THE STATE OF THE UNION, 1998


You disappeared on a school night. Nobody was more surprised by this than me. If I believed in anything when I was thirteen, I believed in the promise of school nights. I believed in the sacred ritual of homework, then dinner, and then the laying out of our clothes for the next morning—something Mom insisted on from the very beginning.

Mom said it was important to wake up having made the decision about what to wear. So, each night, we made the decision. We brushed our teeth. We stared at each other in the mirror as the foam built and built in our mouths, and eventually one of us would speak. “Hello,” you’d say, and this would be so funny for some reason that I can’t understand now. You would start laughing, a loud burst of confetti out your mouth—and so I would start laughing, an ugly inward sucking sound that always made Mom run into a room and say, “Sally, are you okay?” which made us laugh even harder.

“She’s just laughing, Mom,” you said.

We got into our beds. We stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that were arranged on the ceiling to spell our names—an idea I hadn’t liked at first, since I wanted the ceiling to be an accurate reflection of the sky. But you said that was impossible. You said, the ceiling will never be the sky, Sally, and I didn’t argue, because no matter how old I became, you were always three years older than me. You always knew things I didn’t know, like there are eighty-eight constellations in the sky and only twenty-two stars in the pack. Just enough to spell our names. So we stuck the stars to the ceiling, and I spent the rest of my childhood looking up, listening to KATHY tell SALLY about all the other things she knew: The sky isn’t actually blue. The rain evaporates and goes back up to the sky.

“And did you know that trees can feel pain?” you asked.

“No,” I said.

But I wasn’t surprised. I had suspected as much ever since Dad told us that the maple tree outside our bedroom window was nearly dead. It was so old, Dad said, it might have been planted by an actual Puritan, a fact that did not impress me as much as it scared me. The tree sat on our lawn, hunched and tangled, and I didn’t like looking at it the way I didn’t like seeing the bone spurs on Dad’s feet when he took his socks off at the beach. Or the bottom row of yellow teeth that were only visible when Mom laughed really hard. It was death, I knew, waiting in the most unexpected places—inside Mom’s laughter, at the end of Dad’s toes, in the bright green leaves outside our bedroom window that couldn’t have looked more alive. So I pulled down the window shade each night before I crawled into your bed. You never pushed me away then. You liked feeling the soft tips of my fingers braiding a strand of your hair.

“Well, they can. That’s what Billy Barnes told me,” you said. “He knows things like that. His dad’s a florist.”

Then, I was a very good listener, very attentive, the teachers often wrote on my report card. I always had a follow-up question.

“Who’s Billy Barnes?” I asked.

“Who is Billy Barnes?” you said, like I was supposed to know. But I didn’t know anyone except the people in my first-grade class. We were kept hidden away from the older kids, safe in our own private wing of the school. “I’m only dancing the Football Tango with him tomorrow.”

“What’s the Football Tango?” I asked.

“Just some dance the teachers made up to celebrate Thanksgiving,” you said. “I don’t really get it. But who cares? That’s not the point.”

The point was, you were in fourth grade and he was in fifth, and you shouldn’t have been partners, but you were paired up anyway. You were the same exact height. It’s fate, you said. And it was—the next morning, it happened. You dressed up as a cheerleader and he dressed up as a football player and you tangoed across the gym and he whispered something nice about your hair and that was that. You were in love.

“What did he say about your hair?” I asked.

I was starting to learn that I did not have the right kind of hair. It was nothing like yours, which dried straight out of the shower. Mine was curly, hard to control, like one of those evil cartoon trees that pull people in with their branches when they get too close. That’s what Rick Stevenson said on the bus, anyway, just before he told me all about his chinchilla at home, the one that had recently started to eat its own babies.

“I don’t know,” you said. “Billy didn’t specify.”

After the dance, you started talking to me about Billy all of the time at night. But you never spoke to him at school.

“What would I even say?” you wondered.

I was surprised you’d ask me—what did I know about speaking to boys then? I could hardly even speak to my own grandmother and grandfather when they sat on our couch during Christmas. I would quietly pick at the hem of my dress, while you asked them questions about their old coal stove and all the milk that used to arrive at their doorstep in bottles. You accepted their gifts with an enthusiasm I couldn’t fake. “Thank you so much for the Make-Your-Own-Bubble-Gum kit,” you said to Grandma like you meant it, and I was in disbelief. Were we actually excited about making our own bubble gum? I couldn’t tell. You were so good—a natural, Dad said once, after we watched you be Peter Pan in Peter Pan.

But talking to Billy was not as easy for you.

“Billy’s in fifth grade,” you said. “And he’s going to be a famous basketball player one day. That’s what all the teachers say.”

So you just watched him from afar, paid close attention to him at recess. Collected information to bring back to me each night. Listed off all the things Billy liked: Pepperoni pizza. The Chicago Bulls. Praying mantises. And his dad, who had recently broken his neck.

“It’s really tragic,” you said. Then you told the story as if you had been at Bill’s Tree and Garden when Billy’s dad fell off the ladder. “He must have fallen twenty feet through the air, Sally! It was crazy! He cracked his spine in two places.”

“Is he going to die?” I asked.

I couldn’t imagine someone breaking their neck and not dying. I imagined Billy’s father’s neck, bent at a right angle.

“No,” you said. “He’ll be fine. But still. It’s really scary. I mean, who knew being a florist was so dangerous?”

I remember you sounded proud for some reason, like you had broken your own neck.

* * *

You told me so much about Billy that by the time I actually saw him, it felt surreal. We stepped out of Dad’s car and onto the parking lot of Bill’s Tree and Garden, and you clutched my arm like you did whenever we saw a fox in the woods.

“It’s Billy Barnes,” you whispered.

We knew foxes lived here, but we were always surprised to see one in our yard. It was Connecticut. It was the suburbs. We lived one street away from a Dunkin’ Donuts. We never expected to be so lucky, to be in the right place at the right time. In the same parking lot where Billy was moving small white trees out of a van.

Dad went inside to get marigolds for the mailbox, but we stood quietly by the entrance. We plucked petals off a nearby rosebush, pretended like we weren’t watching him, but we were, of course. We were studying him very closely, though now it’s hard to remember much about the moment. All I can picture is his hair, so thick and brown, like it was made of plastic. Like he was one of my Fisher-Price toys.

“What are you still doing out here, girls?” Dad said when he returned with two pots of gold flowers. The moment was over.


Copyright © 2022 by Alison Espach