The Gone World

EPILOGUE

Heavier snow now. The way it hangs in front of streetlamps and looks like glitter. She didn’t want to drive in this, so we walk. Cut through the neighbor’s, down through their thatch of pines. She pulls on the branches, and I’m covered.

“Oh, bitch! Oh, you bitch!” I’m screaming, snow down the neck of my coat, shaking it from my hair. She’s laughing. I ball up snow and throw it, but it powders in the air. She’s laughing in a way I haven’t heard for a while.

“As long as I grow up to be rich,” she says. “Or marry rich. That’s all I want.”

We watch for wrecks in town. “You ever hear how a car crash sounds like plastic?” she says. She’s smoking Camels from a hard pack, and I take one, down to her last few. She taps hers on the box, taps mine for me. She lights hers, and I lean in to catch the fire from her tip. Plenty of fishtailing, but no one hits. I’m shivering, I only brought my dad’s Navy coat. She’s in her Michael Jackson jacket, zippers on the sleeves. A car goes past and blares the horn, and Courtney flips them off, and someone laughs. Maybe they knew us.

Seven Hills on Euclid, Courtney’s favorite place because the woman at the counter never checks IDs. Courtney buys cigarettes. I get a hot chocolate from the machine.

“Gimm,” says the woman, “let me see it.” She says, “Jesus fucking Christ,” when Courtney lowers her turtleneck to show the scar. It’s bright white, will always be there because some fuck lunatic slit her throat. The scar’s jagged—you can see where the knife went in, how it dragged. The woman gives over the hard pack of Camels and says, “On me. Least you should get is a pack of cigarettes out of something like that.”

“Hell’s bells,” says Courtney.

“We were at Pizza Hut, serves her right,” I say.

“I’m smoking my last one, I’ll be outside.”

“One sec.”

I buy the hot chocolate and a Clear Blue test, and the woman just rings me out. All she says is, “If you don’t like what it says, get a second one before you freak out. It won’t hurt to try more than once.”

We lie together on her bedroom floor. Enough room for us if we kick our legs up to her bed. She’s smoking her third, but I’m taking mine slow, blowing smoke at her ceiling fan, watching the fan stir the smoke and blow it back to me. Powerage, side B. We aren’t talking, and I’m all right because Courtney’s told me I’m her only friend good enough not to talk to. When the record ends, I ask if her brother’s coming home tonight.

“He’s at Jesse’s,” says Courtney.

Damn. I couldn’t feel it before we went to Seven Hills, but it’s like I can feel it now, like there’s a butterfly in my stomach, fluttering its wings. Courtney gets up to change the record, puts on Back in Black. I’m touching my stomach. She has a new way of touching her neck, absentmindedly like she’s touching a necklace. When she comes back to the floor with me, our faces are so close I feel heat coming off her skin.

Three a.m. I wake up but let her sleep. Thinking of the blue cross that appeared when I pissed on the stick. Thinking of how I’ll tell him. I creep down the hallway to his room and check his bed, but he’s not here. I wish he was here, the bed of the sister, the bed of the brother. What would it be like if Courtney was my sister? Best friends, but closer. If Davy does the right thing, she would be my sister. I drift through the downstairs rooms. The curtains are open on the living-room French doors, enough moonlight reflecting off the snow to fill the house with silver. I look out at their backyard, at the snowfall so smooth on the lawn, so smooth on the pines, so perfect, undisturbed, except for a circle of footsteps. A perfect circle of footsteps, but I can’t see footsteps leading to or from it, like someone dropped from the air, walked in a circle, and disappeared. My mother believes in omens, but never in good ones.

How will he ask me to marry him? Right then, when I tell him? No, he’ll do it right, someplace romantic, someplace over dinner. I have pictures left over from freshman year I can give him. I’ll give him a picture when I tell him so he can think of me when he’s away, think of us. He says he’s joining the Navy to see the world, but Courtney says it’s because he can’t get into college. He says he’ll see maybe Germany, maybe Egypt, maybe Japan. I imagine what he’ll do when I tell him. I imagine his eyebrows going up like they do. He’ll ask me to marry him, and we’ll get married at St. Pat’s, Courtney as my maid of honor. I’ll pray at St. Pat’s every day that he’s away. I’ll pray for my father, I’ll pray for my husband, both at sea. I imagine Davy in an eternity of water praying to a star he’s picked out and named for me. Shannon, he’ll pray, oh, Shannon Star. And he’ll point out his star, our star, and he’ll make sure I can pick it out from all the others, and he’ll say that he’ll look at that star and think of me, and he’ll ask me to do the same. And on nights like this, I’ll kiss our child asleep and head outside to mark our star, and I’ll know he’s safe, I’ll know that starlight bathes him as he swings from the rigging on the deck of his ship, as he looks out over the sea at night, as the steel hull cuts the swells. I’ll know he’s lit with starlight, I’ll know he’s safe, I’ll know he’s thinking of me, of us, and I’ll know that no matter how far he sails, he’ll one day sail for home.