Chapter 47
Greta
I knock a second time. Hard.
Will opens and smiles. And he’s so devastatingly perfect that I want him to stay there grinning until I finally get bored of him. But I’m afraid I never will. He steps aside to let me in and closes the door.
“I’m starting to like this thing of you showing up here in the middle of the night.”
“Sorry.”
“Did you not hear me? No need to apologize.” His hands are warm on my cheeks as he bends over for a long, slow kiss.
My knees go weak. For a moment, I forget why I came here, lost in the softness of his lips and tongue, his warmth.
Then it comes back: My sister is gone, my parents are divorcing, and I don’t even know who I am…
“Will.” I place my hands on his chest.
“Yes?” he murmurs.
“I came because…” I’m feeling faint—because of his caresses and because of what I have to do. “I need to open the last box in the game.”
He pulls back and fixes me in his stare. “Are you sure?”
“Very sure. We’re taking off in just a few weeks, and I want to finish the Map of Longing first. I’m scared.
I’m scared that I’ll feel empty when it’s over, but isn’t that what life is supposed to be?
Facing those fears, the hardships, the emptiness?
Not necessarily getting past them but at least learning not to look away? ”
I don’t know what he’s thinking just now. And I can’t. He has that gift of absolute inexpressiveness when he doesn’t want to let me in. He nods, crouches, and brings out the game.
“If that’s what you want.”
He leaves it in my hands. The way he leaves everything in my hands.
And I know I should think about that, because the bad feeling returns just then, but I ignore it and open the last box. There’s a little scroll of paper with a number. Will hands me the corresponding letter. I sit down, take it out, draw a breath.
Little Greta:
This is the last letter I’ll write you. I’d like to think that, if you’re reading this, it means you finished the game and didn’t cheat and go directly to the end. But if you did, no worries. I get it. I know it’s hard—sometimes we struggle to handle our fears as well as our desires.
I’ve got so much to say to you that I don’t know where to start.
Maybe at the beginning? When you came into the world, it changed everything for me, Greta.
Not literally—I’m not talking about the cell transplant—I’m talking about you.
I can’t imagine my existence without you.
Mom always says that when we were little, you’d hold on to my pinkie finger when you slept, and when I had to go to the hospital, you’d cry and cry until you finally collapsed, exhausted, on the sofa.
It was easy to be your big sister, Greta.
Following you when you got up to some mischief, laughing at your jokes, watching you stumble and get back up.
How you grew! You did. You’ve grown a lot.
I think the end is coming soon, and I spend all my days imagining what your life will bring when I’m no longer there.
Who will you fall in love with? What kind of house will you live in?
What will you do for a living? What will your friends be like, the people you go out with for drinks?
Sometimes I go further and think about you as an old woman: I wonder whether you’ll still keep your hair short or whether you’ll change, whether you’ll have plants in your window or you’ll learn to bake banana muffins or if you’ll have a cat that will purr when you scratch it behind the ears…
It makes me sad to think of all the things I’m going to miss out on because, you know, you’re the closest thing to a soulmate I’ve ever had.
Think of all the steps we’ve taken together, hand in hand.
Parents and children inhabit two different dimensions, but you’re my sister—we were born as equals and should never be apart. But…
That “but” is the ugliest word there is, right? It always pops up to bring you back down to earth, and it destroys everything in its path. “I love you, but…” “We really liked your application, but…” “I’d love to, but…” Or in my case, “I don’t want to tell you goodbye, but I’m going to die.”
We’d all be happier if we got rid of that word, but we can’t.
See? There it is again. I’m going to ask the impossible of you, though.
I’m going to ask you to live as if it didn’t exist. Greta, don’t waste your life hitting the brakes and complaining about stupid things.
We all have our own chessboard, and that’s where our lives play out, and if you stand there trying to peek at other people’s games, you’ll look around and see all your pieces have been taken and it’s too late to start the game over.
Go ahead and plan your defense, but play.
Don’t hesitate because you can’t always know the right move in advance.
And it’s not about winning—it’s about trying.
Trust your intuitions, be empathetic with yourself.
Remember what I told you about pain? Let yourself be sad.
Let yourself cry. Let yourself fall, and give yourself time to regain your strength.
I’ve always thought you have to go through pain, not around it.
You have to respect pain, and give it the care and patience it needs.
You probably don’t need me to tell you I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about death.
Too much of it, maybe. There were times when it terrified me.
I used to dream I was in a coffin and I couldn’t get out and I’d scratch the wood until my nails tore off.
And sometimes apathy and indifference got the better of me, and I didn’t care if I died because I was tired of fighting.
Only recently did I decide to just flow like a river. And that brought me calm.
I’ve realized death is a constant and it’s always there.
The moments we experience and then leave behind us die, dreams die, the people we once were die, childhood dies, innocence dies, cities die as they change with the passage of time.
Even hate dies. Everything does. But there’s beauty in it. And that beauty’s eternal.
And you, who’ve spent years looking for beauty, should see it that way.
I wish you would. I wish you’d get through the pain and find the beauty in this goodbye, because if I’m here writing you, it means that I lived, that we were lucky enough to be sisters, and who knows, maybe one day we’ll meet again.
And if we do, Greta, I hope you’ve got lots of things to tell me.
Wonderful things. Things we can laugh about together.
I love you,
Lucy
I look up when the tears make the letters blur.
Only then do I realize I’m crying. Or not crying.
Sobbing. A moan rips through my throat and I feel like I’m choking.
I’m in the middle of the ocean under the waves and I can’t breathe.
Will wraps his arms around me, pulls me into his chest, kisses my tears, but it only makes me cry harder.
I know he’s telling me something, whispering in my ear, trying to console me, but I hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing but that stifling pain that squeezes the air out of me as I think to myself: It’s all over—Lucy really is gone now, not just her body but those pieces of her soul she left behind for me in these letters.
I have nothing left of my sister and I miss her the way I’d miss a severed limb.
I let myself go, and cry and cry some more.
It’s not easy, feeling pain again, entering that spider’s lair in the middle of the dense woods.
Pain has a charm to it, because you can just let yourself go, and everything else seems trivial; you feel light, almost weightless as you stop struggling and let it embrace you.
It’s easy just to stay there, caught in its web, swaying softly, but if you do decide to stay there, you run the risk of missing the wild beauty of the rest of the forest. Pass through the pain.
Pass through it. I hear her voice in my head.
And I understand that this is what I have been doing all these months.
I was trapped in the spiderweb, stuck, surrounded by people who weren’t on my level, and then I freed myself, my feet touched the ground, and I walked slowly among the ferns and roots and flowers.
I’m still there. I haven’t made it out of the woods. But the leaves are less thick now, and I can see blue patches of sky. And sometimes, a ray of sunlight hits me.
“Greta…” His voice is an invisible caress. “What can I do?”
“Nothing. No one can walk for me.”
“What do you mean?”
I shake my head, my face still pressed into his chest. I smell him.
I smell him, and when I do, I smell waterfalls and cold and violets.
I hear his heart pound—pum, pum, pum—against my right ear.
Will is alive. I am alive too. And that ordinary fact feels like a miracle.
We breathe. At the same time. His body and mine are perfectly attuned, like two parts of the same machine, each with its own function.
We can hear and see and savor and touch each other with our every cell. We can love each other.
“Will…”
“Yeah.”
“I miss her so much.”
“I know.” He kisses my nose, wipes away my tears.
“Thanks for being with me through the game. You made it even better than my sister could have imagined.”
“Greta.” He strokes my cheek.
Five words are trapped in my throat. I think I love you.
But I don’t think it. I know it. Will has become the friend I needed so badly, my lover, my confidant, the person who can make me laugh as we take off our clothes, the one who doesn’t mind talking for hours about things the rest of humanity doesn’t even care about.
I love his heart. It’s not perfect—whose is?
—and there are parts of it that have lingered too long in the shadows, but it’s also a heart that knows how to atone.
I don’t say this, though. I swallow my words. “Do you think sorrow can last forever?”
He pushes the hair out of my face. “It depends on what kind of sorrow it is.”
My vision’s blurred as he grabs the game and takes out the remaining letters, which I saw the first time he showed me the Map of Longing. One is red, another purple, and two are pale blue.
“They’re for your parents and your grandfather,” he says, turning over the purple one and breathing deep. “And this one’s for me.”
For a few seconds, we stay silent.
“Are you going to open it?”
“Later, I think.”
I nod. It’s strange how we’ve been brought together by a game that seemed ridiculous to me just a few months ago.
And now it’s reached its end. I look around the interior of the RV.
There’s a book by the bed, a new one—Will burns through them quickly—and a pile of folded clothes, and next to it, a gift.
The same gift that was in the back seat of his car when we went to the fair.
It’s been there this whole time, and for some reason, I didn’t notice it, I guess because I was so focused on what I’d come there to do that everything else was invisible.
“Will?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s that present over there?”
He turns back and looks. “Oh, that. It was supposed to be for your birthday, but then the night took a different turn, and I never found the right moment to give it to you. Or maybe I wasn’t sure how.” He seems nervous. “Like, what if you don’t like it?”
But I love presents. I love them crazily, the way a little kid does.
There’s hardly anything that excites me as much as knowing what another person thinks you might like, what reminded them of you out of all the things they’ve come across in the world, and how you get to untie the bow, tear the wrapping paper…
That’s exactly what I need tonight. A distraction.
“Can I open it?”
“Of course.” Will picks it up and hands it to me.
I run my finger over the edge of the bow and wait for a few seconds before pulling one of the loose ends. I don’t even need to look up to know Will is waiting there with bated breath, probably rubbing his chin. I tear off the top of the cardboard box. And there they are.
Purple skates. The nicest ones I’ve ever seen.
I feel myself sucked back into the emotional eddy I was trying to escape minutes before. Once again, my eyes fill with tears.
“Shit, Greta. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”
“No.”
“It was a mistake. I just thought… I guess it struck me that…”
He hugs me and tries to console me. For a few seconds, I try to imagine what he’s feeling. Then I pull back, rest my head against his, and stroke his cheeks. “They’re perfect, Will.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s just that my feelings are so close to the surface right now and I can’t stop crying. Skates… What gift could be better?”
“I’m so happy to hear you say that. I found a skating rink in Lincoln and I was kind of thinking we could go there one day…”
He talks softly as he continues to wipe the tears off my face.
I tell him I’m fine, but a wrinkle across his forehead reveals his worry.
All I want now is for it to disappear. And for him to kiss me.
To kiss me and for the rest of the world to fall silent like the flipping off of a light.
How funny I should think that, think of lights going off when a million candles are twinkling in my head and all I want is for Will to blow them out one by one so I can remain with him calmly in the dark.