For two months out of the year Romy stayed with her aunt, who was my next-door neighbor. This had been going on for whispered reasons for as long as I could remember. And for as long as I could remember Romy and I were inseparable. Romy was my kind of companyâloud, freckled. The twin I needed to my quiet, cautious. Romy was one year older, one year cleverer, full of one more yearsâ worth of dreams and sorrows. We discussed them intensely, intimately, the dreams and sorrows. Weâd tell secrets wherever we went.
You know me too well, sheâd say, sheâd laugh. No one knows me better, I thought.
The fifteenth summer Romy is into painting. She has a real gift. This one was dancing swallows in a tense blue sky. This one was a barn owl with golden orb eyes. They followed me knowing around her room. We had begun our fifteenth summer with a secret: Romy had a bottle of prescription pills that she takes one day at a time. Romy wasnât ashamed, Romy was happy, Romy was steady. Romy spent Tuesday afternoons in an office midtown with a woman named Barbara. Barbara encouraged Romy to paint more.
I encouraged Romy to paint more, too. I took pictures for her the rest of the year and gave them to her that next summer. Look, a cat crouched across your auntâs fence. Look, a dog vigilant by the mailbox. A cedar tree shrouded in snow. An ambulance sheathed in the fire station. Romy smiled her crooked smile. She was one year older. Her eyes looked in directions I couldnât always see. But Romyâs paintings showed me. Romyâs paintings had pulled something out of my heart and now it sung. Mournful, mostly, but peaceful as a hidden lake.
*
Romy braided my hair and we went down to the river park. We brought my dog, who went wild happy. I brought my camera. I decided I liked taking pictures for Romy. Iâd started an album of just the summer. I thought it would be important. We sat together on the log over the river, feet dangled into the water. Romy said that there was a lot that people wanted from her. She said donât worry, itâs not about you. I felt relieved. I felt sad. I told Romy she could do whatever she wants, she was that good. Romy smiled her crooked smile. She tossed a stick for my dog to chase into the water.
You know what, Romy said, someday Iâll be the river. Here and moving on.
Follow your weird heart, Romy, I told her.
What little I understand has grown in melancholy with time: there were people in Romyâs life who wanted something different for her, from her, of her. I wanted Romy to walk with me beside the river; Romy wanted to touch the bottom of the river, come up to me with a smooth stone. I arranged line after line of rocks speckled with muddy quartz across the landscape of my bedroom. Bed was an island. Romy spent the summer rowing towards me, I towards her, and by the time she left, Iâd be all softened again. A riverbank tumbling down.
*
The summer of dancing swallows outside and in. The summer the room filled to the brim with sleep. The summer of my head on her shoulder, just once. I thought of her like she was a knife: bleached and whittled bone handle, fine silver blade of a mind. I thought about being careful. I thought about being split in half. It was joyous. It might have been the first time in my life. Romy, if it couldnât be meâ
I thought of a black and white photograph I saw at an exhibition. Two hands extended and clasped with the background of a plain. How it struck me. How simple it was. How I felt hungry to take it, put in the frame Romy with a body that wasnât mine, maybe one made entirely of quartz, of light.
*
The last day of the summer I was determined not to cry. I gave Romy copies of my photographs fresh from the drugstore; she gave me a box of smooth river stones. I had stories but I forgot them with the weight of the box placed in my hands. And I did cry, unexplainable sorrowful tears. Romy touched my face, wiped them off with her fingertips.
Every night I went to the river, she said, and I picked up a stone. And I remembered you. I donât think your life is easy. I think you pretend you are not a part of the world. I think youâre afraid to touch it. Me, I canât stop holding on tight enough to kill it. Have a good year at school. Iâm going home.
I did see the world and I left it alone. The cruelest element of time is that it does not stop when you do. I dreamt that night in grief songs of a red rushed river and a cascade of snowâ
*
Romy didnât go missing, but Romy didnât come back, either. That was the final summer. Her aunt moved away, Romy graduated, I donât know where Romy went after that. And I wondered about her. The moments were quiet and full. In imaginary worlds Romy is free to go where she pleases. In imaginary worlds Romy is free to go. I was still taking photographs, sometimes I was in them. Romy, I will always show up for you. Did you have an easy time with words? I did not, but I am certainly learning, slowly.
Time to time I heard the boxes in the closet rattling. Hot stones and photographs. I had nightmares of blank canvases or of my frantic hands having scrawled something desperate and ugly I couldnât erase. Two swallows paused in dancing, swooped to pull at my hair. A summer alone can make a ghost of a girl.
Romy, I told her, though she was not there, Iâm falling apart, something inside me is falling down. I want to be so good. First for you, but I think for me too. The most forgiving song is playing in the next room. Iâd rather be a pair of hands, a body of light. I am being patient. I tell myself I am waiting around for the real thing.
*
Romy, when one thing is on fire how much time until everything is on fire? I wanted to ask you, I thought you might know. It seems it does take some time. But it happens, inevitably. Why does this place sit there like a locked cube? It takes some time to form a softer shape. Why is everything about that blank-faced time? When I cry I create a new face in the waterâs reflection, on me, rising in the air blotchy as a ghost. My face says it knows no hands but mine, baptized in the river.
Are you lonesome Romy? Weâve got a sound like salt and honey licking the back of our brains. The sky didnât make us, our parents did. How do you exist a block of wax, a liminal space, is there something, anything, no one is telling you Romy, itâs all itchy under my thin salt skinâ
I live here with the spit and the rivers and the rabbits and Iâm still thinking about that dry gold grass and Hell all the time.
*
I moved out of town after I graduated. I kept going to school, and then in the summer, I returned home to work. I nanny for the family that bought Romyâs auntâs house. I take them to the river park, I take them to the movies. I read to them, I hand them crayons. I give them disposable cameras and they capture their own summer with their own names. I needed something to do: I didnât realize it would be so close.
I have my own orange prescription bottles, narrow white pills. My own Barbara. I have a problem with complicated roots. I walk down to the river park and they simplify. I still do this.
When the kids are asleep in their new home with my eyes I take pictures of the familiar place. I lie on the freshly installed carpet and the view of the ceiling looks the same as it ever did. I breathe in the old house. This is how a dream feels when it was once real. I am learning about nostalgia: how defenseless we are to its easy, merciless pains. And how much I cherish the color and depth it gives the world with memory, like an image adorned with strokes of paint. And of all that I am learning to love, what I love most is the hand that paints it.
*
In rough strokes I imagine grief like a razed field. A harshly reaped harvest. The crass trees lining the field struck by lightning, the encroaching fireline crackling at oxygen and static electricity, the darkness of the storm mimicking nightfall. We are far from August or we are deep at its heart. And I imagine her standing in the middle of the plain in a rain-soaked nightgown. Dark circled, gothic. Herself. Sometimes she screams, sometimes she weeps, sometimes she looks as if she is memorizing a spot distant on the horizon. A place for her to go. I imagine her in peace and in madness. I imagine us hand in hand. I feel the image release.
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