the Dead the Dying

Mrs. Watson caught Lorraine’s eye meaningfully. “Niko,” she explained shortly.

“Mark’s son.”

“Oh,” Lorraine said. She sentimentally placed a hand over her heart. “The poor angel.”

The women watched Niko weep from across the cemetery, a two-person audience at a one-man opera. Then another player entered the stage: a girl with short, straight hair one shade darker than her black dress. She looked at once fresh out of high school and like a 40-year-old mother of five, her youthful face warring with the pinched, aged expression on it. Each of her steps thundered with intention as she made her way toward Niko.

“That’s Hani, Mark’s other kid,” Mrs. Watson explained. “She’s Niko’s little sister.”

“Oh,” said Lorraine. Then they watched as Hani finally reached Niko, and in one swift motion, grabbed him by the sleeve, wrenched his arm painfully, and promptly threw him face down into the grass.

“Oh,” said Lorraine.

WRITING BY

DANG DESIGN BY ISABELLE LIM

Megan

When the shouting started, Mrs. Watson asked Lorraine if she would like to head inside and try some of the hor d’oeuvres. Lorraine said that yes, she would like that very much.

“You’re the worst,” Hani told Niko first, because she thought that after three years of silence, that was the most important thing for him to be aware of. The delivery wasn’t half as cutting as she wanted it to be. She said it again, just for good measure: “You’re the worst.”

“Hani,” he croaked out, and when he looked up at her, his gaze was so stricken by genuine grief that anger whited out her vision for a moment. He lifted his arms up toward her. Hani responded by shoving him again; he toppled ungracefully onto his knees in the grass.

“What are you doing?” she hissed at him.

“I thought I—I don’t know. I thought I should hug you, I guess.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I guess because you’re my little sister?”

“Next time you try that I’m kicking that stupid Invisalign out of your mouth.”

“Noted.” Niko sat up, brushing his slacks off. He frowned at the smudgy green on his knees.

“Man. I got grass stains on my suit.”

“Christ, no, not grass stains.”

“It’s dry-clean only.”

“How sad for you. Dad’s dead, but Niko’s got grass stains on his dry-clean only suit!” Her voice was rising to a shout, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

Niko did—of course he did. He glanced at a pair of well-dressed white ladies who began to make their way inside the funeral home. “You’re scaring off the other mourners, Hani.”

In the politest of terms, Hani could not give one single shit about the other mourners. Mrs. Watson had resented Dad for as long as Hani could remember. Mrs. Watson hated that his pear tree grew into her yard, and their old dog Oatmeal who used to steal her house slippers, and that Dad made her take her shoes off if she took even one step into their house, and that Dad didn’t laugh at her self-deprecating jokes about her crumbling marriage. Hani couldn’t imagine Mrs. Watson was too upset about any of this, and she suspected the same of the other lady, seeing as she’d never seen that one in her life.

“Well,” Hani said darkly, “my bad for killing the mood. I was under the impression this was a funeral, not a birthday party.”

Without warning, Niko’s face twisted painfully, as though he’d been punched in the gut. He sucked in a sharp breath and lowered his head. “Did he, uh… was it, like, over pretty… I mean, how did he—”

“Heart attack. It was over quickly, but it wasn’t pretty.”

“Was he… in a lot of pain?”

Somehow she knew exactly where Niko’s head was at; the feeling was warm and terrifying all at once. That even after all this time, after she thought they’d be complete strangers, she could still read him so easily. “No. I don’t know. Probably.” She paused. “Is that what you wanted to hear? That he suffered?”

“I don’t know,” he said. A thousand indecipherable emotions were at war on his face, but the only one she could make out distinctly was misery. “I don’t know.”

She watched him run his hands through his hair, tugging hard at the roots, and the gesture was so familiar that it took her a beat to remember how to breathe again. An ancient memory dredged itself up in her head: Niko’s fingers running over his scalp, Dad wrenching his hands away. Stop touching your hair, you’re not a girl.

After a long moment she told him, “It won’t make things better.”

“Hani,” he started to say, but she didn’t hear him. She was already walking away.

“The girl — has she always been such a…”

“Stone cold bitch?”

“A character, is what I was going to say. But yes.”

“Niko.”

“She’s not very fond of Niko. As soon as he went away to college, he went pretty much no contact with her and their father. She was the one who stayed behind, took care of the house.

Took care of Mark.”

“I don’t think that gives her the right to act like that.”

“Their family always loved strangely. Makes sense they’re grieving strangely too.”

“That poor boy. Someone ought to show him some sympathy on a day like this.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“Someone ought to.”

“Have you tried any of the hor d’oeuvres?”

Niko looked up. The lady’s hat was so large that it blocked out the sun. He started to push himself up to his feet, but she held out a hand. “Please,” she said, “you don’t need to stand for me. I just… wanted to give you my condolences. And something to eat.”

She offered a deviled egg to him; he slid it off the toothpick, smiled feebly at her. “Thanks.”

“My name’s Lorraine.”

“I know.” Her lips quirked slightly at the ends. “You and your sister are sort of the stars of the show today.”

He laughed at this, although he didn’t find it very funny.

“I really am sorry, dear,” she said with a small, musical kind of sigh. “I just wanted to tell you that my heart goes out to you.”

“Thanks.”

“And I’m sorry about your sister, too.”

At this, Niko looked up. “What about her?”

“I saw her push you,” said Lorraine. “And all that shouting… just… completely inappropriate on a day like this, if you ask me.”

“Right,” he said. “Well. Thanks.”

“Oh!” Lorraine exclaimed suddenly. “Oh, dear. Let me get you a napkin. I’ll be right back.”

It wasn’t until she hurried away that Niko realized he’d crushed the deviled egg in his hand: pasty yellow mashed against white. Now that he was sitting alone again, Lorraine’s enormous hat was not blocking out the light anymore, and he squinted against the harsh sun until his eyes watered.

“Well, the boy is just an angel. An absolute angel.”

“Have you tried this one? The waiter had some fancy word for it. I think it’s French. Crudité, I believe it was? Or was it—”

“He reminds me a lot of my son, strangely enough. Maybe the smile? Maybe the manners? Certainly not the face.”

In the church, Hani studied the back of her right hand, where a small scar clipped the edge of a knuckle. She still remembered the night she got it, when she’d come home past curfew, when she’d felt just masochistic enough to argue with her father about it, when a bottle had broken against a wall and she’d lifted her hands to her eyes and a tiny shard of glass had nicked her.

Her father had been a man of precision, something Hani thought he learned from his lifetime spent running the corner store. He meted out pain to his children the same methodical way he counted change; never too much, never a penny short. He was careful not to leave scars, at least not ones on the outside. Hani always grew up grateful for it. Now, looking at the pale crescent on her knuckle, she began to realize it was one of the few things her father had left for her. It was a tiny, faded thing, hardly even visible; she doubted anyone would be able to spot it even if she pointed it out. The irony of it all made her want to laugh: that her father’s last gift to her was this bit of pain that only she could see. How terribly fitting it was. She was so lost in this memory that she didn’t even notice Niko had come into the church until she saw his grass-stained pants sliding into the pew beside her. She stole a cautious glance at his face, which was a curious mosaic of colors filtered through the stained glass window; it reminded her of the time he’d painted his eyes with a drugstore eyeshadow palette, and Dad backhanded him so hard his nose bled.

Finally he said, “Have you tried any of the hor d’oeuvres?”

Hani stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Just making small talk.”

“Small talking is for people with too much time on their hands.”

“We can talk about whatever you want to talk about, then.”

“Does it even cross your mind that maybe I don’t want to talk to you after—after—”

“After what? After Dad died? I didn’t kill him, Hani.”

“You killed me!” The words clanged like knives through the empty church, harsh, jagged, awful. Niko opened his mouth, but Hani kept going. “When you disappeared on us, you fucking—you killed me, Niko. That’s the worst part of it. You killed me and you don’t even know.”

“You know I had to leave—”

“Of course I know that!” Hani snapped. “I don’t blame you for leaving, I just—you didn’t even tell me.”

“I thought you might tell Dad.”

“You never even asked me,” she said plaintively. She felt like a kid again, asking him to take her to the park with him and his cooler, older, weed-smoking friends, and she hated it. “If I wanted to go with you.”

“Would you have gone with me?”

She didn’t want to answer. It didn’t matter anymore. It wouldn’t make anything better. She answered anyway.

“You were—” Her voice cracked a little, because her throat was dry, and no other discernible reason she could think of. “You’re my big brother.”

Niko just looked at her with his mosaic face, and nothing was better, nothing was better at all, and she put her face in her hands and for a while they stayed there and didn’t say anything.

At last Niko moved, and she thought he was getting up to leave, but instead— Instead, he picked up her wrist. Turned it over. Traced a finger over the little white scar on her knuckle. “I have these too,” he said quietly. For a moment she thought about telling him how much she’d missed him, how she’d never felt quite the same when he was away, how she’d called his number just to listen to his voicemail two hundred and seventeen times until the line disconnected, how she was sorry that they couldn’t protect each other from Dad, how she’d spent so many nights blinking into the darkness and wondering where he was—whether he was happy, cared for, wanted—how despite everything they were not strangers. How she didn’t think they could ever be strangers, no matter how many times he left. The moment passed. She said, “You’re the worst.” But she still licked her thumb and rubbed it over the grass stain on his knee.