Four Geny
My whole body trembles and my mind fights with itself about what is real.
Don and everyone in the pews seem to be having an equally hard time gathering themselves.
The pastor stands behind the podium at a loss for words, and I resist every urge to pull my sister outside and find out how this is happening.
Don starts speaking again, but I want him to stop. I need this to be over. It’s too much. Losing my father and gaining my dead sister. My brain is short circuiting trying to make sense of it and I just need real answers and not the ones my head is conjuring up.
I have no idea what else Pastor Don says about my father, who he was, or what he would have wanted.
I can only count the seconds that pass with my sister’s hand in mine.
Warm and alive. When the speech is finally finished, the service ends, and I pull my sister out the front doors of the church, barely able to contain my hysteria and leaving my family behind.
How is this happening? Is this real? It has to be real.
By the look on everyone else’s faces, it’s definitely real.
Her fingers interlaced with mine are real.
Outside, I spin to face her. I can barely see her through my tears and the late afternoon sun, brighter in the fall than in the dead of summer. I wipe at my eyes. I try to breathe, but I think I’ve forgotten how.
I get my first good look at her, and it’s incredible. Of course, I could have guessed how she would look because we share a face. But I never thought to imagine it. To me, her face has been frozen at nineteen years old.
I reach my hand out without having the thought to do so.
The tips of my fingers touch her cheek, and I can’t help but suck in a breath when my fingers meet her skin.
My hand falls to my side like I’m a child having sneaked a touch of a priceless glass artifact at the antique stores our mother used to take us to.
“How are you here? I don’t—” I choke out. “I don’t understand.” I can hardly whisper the words through my constricting throat.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she says. Her eyes shine, and we collide into each other, arms pulling each other in tighter.
She smells like the sea salt spray we’d spray in our hair during the summers of our youth, and I think maybe she is a ghost.
Shock still has me in a chokehold, and I don’t know what to do or what to say or what happens next.
And then icy-cold dread spiders through my limbs.
She’s going to find out I married Wyatt.
That we have children together. The guilt was almost too much to live with back when it first happened.
The looks and comments from the people in town made it hard to go out in public.
But eventually, the scandal of it all faded into normalcy. It always does.
I’ve never had to face my sister though. If I had, everything would have been different. A mix of emotions pinches in the center of my chest. I won’t go there. Not right now.
I’m first to pull away from our embrace and I instantly regret it. I reach forward and grab her hand because I need to restore the touch. Then I realize she never answered my question earlier, so I ask again, my voice only slightly steadier than before.
Her chest inflates with a big breath, and she lets it go with a sigh. “Can we talk about this in private? I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Just . . . somewhere else.”
She glances around, and it’s the first time I notice them. The crowd of people standing around us, staring, chattering, some even crying.
Our breaking eye contact has burst the protective bubble around us. People take it as permission to flood toward us. Old neighbors reach out and touch Grace’s arms, back, hair.
“Is it really her?”
“Jesus, it’s a miracle.”
“How is this possible?”
“Who did they bury?”
The last question makes my heart stop. It’s a question that hadn’t yet surfaced in the shock of it all.
Who did we bury? Because we buried a body.
At least I think we did. The casket was closed.
Frank Gibbs identified her body, so we didn’t have to see her like that.
He was, is, the sheriff. Not to mention my dad’s best friend and Wyatt’s dad.
He did us a favor we were all too happy to accept.
None of us wanted to see Grace without a pulse or that fiery light in her eyes. We couldn’t bear it.
The chaos is interrupted when the church doors swing open and the end of our father’s mahogany casket protrudes into the light, six people holding it up. Wyatt. Jack, our oldest son. Frank. Pastor Don. Murphy, Wyatt’s best friend. And Todd, Raven’s mayor and another close friend of my father’s.
They carry him into the back of the black hearse parked at the curb. I jump at the sound of the doors slamming shut.
“We’ll talk later, okay?” Grace says. “Let’s get through this together.”
Together.