See, in order to get back to where she is on Asteroid B-612—their planet—he has to get bitten by a poisonous snake. Supposedly he gets back to his asteroid and his rose at the end, but honestly? I’m not really sure the Little Prince is alive—I think he has to let the snake kill him so he can leave Earth. I think the pilot is telling his story to keep his memory alive. Don’t take my word for that. I got a D in English last semester.
But the reason this story is everything to me is because the Little Prince loves his rose so much that he’s willing to die for her. I want to be loved like that. I want a boy like him.
Micah should have come. To the clinic. To be with me. He should have come. If there were a wave like the wave and we were on the beach, he’d probably run as fast as he could. Leave me behind when I slow down. He already said he’d do that, didn’t he? I can’t carry you.
The sun spreads over me, and I close my eyes against the light. It hurts. So does the remembering.
I am seven, and Mae and I are lying on either side of Mom on the pull-out bed in the living room at Gram and Papa’s house on the Cape. We are squished against each other, and I breathe in Mom’s faint rose scent, which reminds me exactly of Gram’s garden of wild beach roses. Mae and I each hold a flashlight so Mom can see the words in the book.
“It is such a secret place,” Mom murmurs, “the land of tears.”
I run my fingers over the illustration of the Little Prince’s abandoned rose, sticking to the side of his small planet, all by herself, with nothing to protect her but four thorns.
Then Mom reads what has always been my favorite line from the book, which the rose says to the Little Prince when bragging about her thorns, which deep down she knows aren’t big enough to protect her, but she’s proud and she doesn’t want him to pity her and she doesn’t want to pity herself, so she says: “Let the tigers come with their claws!”
I whisper the words into the silence of my room: “Let the tigers come with their claws.”
It sounded better when the thorny rose said it in Mom’s voice. I open my eyes and look at the yoga mat I laid on my floor this morning, waiting, but she’s not there.
“Come back,” I whisper. I guess Mom can’t hear me. Where she is.
I pulled a card today from the tarot deck Mom bought me when I turned thirteen—Rider-Waite-Smith, the classic.
I got Death. That skeleton riding on his horse, looking fucking satisfied with himself. Maybe the card is telling me she’s not coming back, ever again. Maybe it’s telling me that my parents aren’t the only thing in my life that has died.
There is a knock on my door. I ignore it.
Poor little rose with all her bravado, all that insecurity coiled up inside her petals. Doesn’t she know that trying to be strong never works?
More knocking, louder this time. “Nah?”
“Yeah.”
The door creaks and I open my eyes when I can feel the heat of my sister over my face. She leans above me, her short, blond hair sticking up in every direction. Her blue eyes, a tropical blue like Malaysian water, stare into my green ones. She knows. I know she knows. My sister is the smartest girl under eighteen in the world. If she can figure out how to fly to the moon, she can figure out I’m currently on it.
The late-afternoon sun cuts into the room so that her face is half light, half shadow. What goes on in there, in that head? Is it all math, or is she as confused as I am? I haven’t seen her cry, not once. But I know she’s sad. Yesterday, Mae forgot what the capital of Norway was. She was talking about stars in gutters and said the guy was from … and then her face scrunched up. It was the first time I saw my sister not know something. I guess sad hits people in different ways.
“There’s food,” she says.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Are you nauseous?”
Here we go. I expected a lecture. Instead, I get Dr. Mae, who has done so much research on my disease that Harvard will likely give her an honorary degree. Opiate abuse results in nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, loss of parents.
“Not yet, Dr. Winters.”
Mae looks down at me. “What did you take, and how much?”
My sister. So good. It would never occur to her, like it did to me, to steal our dead father’s opiates.
I lie, because I’m good at it, and because it never occurs to Mae to lie. She’s so smart, but kind of dumb, too.
“Vicodin. I just had one pill left,” I say. “I hid it. For an emergency. That’s all I took. I promise.”
Her eyes search mine the way they search the night sky for falling meteorites. “Okay,” she finally says. “But that’s it?”
“That’s it. I just miss them. You know?”
She nods, then lies next to me on the rug. We are quiet.
That kid in group was right about all of us in the Circle of Sad: I am a piece-of-shit lying junkie.
“There’s a crack in your ceiling.”
“Yeah.”
Right now, my sister radiates calm. Usually she’s buzzing, like a third rail, zzzzzzzzz, never stops, but right now she’s like putting your hand on a stone that’s been sitting out in the sun for hours. A rock. Me? I’m water. A puddle. Sludge at the bottom of a well.
I wait for her to tell me I’m a piece-of-shit junkie. She won’t say it like that. She will use big words and be precise and reasonable. But underneath, we’d both know I’m a piece-of-shit junkie.
“The Red Cross called,” Mae says. She almost whispers it. “They need DNA.”
I turn my head to look at her. Push the cobwebs out of my brain. Dee-en-nay.
“What?”
She swallows. “To help them identify the bodies, Nah.”
There’s not enough Vicodin in the world.
“Fuck no. Fuck that.”
I have decided that my parents are just floating. Forever. Whole and forever and they will float on the sea with sunlight and moonlight. Hand in hand.
She ignores this and explains how, in order to prevent disease, the Malaysian government has dug mass graves. Our parents might be in one of those. Mom, with dirt and other people on top of her. She’d hate that. She never liked closed spaces, always had mini panic attacks on elevators. We took the stairs a lot. “Good for our hearts,” she said. Then she would grin. “And our asses.”
I push up onto my elbow, which is goddamn hard when you’re made of sand. “They’re not bodies, they’re our parents, Mae.” I have a hard time zeroing in on her face, but I do my best. “Don’t get fucking clinical on me.”
I fall back down, and Mae’s hand reaches across the rug and grasps onto mine.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was trying to use the most efficient way to explain the process.” She takes a breath. “We have to find them, Nah. We can bring them back.”
In a cardboard box, probably. Ashes.
I close my eyes. Imagine Mom floating on a calm sea in corpse pose.
Dad floats beside her, and he even managed to keep his glasses on. They could be the illustration for the Two of Cups in one of Mom’s tarot decks, love and harmony.
When there’s no … body, it’s hard to know when to stop looking. I don’t ever want to stop—but this kind of looking, only looking for a dead body. No. I can’t. I can’t.