“I’d appreciate that.”
“And that’ll be it?”
That’s what her mother wanted, for that to be it. She was ready to stop talking about it and thinking about it and seeing it. She was ready for the paperwork and phone conversations to stop. She was ready for the sympathy cards to go away; most had been swept off the mantel the week after the funeral, the flowers too. She was ready for Kara’s room to be eviscerated and for Gwen to go to New York and then to college. She was ready for a new house and a new life with Randy and Bobby and Bobby.
Her mother would never open those boxes. Steve had sent two large cartons to the house—COD—and now they sat unopened between Kara’s old bookshelf and their mom’s sewing machine. With a sigh, Gwen walked over and ripped open the first.
The scent was overpowering. Filth and smoke. It was as if Steve had just dumped Kara’s dirty laundry hamper into a box, sprinkled a couple of ashes on top, and sent it to North Carolina. That’s probably what had happened, except Kara had probably ashed all over herself. Gwen got a couple of trash bags from the kitchen and returned to the boxes. The clothes went right into the trash: jeans and shirts and slacks and bras, a coat, a couple of scarves, a black blazer, a furry hat.
Gwen paused when she saw a sleeveless blouse she’d given Kara this past Christmas. That was the last time she’d seen her sister in person. Five months ago, and a little bit. She wasn’t planning to come down for Gwen’s graduation. Her mom was annoyed about that, but Kara had talked to Gwen, and it was no big deal. Gwen was about to be up there for eight weeks, and they could have their own celebration. Gwen held up the shirt. She was thinking about keeping it, but it smelled too much like everything else, so she threw it in the trash.
Below the clothes, which filled most of both cartons, were some books and scripts, which Gwen piled onto Kara’s bookshelf. There was a cell phone in one box, and scattered about the bottom of the other were loose earrings and necklaces and rings. Gwen lay them out on the desk. Most she didn’t recognize beyond their being the kind of thing Kara would wear—silver with something extra, something simple, a twist or a stone. The one thing she was glad to see—and startled to see as well, because it made Kara’s absence from the world more real—was the silver locket that Kara had found at a thrift shop a million years ago. It held a black-and-white photograph of an attractive young stranger. Kara liked to tell people it was her namesake, the late imaginary Great Grandma Kara.
Her great grandmother, Kara would tell people, had been extremely wealthy, but she kept all of her money in cash under a stack of brassieres in her closet, and so naturally in the Great Imaginary Fire, when poor Great Grandma Kara died, all of her money burned up too. Alas, young Kara was not to be a rich girl. Kara told the story to boys when she was in high school, to anyone in town who admired the locket when they were out, to Gwen’s junior prom date, whom Kara knew Gwen didn’t particularly like, and to every employer who required a death in the family as justification for a missed shift.
Gwen slipped Great Grandma Kara into her pocket. It felt like stealing, even though she knew she could take anything she wanted now. Should, in fact. She’d already taken a few bracelets from Kara’s dresser. The rest of the jewelry she didn’t want to throw away, so Gwen pulled open Kara’s top desk drawer to sweep it all in, but when she did, she noticed in the back a finger puppet that had belonged to her. Gwen pulled out the puppet and fished under the rim of the desk into the back of the drawer and found a kazoo that had also been hers, and a lip gloss she’d loved as a child and had forbidden Kara to use. Gwen sifted through the contents that had been tucked in back. “What a bitch,” she laughed. There were at least another half-dozen stupid things that belonged to her.
Gwen went to her room and brought back a carton she’d been using to pack her own things. In it, she dumped the entire contents of Kara’s desk drawer, along with the jewelry that Steve had sent back. She surveyed the room and pulled off the shelf a couple of photo albums that were spilling over with high school and college photos. A picture of Kara with Brad fell out, and Gwen studied it. They were probably nineteen in the picture. Brad had no glasses and longer, messier hair. He was skinny and unshaven and handsome. Somewhere on the graffiti wall Kara had once written the words Mrs. Bradley Mitchell. Gwen scanned the wall and found the words near the dollhouse in the corner. They’d been scratched out in pencil, though they were still perfectly legible, the capital M, B, and M fat and oversized.
For the next two hours, Gwen sorted through Kara’s drawers, closet, and bookshelf, filling up boxes and labeling them “Gwen’s Closet.” She didn’t want anyone to throw away the Grease 2 poster, but she also didn’t want to be the one to take it down, so on the white wall, beside the poster, she wrote “Save for Gwen” in pencil.
It was dark outside when she finished, and she could hear that the Bobbies and her mother were back in the house, though no one had come to find her or to make her go to dinner. She’d packed the locket, the cell phone, the photo of Kara with Brad, and the bag of pot from the dollhouse in her luggage for New York. She would be there in four days.
As she was heading for the kitchen, she took one more look into her sister’s room. Beyond the giant treadmill, the graffiti wall dominated the room. There was little evidence of Gwen’s packing, and Steve’s cartons were now gone. Gwen wondered what would feel worse, coming back to find the house sold or standing in this doorway and seeing all signs of Kara erased.
“Happy Birthday,” Gwen whispered to the room. “I’ll miss you.”
Margot had driven many times to the Park Slope apartment Kara had shared with Collin, and to the one she’d shared with Mullet, and to other apartments that had preceded them. She had not, Margot now realized, seen the inside of Mullet’s apartment, but that might have been true of one of the early apartments, too. Kara went through a lot of roommates when she first moved to New York.
But for all her moving, she’d always lived in Brooklyn. Margot had lived in Queens for a time, then moved back to Long Island. If she and Kara met in the city, for drinks or a show or a shopping trip, they usually took trains in and trains home. But when Kara voyaged to Long Island, which had become the most common way they visited, Margot would drive her home the next morning.
“Boring Girl’s Night Out,” that’s what they liked to call it. Margot was the boring girl—that was implied, but never said—but it was more fun being boring with Kara. They’d go to Target, rent a movie, make dinner—well, Margot would make the dinner, and Kara would keep the wine poured. Then they’d get up and have breakfast. Margot might cook, or they’d go out. Sometimes they dyed the grey strands out of their hair; sometimes they painted their nails. Then Margot would drive Kara back to Brooklyn with her haul of groceries and a box of muffins.
Kara would usually wait for the drive home to bring up anything bad that was going on. She’d been fired. She was getting back into coke. She’d been to a party and blacked out. These drives back to Brooklyn often felt like confession. Margot would say it was bad, and Kara would agree, and she’d swear she was never going to do whatever it was she needed to never do again, and—Oh, I forgot to tell you the most hilarious story—and then the subject was changed. Maybe Margot should have worried more about Kara during these conversations. But Kara always made it sound like she had things under control. She seemed naughty, yet indestructible—just like she’d been in college. Even her DUI a few months ago she’d managed to explain away somehow. There were the customary pangs of regret on the Belt Parkway, but those felt a bit manufactured, for Margot’s benefit or perhaps more for Kara’s own sense of ritual cleansing. That’s how they generally felt. Maybe there was more to it, sometimes. Maybe Margot should’ve listened more carefully.
Today she was listening to the radio, or at least she’d flipped on the radio to fill the silence beside her. Several times she considered turning around and heading home. She didn’t know Kara’s other New York friends. Why did she need to meet them now?
The apartment building was red brick and five stories tall, and as