Charlotte lent her weight to the wooden railing of the front porch, cigarette held loosely between her index and middle fingers, and sighed heavily through her nose.
The muggy, English weather about her had seemed relentlessly suffocating the weeks leading up to this day, but there was a reprieve in the chokehold of humidity. A light rain was pitter pattering away cooling the air about her, chasing away every tendril of heat as it brought about cool breezes.
Despite the weather, Charlotte had been dreading this day. Dreading it as she had done last year. And the year before. And the year before.
Mum and Dad were always withdrawn on this day, speaking little— to anyone.
Charlotte sighed again, a long-suffering sound, before raising the smoke to her lips and taking a long drag. On her exhale, she heard a window slide open a floor above her.
“Charlie.”
It was Dad.
“Yeah, Dad?” she called back.
“Put out the cigarette before your Mom gets back.”
Charlie rolled her eyes: of course it was fine if she smoked when it was just the pair of them, but smoke in front of Mum and she’d be a goner. An hour long rant about the dangers of smoking (which she already knew about), how much she was shortening her own life (which she already knew about), and how much she was putting everyone around her at risk of lung cancer (precisely why she smoked outdoors and alone) would follow.
“Actually, just come inside,” he called before sliding the window shut.
Charlie ground the still-glowing end of the cigarette into the ashtray by her elbow, then, ashtray in hand, she turned and walked inside.
“When’s she due home,” Charlie all but shouted up the stairs.
“Ten, fifteen minutes,” he replied, making his way down the stairs. “You’d better do something with that.”
“I’m about to toss it,” she murmured, looking her father up and down.
His already pale skin looked white as a sheet, and the bags beneath his dark eyes stood out more prominently—like bruises. His once obsidian hair was now sprinkled with grays that seemed to have grown in number.
“Are we going to head down to the cemetery,” she asked, already knowing the answer as she flicked the cigarette into the trash.
“Of course, Charlie,” his voice was quiet, barely audible over the now pouring rain.
“Right then,” she turned on her heel and made to walk up the stairs. “Well, I’ll go get changed.”
Upon reaching her bedroom door, Charlotte paused at the threshold, looking around at the closed door directly across the hall from hers. With one foot inside her room and the other still in the semi-dark hall, Charlie bit her lip, and wondered whether she dared follow the dangerous thought that was turning circles in her mind.
She took a step back and gingerly approached the closed door, her thin hand, pale as her father’s, shaking as she placed it on the doorknob. Then, quietly as though she were trying not to wake a sleeping child, Charlie pushed the door open about halfway, then let it swing wide open.
Ivy’s room had lain untouched, looking exactly as though it were waiting, waiting for the girl to come home, perhaps lay on her bed for a nap, or turn to the heavily grafitied desk to do some homework. But no such girl had come. No such girl would ever come.
No one had even stepped in the room for five years.
Charlie steeled herself against the tears she knew were soon to come and ventured further into the room. The carpet wheezed out small puffs of dust everywhere she stepped, and, like a brick wall, the smell of the unused space, dank and dusty, hit Charlotte and she reeled as though physically struck. She sank to the floor, clutching the end of the bed, eyes locked on a few pictures, blanketed in dust.
But the dust could not dull those enigmatic, sparkling, black eyes—so full of warmth, full of life. Nor did it leech any color from the blonde hair that framed her face in ringlets, so much like her mother’s.
Charlotte’s lip quivered and her breath came out in ragged gasps, face wet with tears she had not yet realized were there. As she rocked back and forth slightly, a habit formed with her childhood tears, her uneven breath punctuated with the occasional quiet sob was the only sound to accompany her in the slowly darkening room.
The tears continued streaming down her face and she remembered something Ivy had said, not three days before her accident; it was all rushing back, as though her sister were sitting right beside her…
“Hey, Char?”
Charlie rolled her eyes at the pet name she’d been bestowed by Ivy and Ivy alone.
“What is it, Vi?”
“Why is everyone so scared to die?”
The pair had been sitting on the roof whilst mapping the stars with their eyes, a favorite pastime of Ivy’s. The chill wind that had been knotting their hair had ceased, and save for the crickets, and the pair of them, the world seemed to stand still.
“Why? Well…” 14-year-old Charlotte struggled to come up with an answer that would placate her sister’s need to have her morbid question answered. “Well, they’d be leaving loved ones behind, for starters.”
The younger sibling was oddly silent, as though digesting what she’d heard.
“But they won’t be.”
Charlie sat up, peering down at Ivy curiously.
“Whadyou mean, Vi?”
“Well,” she said sitting up as well, though not as quickly as her sister. “All things in the universe were once one thing, right? Before the Big Bang?”
Charlie nodded, not sure what she was getting at.
“Then that means we’re all part stardust and star fragments, right?”
Again, the elder sibling nodded, slower this time.
“Well it make sense that once we’re no longer alive, we won’t be us, right? We’ll just have gone back to being stars, or stardust or whatever.”
Even the crickets seemed to quiet as a smile played across Ivy’s lips, eyes shining brighter than ever.
“Why would we be leaving loved ones behind? We would be watching them from the night skies, and they could always look for us up there. If they don’t know which exact star we are, they could pick one at random. A little piece of that person is bound to be inside that star, right?”
Charlotte watched in awe as Ivy leaned back, completely content with the knowledge she had sleepily expelled into the summer night.
“Right,” Charlie whispered, leaning back as well.
A smile began to bloom upon her lips as well.
“We can just look for them at night.”
Still sobbing, Charlie crawled up onto Ivy’s unused bed and curled up into a ball atop the neatly tucked sheets and blanket. How long she’d been there, she didn’t know; the passing of time was marked by her cries fading into hiccups and the tears drying on her face.
Oh, Vi, she thought, I’ve looked and looked, and none of the stars remind me of you. Which one are you? Which one?
She found herself climbing out Ivy’s window, onto the roof, settling in the same spot they’d shared those many years ago, frantically searching the dark sky. After what seemed like hours of searching, she gave up, and curled into a ball, wrapping her arms around her legs, and tucked her legs to her chest.
A while later, she heard Ivy’s window open. Her mother climbed out and joined Charlotte on the roof. After a moment, she said, “You know your father and I heard you sneaking up here almost every night?”
Charlie scooted closer to her mother, almost crying in relief when she felt the warmth of her arm behind her back.
“You know, I always thought we were being so sneaky about it.”
Her mother laughed, a sound that was hard to come by.
They both sat there, studying the darkness, when, in a flash of light, a shooting star streaked by, there and gone—in a heartbeat.
Neither of the two said anything. But they knew.
Ivy.