. Driving tempted all of us, but to her it carried a heightened, almost spiritual, import.

“Next year,” Catherine said, “we’ll drive ourselves here. In two years we’ll be off to college.”

“Sure,” I said glumly. I too longed for freedom, but I also dreaded it. Growing up meant changing. Moving away. Losing what everyone warned us we’d lose: each other. “These are the best friendships of your lives. The best years,” adults said cheerfully, ominously. Soon, I’d been warned, I’d trade the frank intimacy of teen friendships for classwork and jobs. Romance would evolve into marriage and children. It all sounded so dreary.

Ash smoldered on the grass nearby. “I wish time could stop,” I an- nounced. “This is perfect. Right now.”

In truth, I lost Catherine long before she died, our parting another cost of growing up. No two personalities survive the machinery of adoles- cence in quite the same way, and we were no exception. We merged and then divided. Kept secrets. Fought. In high school we didn’t know that some rifts don’t heal, that geographical separation would enable our wounds to grow septic, hot with narratives of accused and accuser, guilty and indignant, the righteous one and the wronged.

What I know is that I loved her. When Catherine talked, she con- sidered her words. She analyzed and second-guessed and reconsidered. She listened. She judged. Conversation with her was different from conversation with anyone else I knew. She offered insights and praise. She disagreed freely and parsed out what she didn’t understand. Her insights wowed me. And she, I like to think, found refuge in my own careful thinking. We didn’t just grow up together; we formed each other, tried on parts of each other’s personalities, interpreted our world as one. “Joined in mutual admiration,” Toni Morrison writes of the girl- hood friendship in her novel Sula, “they watched each day as though it were a movie arranged for their amusement.”

The morning after the fireworks, my mother suggested we extend the festivities and check out a swimming hole she’d read about in our local newspaper. My twin sister worked as a lifeguard, and my brother had no interest in palling around with teenage girls, but I was game and so was Catherine. We packed sandwiches, peaches, and chips into a wicker basket and piled into my family’s teal Subaru Outback. My father took the wheel.

Despite the Virginia humidity, the hike out to the swimming hole was easy: a steady downhill on a piney path. At the trail’s end a creek snaked through slick limestone, and the water was clear and cold. A brace of cobblestones on the downriver side dammed the outflow, creating an oblong pool. After a few rounds of dunking Catherine and I basked on warm rocks, slathering mud on our legs and joking about exfoliation, whatever that was. Later, sun-drunk and groggy, we trudged uphill and collapsed into the warm car. My dad drove, and in the backseat we made lazy conversation until our words slowed and our eyelids grew heavy.

In my dream I was tilting, underwater at first and then over a ledge, jabbed into slate edges and the poky tips of sunken branches. The Subaru rocked upside down, and my head and limbs boomeranged between the cushioned seatback and the cold glass of the side win- dow. Below me the felt ceiling jerked and was somehow also the floor. Somebody screamed. “This is fun,” I remember thinking. “Like how a roller coaster is fun.”

By the time the car flipped back around, righting itself after a verti- cal spin, I was mostly awake and seriously confused. A lonesome bag- pipe wailed from inside the engine, and instead of sitting on asphalt, we were somehow in a meadow. I knew this to be true because a fence post had blasted through the front windshield and lodged itself against my father’s thigh. A country girl, I assumed a fence meant cows, and I worried for the bovines. Had the animals escaped? When I scanned the field for them, I discovered all the car windows had cracked.

My mother’s voice broke through sticky air. “Everybody out.”

“Why?” I asked. Beneath my T-shirt, my damp bathing suit clung to my skin.

“In case the car explodes.”

I stepped barefoot onto a stranger’s lawn. Some driver had ripped up the grass, scraping deep ruts into the Virginia red clay. A drainage ditch separated us from the road, and a half-dozen vehicles had pulled onto the opposite shoulder to gawk.

My mother and father lay flat on the ground. Catherine sat with her chin hunched over her knees. Nothing inside me hurt, but I wasn’t okay. None of us were. From nowhere a woman materialized. She told us she was a nurse and had been driving by. She had questions about our bodies. Over the blare of our car horn I registered the sound of a siren, but only when the ambulance parked did I understand it had come for us.

It’s easy, as an adult, to laugh off the intensity of adolescent feelings, to claim that what teenagers call love is merely a surge of hormones, as if those same chemicals weren’t a biological feature of adult love too. In high school I believed my friendships to be clear-eyed and pure, free from the blindfolds of lust and attraction, ideal examples of true love. What I felt for my crew wasn’t sexual, but it was absolutely romantic. My pals and I traipsed about on midnight walks, fished in frozen ponds, climbed onto roofs to watch the stars or dance under moonlit skies. We baked cookies, mostly abstained from drinking, escorted each other to dances and later boycotted them, dared each other to phone boys, sneaked into private pools to skinny-dip, hiked, ran, wallowed, and cried together. Traditional romance was an exciting prospect, some- thing we discussed and occasionally pursued, but largely it was a drama we narrated for each other, an unfolding tale of desire and dismissal, a theater in which we were both actors and audience.

Crushes, for me, were flitting things that swooped here and away, but Catherine took desire seriously. Her crush was a gawky blond music lover, a math whiz like Catherine, skilled in both procrastination and good conversation. He was nice enough, but the reason for her attrac- tion to him eluded me. Perhaps she longed to replay her parents’ love story: they started dating in high school, got married a few years later, before college, graduate studies in psychology and computer science, the births of three children.

Or perhaps hers was a love born from the shock of their separation and later divorce, an imagined escape from love’s disappointments, an obsession. What she felt for her Romeo was consuming; her feelings devoured her. She could talk about him for hours. She daydreamed non- stop. “I love him,” she’d tell me with the gravity of a medical diagnosis.

Politely, repeatedly, he declined her advances.

Her suffering was both academic and existential. “How could he have said this but felt nothing?” she asked me. “If his feelings are dis- honest, then what else is he concealing?” She could hypothesize and ob- serve and consider ad nauseum, though none of it brought her relief. I took refuge in his rejections. If they got together, where would that leave me? Her infatuation was so deep, I sometimes felt he’d already won.

When I had it, Catherine’s attention was intoxicating. As an identical twin I often felt misunderstood. My sister and I were hypervisible, a spectacle, but our outward sameness cost us. Only a few close friends knew us or cared to know us individually. Catherine was one of them. Around her I was always myself, distinct from my sister, and to my delight Catherine found it absurd, even offensive, that anyone ever confused us. Being chosen by her meant being seen, though it often hurt my sister’s feelings when she wasn’t included.

One summer Catherine invited just me to join her for a weeklong trip to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, to visit her favorite aunt and uncle. On its surface, the trip was glorious. Ellen and Jim were artists and treated us like artists too. We slept on a futon in their office and spent mornings bent over their enormous collection of art books. Afternoons, we’d traipse around museums or string beads into complicated patterns: part basket, part necklace. We tried on plaid gowns and gold pantsuits in the changing rooms of used clothing stores, voguing in scratched infinity mirrors. To see Austin Powers, we glammed up in psychedelic rompers foraged from Catherine’s aunt’s closet.

Yet much of that trip Catherine ignored me, vanishing behind closed doors to whisper with her aunt, reemerging from those sessions red- faced and sulking. More than once she lashed out at me, saying I wasn’t smart or trustworthy, that I had no intuition, that I was oblivious to other people, what they stood for, who they were in their core. Her aunt apologized to me for Catherine’s behavior, which she called bratty. I lied and told her I was okay. In truth, I felt Catherine’s cruelty with the acuteness of a physical injury.

It wasn’t just me. Our senior year, more than anyone else, Catherine attacked herself. When she did okay, but not exceptionally, on her SATs, her disappointment cast its long shadow over the subsequent months. Her hyperfocus on school was disorienting. Instead of growing restless with senioritis, Catherine was increasingly a perfectionist, evaluat- ing herself by her deficiencies, ignoring her achievements. When she wasn’t happy with her schoolwork, she stayed home, losing herself in some art project, later buried beneath the burden of deadlines and extended deadlines and, eventually, ultimatums. That she was on the student council, attended the governor’s summer school for the arts, played French horn, and attracted the admiration of her peers didn’t fulfill her. All she was able to see was her perceived inadequacies. Along with her other friends, I tried to comfort her, to describe the light that she basked in, to share with her the steadfastness of my affection. It worked, sometimes. Mostly, though, her behavior remained mysterious, inexplicable. What I felt most keenly was loss.

It wasn’t until spring that I learned secondhand that her parents had separated. During the summer and subsequent school year, she guarded that secret ferociously but couldn’t conceal her anger. I was relieved there was a cause for her agony but confused by its magnitude and her inability to work through it. We were kids; almost no one I knew had a working vocabulary about mental health. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Our school counselors were jokes. There was no place to turn, and her pain seemed unfixable.

In the ambulance the driver told us that seatbelts saved our lives. In fact, he said, he’d never seen a car so crumpled without fatalities. We were lucky. Catherine and I had whiplash and bruises. Several disks in my mother’s spine were compressed. My father, the driver, suffered damage to his thigh from the fence post. The skin didn’t break, but his tissues did, and they bled, forming a black bruise that spread from knee to hip. Worse, though, was his guilt. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, and remorse kept him up at night, distracting and haunting him. What had happened, what he’d done, wasn’t intentional—he was subsequently diagnosed with sleep apnea—yet it was also his fault.

Several times in the weeks after, I returned from my summer gym class to find my parents home early from work, holding hands silently. Their solemnity embarrassed me. In the safety of the living room they recounted the accident, imagining worse possibilities, considering the unthinkable. “If anything had happened to your daughter,” I once overheard my dad say on the phone. I left the room before he finished the sentence.

Against my will, my daydreams turned dark. Road lust became dread. I didn’t want a license. Why would I? Cars weren’t made for transport. They were mobile weapons. Rattling deathtraps. I had no desire to steer such a machine. All it took was a careless twist of a wrist, a hand grown heavy on the wheel, and the tires could slip and the metal frame crumple.

On her sixteenth birthday Catherine got a car, a boxy baby-blue Volvo hatchback with a single red pinstripe down each side, a gift from her father, whom, unbeknownst to me, she no longer lived with. My sister and I were forever begging her for rides. We lived in the burbs; roads separated us from everywhere we wanted to be.

When Catherine drove, I white-knuckled the door handle and prayed that we would stay on the road. My nervous squeaks gave me away.

“Is my driving that bad?” she once asked.

“You’re fine,” I said. “Watch that curve.”

The way I understood it, when the inevitable happened, the car wouldn’t flip just once. It would roll interminably, locking Catherine and me forever in spin cycle.

Later another friend informed me that Catherine’s anger and viciousness toward me had little to do with her parents’ marriage. The procrastinat- ing math genius whom Catherine loved so desperately turned her down because he liked someone else, and that someone, I was told, was me.

“Not possible!” I said and meant it. The idea was preposterous. I was no match for Catherine. Besides, what was I supposed to do about it? I never asked for his affection. This new information didn’t clarify her resentment so much as amplify my own. How dare she let our friend- ship sour over something so trivial. Instead of sympathy, I found rage. When her crush asked me on a date a few weeks later, I said yes. My opinion of him hadn’t changed, but my feelings for Catherine had. I hoped to hurt her as she’d hurt me.

Though it was only one date, it worked. Catherine was livid, refus- ing to even sign my yearbook. We reconciled halfheartedly that sum- mer, but our friendship went limp. When at last, in late August, we set out for our separate colleges, I was relieved. We still called—she shared news about her shifting friends and boyfriends, the organic farm where she volunteered, the Middle Eastern music group she’d joined, and her major in peace and conflict studies—but our connection grew increasingly thin until we fell out of contact entirely.

Perched atop a bookshelf, Raggedy Ann and Andy survey my daughter’s room. Ann wears a polka-dot smock over a red-and-white dress. Andy sports jean shorts and a white button-up. Their legs are striped. Their noses are triangles. Their eyelashes zigzag below cross-stitched eyes. Catherine’s mother, Lynn, sewed them in the early ’70s, not long after she and Paul married, and mailed them to me almost fifty years later, months after her daughter’s death and mere weeks after my own daugh- ter’s birth.

Lynn wrote that when she crafted the dolls, she modeled them after her and Paul, using leftover scraps from a handsewn shirt and frock. I try to conjure Catherine’s parents as honeymooners, holding up matching dolls, laughing at the absurdity of it. I like thinking of them this way: standing before a mirror, years before they became parents, decades before they divorced. In the squint of my imagination, they are linked elbows and smiles, making eye contact through the glass.

I feel honored to have received the dolls, heirlooms from a family that hosted me for countless chili dinners and Sunday pancake break- fasts, for sleepovers that sometimes lasted several nights. As Keira sleeps in my arms, the fuzz of her scant hair tickles my neck, and I kiss the top of her head. These dolls were never intended for her. Lynn saved them for Catherine, for the children she would never have.

After she’d moved to Germany and I’d moved to Mississippi and later New Orleans, Catherine and I Skyped or e-mailed across the Atlantic, catching each other up, but our correspondence had the taint of obliga- tion. As an adult Catherine had more intense moods, and her ability to communicate her feelings declined. With rare exceptions, our conver- sations felt mismatched, even forced. Catherine, who’d always been so careful with her speech, spoke with such hesitancy and uncertainty that I found myself losing patience, wondering how she could maneuver through her days at such a crawl. In contrast, I felt like a bulldozer, my opinions, so quick and easy, pushing up against her delicate, carefully formed thoughts.

Still, our efforts were earnest, and occasionally we broke through the muck of our history and connected. “My father and [his second wife] are here visiting me in Germany right now and I have a little bit of vacation time,” Catherine wrote sixteen months before she died. “I thought you might be interested to know that I took my father up on an offer from a few years ago to go see a therapist together in hopes of trying to come to terms with our past (the divorce, his absence during my teenage years, my inability to connect with him because of my loyalty to my mother).”

“You kept it all so close in high school,” I wrote back. “I think it’s courageous to shine more light on those years. Hugs. For real, I wish you the best in what I know is a difficult process.”

“I feel fifteen again,” she reflected, “with all the pain and confusion of that time in my life. But at the same time, I feel hopeful. I can feel the present and the past and the future inside of me as translucent layers.”

When we heard the news, those of us who’d known her well, the ones who’d once counted on her sisterhood to pull us through high school, felt flattened, unmade. She’d been living in Germany for more than a decade then, and most of us hadn’t seen her in years. We didn’t know Catherine the woman the way we’d known Catherine the girl, and, for me, this created a kind of illusion. In the weeks after her death, nineteen years to the day after we survived our first car crash, time seemed to accordion. My teen love flared once more, and in the glow of nostalgia her adult self—the hesitant woman I struggled to connect with—faded. It was almost as if I’d just emerged from the pool or come home from a dance or woken up groggy after a sleepover, to learn that she’d done the unspeakable.

Or perhaps the unspeakable had been done to her. I couldn’t keep it straight. A woman killed her. Or an illness killed her. Or the impact killed her. Her death hit like a high-speed train, but it was Catherine, not me, who cycled to the tracks and jumped. None of it seemed pos- sible. She was both victim and perpetrator.

While I grieved, my body assembled another body, following a blueprint legible neither to me nor my unborn daughter. I felt the pressure of a knee against my rib, an elbow pooching out the skin of my belly. I was not yet a mother, but I wasn’t an unmother either.

During my pregnancy I kept thinking about the circumstances of Catherine’s death—a psychotic break followed by a depression, treat- ment at a German mental-health clinic, a bicycle trip, a train. What did it mean that she’d almost killed herself several times before? Why did she go through with it this time? What, if anything, had changed?

Her father told me her depression was hereditary, that Catherine’s blueprint contained her undoing.

Her grandmother had done it.

Her great-uncle.

“Suicide,” he said, “runs in our family.”

Yet genetics aren’t math. There were circumstances. Interventions. Journals. Exercise. Visits. Medication. “Suicide,” writes Sarah Manguso in her essay “Perfection,” “is self-murder only incidentally; mainly, it’s the murder of your tormentor. That you need to break through your body to get to the tormentor is beside the point.”

But for those left behind, the distinction between body and tormen- tor is moot. A human is gone, and we’re left to solve a rotten riddle, a snarl that can be picked at but will never untangle.

A displaced organ? A wind that won’t blow? A wave forever breaking? Grief eludes comparison. In his poem “Michiko Dead,” Jack Gilbert describes grief for his deceased wife as a heavy burden carried alone. A man, presumably Gilbert, “manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath.” When his arms start to fail, he adjusts the load so that the weight rests against his chest, and later on his shoulder, until he once again carries the box from underneath. He adjusts his grip and then adjusts it again. He does not, or perhaps cannot, put the box down.

Toni Morrison, too, depicts grief as a physical object. In Sula, a woman’s grief at finding her husband in bed with her best friend takes the shape of “a ball of muddy strings, but without weight, fluffy but terrible in its malevolence,” hovering “just to the right of her, in the air, just out of view.” Unable to look at the ball directly, Nel “closed her eyes and crept past it out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.” Not until her best friend’s death, decades later, does the gray fur ball break apart, “scatter[ing] like dandelion spores in the breeze,” reveal- ing the true nature of Nel’s loss. “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing [my husband],” Nel says. “We was girls together . . . girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”

For a time, pregnancy kept me on the surface of my sorrow. There was the discomfort of my stretching skin, the nausea and napping, the frantic preparations. Physical demands superseded my emotional processing. In the bath, the one place where I could forget about my body, I lit candles for Catherine. Please, I’d whisper, not knowing whom I was addressing or what I meant entirely. In my belly the baby would waken, and I’d lean back into the soothing heat, marveling at her kicks, until the horror rushed back in.

“Life with an infant is a blur,” Catherine’s mother wrote in another letter. “Keira’s demands are so immediate it is hard to find the time for contemplation. Sit still for a minute and you are more likely to fall asleep than to think about the person she is becoming.”

With my daughter in my arms I could begin to fathom Lynn’s sor- row, though I wished I couldn’t. Keira couldn’t yet lift her head. Her whole body flushed pink from the effort of crying. She nursed with fierce desperation, as though she might never drink again. She was tiny, thumb-size feet and thimble-size hands, but if she left, the vacuum from her absence would be immense. We risk the vastness of grief, love’s underside, again and again, every time we let love in.

“I know that you will receive many gifts for your little girl,” Lynn wrote. “You will receive clothes that she wears once, or maybe not at all. As I was going through Catherine’s baby things, I found this dress. . . . I have missed the opportunity to send it on to my grandchildren, but maybe Keira, a child of the South, will fit into it in a few months.”

A sundress lay folded beneath the letter. Pink smocking embellished the neckline, and thin straps buttoned in the back. It was hard to imag- ine Catherine, whom I’d met when she was eight, was ever that small. On the other hand, next to my newborn, whose legs still curled from her position in the womb, the garment looked gargantuan, like a tent or a parachute.

The afternoon before the memorial service, Lynn invited Catherine’s closest high-school friends to gather at her house. Because Catherine had lived out of the country so long, her more recent friends were over- seas, and so, in a way that felt both odd and fitting, her high-school crew became Catherine’s chief mourners other than her family. Estranged by geography and time, we’d flown and driven from all over—Florida, Pittsburgh, New Orleans. Most of us hadn’t seen each other in a decade or more.

Lynn laid Catherine’s photos and artwork on her bed and invited us to take what we liked. “I already picked out what I want,” she reassured us. “There’s just so much.” But we hesitated.

“I want you to have these,” Lynn said.

Catherine took the best photos. She documented our adolescence ferociously. There must’ve been a thousand pictures or more, some orga- nized into books, others still in paper envelopes from the store. We saw ourselves lined up before prom, holding foam pool noodles, wearing towels like capes over neon bathing suits, posing beside hand-decorated cakes, lying across the steps of museums. In my favorite, eight pajama- clad girls march in a line, balancing pumpkins on their heads. Music must’ve been playing, for we’re all midstep and jaunty, and Catherine’s in the lead.

My sister and I stayed the longest, listening as Lynn explained how she’d come to understand Catherine’s state of mind. During the final months of her life, Catherine had heard voices, a distinguishing symp- tom of psychotic depression. Unlike the auditory hallucinations that accompany schizophrenia, which express a range of emotions and opin- ions, depressive voices tend to amplify depressive thought. Lynn told us Catherine was deluded about her worth. Though family members and friends who knew her condition had offered her rooms in their houses, havens in which to recover, she felt she didn’t belong anywhere— not Germany, not the United States. She felt her existence, like the existence of all humans, taxed our severely damaged planet, and unlike many environmentalists who repress at least some of their planetary angst in order to function, Catherine could not escape the dread and despair of climate change. She felt it acutely and without respite, pro- jecting her inward turmoil onto society at large and wringing herself out over problems beyond her control. “She was hard on others,” Lynn told me. “But hardest on herself. She wanted everyone to wake up to the need for change, and act. Boom, done. She saw it as a need, an emergency, impending doom.”

Catherine’s voices, I imagine, were persuasive because she was persuasive. Her logic was flawed but likely relentless: eliminating herself was the solution she found to a myriad of problems. It was an ending to a story that lacked clear form. For months voices told her to kill herself. One day, she did.

“If you want to understand Catherine’s death,” Lynn said at the memorial service, “you need to understand her life and her illness. Catherine did not choose to die. Catherine chose to live. Every day. Until she couldn’t. When I read her journals, I can see how hard she worked to make a choice that most of us take for granted, a choice that was harder for her than any of us can imagine.”

The hospital where I delivered Keira played the opening phrase of Brahms’s “Lullaby” over the loudspeakers every time a child was born. Otherwise occupied, I missed hearing the song after Keira’s birth, but in the days following, whenever the melody descended, my husband, mother, and I paused our conversation to glance up. The speaker was overhead, but it also seemed somehow like babies came from above. Though we’d all been there for Keira’s birth—she definitely came from in- side me—my daughter remained ethereal. Tiny and perfect, she seemed like condensation from some celestial mist. I feared she’d evaporate.

“There goes another one,” my husband said whenever the melody played.

“Keira’s future classmate,” I joked.

“Her best friend.”

“Or first love.”

“Do they play it twice when twins are born?” asked my mother.

The melody was familiar. As a child, I’d twisted the metal handle of my mother’s old music box to hear the lullaby, but I didn’t know there were lyrics until after Keira was born.

Lullaby and good night, 
In the sky stars are bright. 
’Round your head, 
Flowers gay,
Set your slumbers till day.

In most English versions, the chorus ends with this couplet: “Lay thee down now and rest. / May thy slumber be blessed,” but the literal trans- lation from German is darker, a reminder of the mortal bargain all life makes at birth: “Tomorrow morning, if God wills, / you will wake once again.”

As she lay cradled in my arms, my daughter’s lips fluttered with each breath. Her hands shook. When I rested a palm on her chest, I could feel the swish of blood and pumping muscle. At 130 beats per minute, her heart hammered almost twice as fast my own—If. If. If. If.—her existence, like all existence, hinging on if.

Motherlove hit me with gale force. It consumed and remade me. It knocked me flat. Life had new smells, new rhythms, and what I’d once thought of as my own—my time, my thoughts, my solitude—became ours, hers. Even when she wasn’t there, Keira was present. Phantom cries woke me at night and pulled me from the shower. Soaking and soapy, I’d run to her rescue and discover she was as I’d left her, asleep.

I had been seventeen on the crisp, clear fall day when a DMV officer came to my school to administer my in-car driving test. I had at last begun to relax about driving, no longer interpreting each microbump as catastrophic. Perhaps, I conceded, death didn’t hover around each bend. Perhaps mobility was a blessing worthy of risk. The DMV offi- cer told me I spent too long at stop signs, checked too many times for oncoming traffic. My hesitation, he predicted, would confuse other drivers. Still, I passed.

Then, like periods and babysitting and mowing the lawn, driving became routine, and for a spell my friendship with Catherine regained its old luster. That Halloween we dressed as seasons—I was summer, she was fall—and for Valentine’s Day we put her boom box in an old red wagon and traipsed around our high school, performing a song and dance that we had choreographed barefoot in her living room.

Memories warp. Catherine’s death, the how and why of it, looms too large, casting oversize shadows, dulling what once was bright. But if I try hard enough, I can force myself back to that sweet unknowing, to those days when the future beckoned and freedom was a steering wheel. But even that sweetness is false. We were always negotiating, competing, loving each other through feelings too big and complicated to comprehend. As if through a half-opened door, I can see us at our best: beneath the classroom’s white lights, a guitar intro revs, and we breathe in and focus, waiting for our cue, for the moment when we’ll step into song, when we’ll shimmy until our blue skirts sparkle.

Read more from Issue 18.1.