Aunt Maisy used to give Luna and I lemon-flavored cough drops and tell us they were real candy, and the summer I was four and Luna was six we took the bag of cough drops off Maisy’s shelf and ate the whole thing in darkness of the basement, sitting in front of the broken television that glittered with static. Our fingers were sticky. We puked gold all over the carpet.
Luna’s body rises up from the East River when she’s twenty-four and I’m twenty-two, and it’s Aunt Maisy who calls me to ask about the funeral arrangements. Her voice is perched in my ear as I hold the cell phone in one hand and throw clothes into my suitcase in the other. What kinda cake should we have, Maisy asks, what kinda flowers do you want me to order? My sister has been missing for three months. Now the autopsy says she’s been dead for four. We gotta have a good wake, Maisy’s telling me, so she gets into heaven. Vanilla, I say. Sunflowers. I click the phone shut before she can ask me another question.
Nobody at school says my sister jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge but everyone saw the grainy picture that the NYPD detective shared with me and Dad that we posted on Facebook and asked everyone to like and share. So everyone must know what she did. But no one knows why, no matter how many hearts and comments appear on the post Dad makes about Luna’s passing. I scroll through them for an answer as to why she went there instead of coming home for New Year’s Eve.
I have to catch a train to Jersey in the morning but Colt goes with me to this bar in Soho where all the DJ plays is Usher. I drink until the street lights glow like planets collapsing and I can feel Colt holding my hand as he guides me through Washington Square. I make him stop by the fountain and it’s still drained but I tell him about how cold the water was at the beach the summer I was four and how I remember Aunt Maisy telling me my mother was going to be fine and how she said the same thing when Luna didn’t answer her phone on January 1st. Colt hugs me so tight, his lips pressing into the space between my eyebrows. I whisper that I love him into the lettering on his sweatshirt. I know I’m in love with him the next morning when I find him asleep on my floor using his arm as a pillow.
The sun is rising outside my window on the train and this woman sits down next to me and asks if this train is going to Summit. Her shoulders tremble like her insides are contracting and she tells me in fractured exhales that it’s the first time she’s ever been out of the city and she hates her daughter for moving away. But she doesn’t believe me that I know when her stop isn’t coming next because she says I look too young and I tell her I was actually born a week late. I see her standing on the brick platform at the Maplewood stop as the train pulls away, pressing her phone to her ear, her lips shaping around the words to tell someone that she thinks she’s home.
Ever since they found her body, all I can imagine is Luna hurtling towards dark water, it’s this image that’s consuming me like a flesh-eating virus. I see my sister, her indigo black hair flying up, her toes pointing, her fingers interlocked over her head. If I let it, this is going to consume me. If I let it consume me, will it bring her back?
I’m still scrolling through Facebook at the funeral when Aunt Maisy places a slice of cake in front of me. I got it made with a lemon filling, she says, you both used to like lemon. I dig out the filling and stick the spoon in my mouth. The flavor makes my teeth sink back into my gums. For a second, my sister is six and I am four and we grin at each other over the bag of lemon cough drops in the cool darkness of my aunt’s basement, grinning because we think we’re sucking on stolen candy, because we’re in this secret moment together. I thought we would always be together.
Your eyes are watering, baby, Aunt Maisy’s got her hand on my shoulder, is it too sweet?
The hearts keep appearing one after the other on the Facebook post about Luna’s passing. They’re not going to stop. She’s not coming back. I can taste it now. I can’t not taste it now. Does it taste good, Aunt Maisy’s asking, does it taste okay? Are you okay? I sit there, the custard filling still in my mouth, so sweet that my teeth ache, that all of me aches, and I force myself to swallow.
Sydney Quinn is an emerging literary fiction writer. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Teaching from Drew University. She writes and lives in New Jersey.
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