Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 18 ~ Build a House for Me

Elly dreamt of the Lost One that night.

She walked hand in hand with her sister along a riverbank on a bright, clear day.  The Lost One wore a white dress and her hair shone auburn in the sunlight.  Her skin was pale and Elly thought that it might freckle in the sun, but then realized that she was dead, and the sun could not really touch her.  But her hand was warm and solid in Elly’s and when she looked down into her eyes, she thought they might be hazel.  If she were alive.

She said; “I need to know why you died.”

“Does it matter?” her sister asked.  “I’m dead all the same.”

“It’s a secret, and I don’t like secrets.”

“You keep them well enough.”

“If I know how you died maybe I’ll know how I’m supposed to help you.  That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Is it what you want?  I asked you to help me years ago and you forgot all about me.”

“You said I wasn’t ready.”

“You said you were not ready.  I said you would be someday, and now you are, but you don’t care about me.”

“I care.”

“Do you?  You’re not coming to help me.”

“That’s because I don’t know where you are or what I’m supposed to do to help you.  That’s what I’m asking you what happened to you, where you are now, why you think I can do anything.”

“You know all the answers, just like you’ve always known about me without anyone telling you.”

“Fine.  Be cryptic.  It just makes it easier for me to forget about you, makes it easier for me to not care.  After all if you wanted my help you wouldn’t play games.”

She relented then.  As they came to a stop by the river she said:

“I don’t remember where I came from, who made me, what I was.

“Your parents don’t make you.  They make your house, your body to live in, but they don’t make you.

“My house was incomplete when it was ruined.  What happens when a house is broken before you move in?  You have nowhere to go.  I didn’t go back where I came from, I went to the River, my third parent, and I can’t get free.

“When my house was very young, my mother dreamed of me and I met her then.  It is my first memory.  She dreamed of me as a little girl with auburn hair and hazel eyes.  It is the illusion of me.  For a time too short I lived in her, as my house was being built, but then I saw it torn down by another, and I was lost.  My mother cried and could not hold onto me, but the River could.  My house fell apart and there is no building it again.

“My parents have built new houses but they have not been for me.  They have been for you, and your brothers, and your sister.

“Build a house for me, Eliasha.

“Build a house for me.”

---

Hollie didn’t notice when she first started to feel forgotten.  But when she thought back on it, she could pinpoint it to the beginning of that fall, when her parents began to worry over Elly and watch her and talk about her — her and her new boyfriend.  Or they were worried about Marc, angry at Marc, wondering what to do about his criminal habits.

As for her siblings; Elly was taken up in thoughts and daydreams, or away with her new boyfriend.  Eric was busy with his budding extreme sports career, making commercials, being popular.  She had never been very close with Marc.

None of them seemed to notice how much more time she spent over at Uncle Jake and Aunt Kiki’s, with Adrian.  Sometimes, it didn’t seem like any effort at all to keep the secret that Grandpa was around, that she’d met him and spent time with him, was getting presents that she kept at Adrian’s house.  She knew her father didn’t like his father, she knew he didn’t want Grandpa around.  Grandpa admitted that he hadn’t been a very good father, said he’d wanted to make up for it, but that Russ just wasn’t ready.

At first she’d felt bad about sneaking off.  But her parents didn’t ask questions, didn’t seem suspicious, and after all, it was her own Grandpa she was seeing.  Other kids got to be around their grandparents and it wasn’t fair that she shouldn’t be allowed to see hers.  She didn’t know quite when she stopped feeling bad about it, but it was the same time she started thinking about when it was her parents had forgot about her.  They had a lot of kids, she supposed, it was just easy to forget about the last one.

And then it had happened, like a clap of thunder on a perfectly clear day, followed by weeks and weeks of rain.  Her father found out, she was forbidden to see her grandfather, and then . . . then he was dead.  Gone.

Death had only ever visited Hollie once before, when Elly’s cat was found stiff and cold one morning on the sofa in the family room.  Furball had not been that old, so it was unexpected, and Hollie had cried.  She’d refused the offer of a new kitten.  A kitten could not bring Furball back from the void of death.

Hollie thought about that a lot back when it happened — how something could be alive and purring one night and gone the next morning.  Just gone.  Cold.  Nothingness.

It had scared her then, and it scared her more now.

Her grandfather, who smiled and talked and thought and loved, was gone.  Just gone.  Like that.  Like Furball, found stiff and cold and dead where they’d been sleeping.

And one day, Ade would die.  Her mother would die, and her father, and Elly, and Marc, and Eric.  And she would die.  Where would she go?  All her thoughts and feelings would just stop, and she would disappear into the void.

Hollie didn’t believe in heaven or hell.  She was only eight but she’d decided that much.  She’d asked Elly if there was life after death, and Elly had said no.  “There’s just death.”  And Hollie didn’t know exactly what she meant by that, what “death” was.  But she figured if life was being someone, walking around, talking and thinking and feeling, then death must be the opposite.  It must be complete nothing.  You are gone forever and everything you were just disappears.  Like that.

It was the most terrifying thing she could think of.  So she didn’t think about it, if she could help it.  She didn’t want another cat because she didn’t want to see it dead.  She knew Muttface was old and would die soon, and she dreaded it, dreaded that moment when the dog that had always existed, as long as she’d been alive, was simply no more.

And now she wished she had never met her grandfather.  She wished she had never known him at all.  Because now he was dead, now he was gone, and she hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.

Now her parents were paying more attention to her.  Her mother, especially, seemed to watch her, watching for signs that she was sad or upset about Grandpa’s death.  But Hollie didn’t cry and she didn’t yell or complain that she couldn’t go to the funeral.  If she did, she’d just have to think about it more and more.  They’d make her talk about how she felt, and she’d have to to think about it.

Elly only tried to talk to her about it once.  She was in her sister’s bedroom, helping her make her Halloween costume.  It was late October by then; Grandpa had been dead for weeks.  Elly looked up from the red and gold ballerina costume that she was sewing feathery wings onto, and said, “Do you know why the phoenix is so awesome?”

Hollie just looked up at her, and waited.  She was working on a tiara, making it into a feathered plume.  She liked helping with the costume, more than making her own, because Elly was going to wear it to a big party that Hollie was not old enough to attend.  It seemed more important.

Elly said, “It’s one thing to never die.  The phoenix dies and comes back.  And it makes more sense, really.  Everything dies, in reality, nothing lasts forever.  But if you could die and still find a way to live again, that would be . . . I don’t know.  I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Hollie looked down again and they were both quiet for a while.  Then Hollie ventured, “I wish people were like the phoenix.  When we get too old and things go wrong, and we die from them, instead of just being gone forever, we could come back new again.  It wouldn’t be sad then, to die.  You’d just be starting over.”

Elly lifted her costume and gave it a little shake.  She looked at her work critically for a moment, then said, “Do you miss Grandpa?”

Hollie looked at her sharply, and wondered why she would ask something like that.  It seemed such a stupid question for someone as smart as Elly to ask.  “I didn’t know him for very long,” she answered.

“But you knew him better than anyone else.  I mean better than me, or—”

“I wish I’d known him longer.”

Elly nodded.  “Dad was just doing what he thought was best when he said you couldn’t see Grandpa anymore.  You know that, right?”

Hollie nodded in return, and didn’t say what she was thinking.  She didn’t want to talk about it.  She didn’t understand how it could be good to take her grandfather away, but still, she didn’t want to talk about it.

“Sometimes people mess up when they’re trying to do the right thing,” Elly said softly, as if she could read what Hollie wasn’t saying.

And then it was over.  They didn’t say anything more about it.  They just bent their heads over the fiery phoenix costume, to make something that would not last forever.

---

Elly had no real desire to go to a Halloween party that year, but she felt as if she had to.  She had to go, to make her friends think everything was normal.  She wanted to go, to remind herself that she was still a normal girl.  She was still a student at Ridgewalter High School and every year, Sherri Pomory threw the biggest most “important” Halloween party around, and of course Elly Markson would go.  Why wouldn’t she?  And why wouldn’t she go with a date, her boyfriend?  This was her normal life and it was very important to keep it going.

Besides, if Jani and the others asked her why she suddenly didn’t feel like going to the biggest party of the year, she couldn’t very well say that she’d killed her grandfather and her dead sister was haunting her dreams.  Not hardly.

When she told Sien about the party, and her intent for him to go, he wasn’t thrilled.

“I’ve never been to a party,” he said.

“Never?”

“No.  Never.”

“Oh.”

“I told you what my life’s been like.  I know everything there is to know about Airidan, the only stuff I really know about this world I learned because I had to take care of my father.  Parties really never were high on the agenda.”

“Make this your first party, then.  I’ll be there so it’s not like you won’t know anyone.”

“I’m just not sure if . . . .”

“If what?”

“I just don’t know if I want to.”

“How would you know if you’ve never tried?  Come on, Sien, I thought you wanted to try having a normal relationship.  This is what normal people do, they go out together, do stuff like this.  Life isn’t all big secrets and drama.  At least, it doesn’t have to be.”

He couldn’t really say no after that.  She didn’t want to go as much as she was making out to, but she wanted to want to, which she thought was almost the same thing.  He couldn’t deny her this after asking to be let back into her life, and they both knew it.