K by Mara Finley
Katrina almost dies so many times, that by the time she’s actually dying I don’t believe her. She texts, My sister is such a little bitch. And then 53 more texts that I don’t read. I write back, I’m in Santa Barbara, and leave it at that. Weeks later when her texts stop entirely, I start to worry. Are you ok? Nothing. Are you mad? Nothing. Sorry I’ve been so out of touch. Nothing. I send a selfie of me and my brown and white cow-print pit bull with the caption 50 lb. lapdog. Still nothing.
I’m walking down Valencia Street on my way to work when the texts start again in quick succession. Back in the hospital again. Dot dot dot. The nausea is abhorrent. Dot dot dot. Things are moving fast. Dot dot dot. We may need to go to France soon. I write back, What’s going on? The dots start again then disappear.
I have a little time before work, so I stop into the boutique on the corner, the one with the clothes that are just a bit too young for me. I buy her the gold bar earrings I’ve been eyeing for myself, the ones with the perfect hammer marks that I can’t afford.
* * *
When I introduce her to my boyfriend, I say, “This is Katrina, the love of my life.” He leans across the sticky bar table and kisses her on the lips. Years later I marry the boyfriend. When I introduce him to people, I just say, “This is Rick.”
* * *
Katrina is the first and last stranger I ever approach. I just walk right up to her in photography class on the first day of high school and say, “Hi, I’m Mara.” Usually my voice cracks and I hide behind my hair, but with K it’s just effortless. I follow her into the darkroom and watch spellbound as she holds her photos with wooden tongs and dips them expertly from tray to tray. She’s more striking in the dim red light, and even the damp sulfur scent of the developer can’t keep me away.
Before Katrina, I study fashion magazines like a manual, comparing myself to the models flaw by flaw. I buy tubes of foundation called Finland and Alaska, layer them on thick like paste. I coat my hair in slick serums scented watermelon and grape. I am a trick mirror of proportions, nose and feet bulbous, limbs elongated, eyes cartoon wide. When K tells me I’m beautiful, I almost believe her. When people ask if we’re sisters, she nods and says, “mm hmm,” raises an eyebrow, gives me a side-eyed smile.
* * *
Before Katrina, I cut class alone. I slip out through the side gate by the locker rooms, nod to the security guard, and just like that I’m on my way. I walk the wooded paths of the UC Berkeley campus and fancy myself a college student, studying something ancient and important with chalkboards full of equations and plenty of Greek. I sit on sloping lawns and memorize the geometry of the boys – their elbows right triangles against fresh cut grass, their legs splayed out in perfect Vs. The hours spread slow like summer into early afternoon. I read at Cody’s Books for a while, count my change for a white chocolate mocha at Café Strada, head toward the hills and back down again, walk the long way home.
* * *
After I meet Katrina, I perfect the art of the forged parental note. At first I try to call her in sick, but we lose our breath trying not to laugh and have to hang up before they hear us burst. We are systematic in our truancy – we erase the message from my parents’ answering machine first, then I drive us across town in their grey Mercury Sable wagon to erase the message from the machine at the house where K is living. Your son or daughter has missed one or more classes today.
Katrina’s mother is back in Virginia, her father in Australia we think. Their divorce is brutal and ongoing, and they’ve shipped K off to live with family friends in California for the year. Joe and Carol are always at work, and if their maids speak enough English to understand the messages on the answering machine, they never turn us in.
We walk from Joe and Carol’s to Star Market and charge turkey avocado sandwiches and salt and vinegar chips to their account. We walk to the video store and rent Basquiat on VHS, charge it to their account too. We steal a joint from their son Mickey’s room and smoke it out of K’s third-floor bedroom window. We flop against the headboard of her walnut princess bed, our legs dangling a good foot above the floor. Her window faces east, and the late morning light glints golden on her hair, orangey-pink on her freckled cheek. Thick, wallto-wall beige carpet muffles all sound. K arches her head back and pulls hard on the joint, exhales a stream of smoke like a sigh.
* * *
The year before I meet Katrina, my dad has a windfall at work and my family moves from a cramped duplex in the flats to a house in the foothills with more than one bathroom and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. I never feel at home in our new neighborhood, with its broad stucco houses and sprinkler-fed lawns. I miss the duplex’s creaking floorboards and the noxious scent of the leaky pilot light, the peeling linoleum and the doors that never closed. In our new house, I choose the only finished room in the basement as a bedroom. Its smallness suits me, and I spend hours reading on my mattress on the floor.
At night my mother wanders down and opens the door without knocking. She says, “I think you might be mildly autistic.” My chest roils and tightens, but my voice stays steady as I hear myself say “Interesting, what makes you say that?” She hands me a lopsided ceramic mug of Sleepy Time tea, the brown and beige glaze dried into permanent drips and the tea bag string twirling off the side. “Well,” she says, “you’re good at math, you like animals more than people, you take too many showers, and your room is always spare and clean.” I take a sip of my tea too soon, and the scalding water burns my tongue. It all feels by design – the tea a false gesture of goodwill, the water hot enough to shock but not to mar. “I think you’re a slob,” I say. She glares at me for a moment, then turns her head away with a dramatic sweep. “Bitch,” she whispers as she slams the door.
* * *
I have friends before Katrina, but we don’t like each other much. Most of them are named Rachel, and all they want to do is talk on the 148 phone. They paint their nails cotton candy pink on the phone, eat Stouffer’s microwave mac and cheese on the phone, pee while still on the phone, their phone cords crushed in the bathroom door. They watch TV on the phone, sticky after-school specials with blondes and laugh tracks, handheld music videos on cable channels that my family doesn’t get. When they tell me I’m weird, I take it as a compliment.
K and I drive all the way to Point Reyes listening to The Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest and The Beasties without saying a word. Back at my house, we wear each other’s bell bottom jeans, share 40s of Mickey’s and flick the bumble bee bottle cap back and forth across my closet floor. My mother tells K and I to “earn our keep” by painting the unfinished basement just outside of my bedroom. I beg her to please, please wait a few months to rent out the basement, just until I leave for school. “You ungrateful brat,” she says as she thrusts a paintbrush towards my face, spraying microscopic dried paint chips into my eyes and hair. K stands between Mom and me, her body a shield, and yells, “Fuck you” right in Mom’s face, then grabs me by the hand and says, “We’re outta here.”
* * *
When K and I fantasize about the future, we are married but live next door to each other, walk arm in arm to seaside markets with netted cloth bags, gossip in fluent French. Years later she really does marry a French man named Michel, but we always live at least 3,000 miles apart. We call each other from our cars (she in DC, me in SF) and gossip in English on our drives to and from work. She leaves long rambling messages that flit from one minutia to another, as if we’d been disconnected mid-sentence right when there was something that she absolutely had to say. “Hi Mar Mar, hey M, Ma Belle! Bisous bisous.”
* * *
It’s my younger brother’s 32nd birthday (K and I are 39) when I get the call from her sister. I’m at a Mexican restaurant in Oakland with my family, mid taco, and I don’t pick up. In the car on my way back to San Francisco her sister says hospice and weeks. The air is hazy from brush fires up north, the city skyline a dusty red. They’ve added a new section to the Bay Bridge, bright and buoyant like a sail.
When I get to her mother’s house in Arlington, Virginia, a few days later, K is sitting upright in a hospital bed in the middle of the living room, surrounded by friends and family and looking almost 149 exactly like herself. “Mar Mar!” she says. “Don’t look so serious, it’s not like I’m on death’s door.”
* * *
K is determined to die in France, so we spend our last days with her in a mad rush to renew passports, buy elaborate plane and train tickets, fill prescriptions for fentanyl and OxyContin and morphine. I am mostly useless, but I do take the rental car on a Target run for extra-large flannels and hoodies, candy-colored bottles of Pedialyte, nail polish in dark blood red. When she asks for me I sit with her in bed, rub lavender lotion onto her bad hand, stretch her curled fingers out one by one. I try to memorize the violet sweep of her eyelids, the thick arc of her eyebrows, the little freckles dotting her nose. I watch her sleep for hours – we all do – the rise and fall of her collarbones reminding us to breathe too.
* * *
K keeps coming back to life, snapping in and out of a comatose state. Delirium, the doctors call it. Her body is still young and strong, they say. But we who know her know that this is a battle of the wills. “I just want to live,” she says, then asks me to send her rosemary mint Aveda shampoo. Her inflections are right, but she sounds like a broken clone of herself, pausing at strange intervals, repeating herself in a robotic loop. I spend $50 on postage to send the Aveda shampoo to France, then start calling on my way to work to keep the conversations short. She asks Michel to take “ugly pictures” of her, but I can’t bear to see them. I want the cinematic airport farewell, not this disoriented version of her, blown up on steroids and mind flailing like a used car lot balloon.
I mostly stop calling. Instead I text her sister What the fuck is really going on? and How long? and When? Michel calls too early on a Friday morning in December, and I let the phone vibrate in my hands a few times before picking up, just to take in the relief.
* * *
In line for the sign-in book at K’s memorial, I see some of her college friends across the room. The boys who took care of her the year she had a hundred seizures. The ones who drove her to class in beat-up Honda Civics and helped her type her art history papers and broke dried spaghetti into pieces before they boiled it because they didn’t know how to cook. They were a year younger than us, maybe two, and we flirted with them in a maternal way, loved the way we could 150 make them blush with just a look. It’s been twenty years and I’m not sure if they’ll recognize me, but of course they do. Her friend Andy cracks a welcome joke, and when I hug his fleshy, comedian’s body, I can’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that he’s some kind of academic researcher now, married with a kid on the way.
K’s family friend plays a Bach sonata on violin while we settle into white cushioned folding chairs, huddled together in arced, narrow rows. By the time it’s Andy’s turn to speak, we are teary and hoping for comic relief. But Andy just stands there wide-eyed and speechless in a rumpled, untucked shirt. He scans the crowd as if trying to make eye contact with K, then starts in without introduction or preamble. He says, “Me and Katrina never did anything, and we never went anywhere. We just drove around, talking shit.” I’m not one for speeches; I don’t say a word. After the service, I drain glass after plastic glass of watery white wine while K’s people – coworkers and cousins, old boyfriends and family friends – approach me like an apparition. If I’d given a speech, I could’ve said that people always asked us if we were sisters, or that she was like a sister to me, or that she was my soul sister. All true, but far too prosaic to utter out loud.
I could’ve said that I taught K how to drive in my parents’ station wagon, winding up Grizzly Peak Boulevard into Tilden Park. I could’ve said we kept the windows down and the baseline high, that the car filled with warm, eucalyptus- and fennel-scented air and the croons of Erykah Badu.
I could’ve said that at sixteen we were as close as lovers, closer maybe. That we sealed ourselves off into station wagons and high school bedroom closets and that it all felt like the most ingenious and original inside joke. I could’ve said that, years later, it was more than miles that came between us. That K ushered me into a world outside of myself and that once I got there, I didn’t need her as much. That as my skin cleared and my figure shifted from skinny to thin, I caught up a bit to her singular beauty. That once she wasn’t my only friend, I often found the way she filled a room claustrophobic. That I stopped inviting her out, that I let her calls go straight to voicemail, that more than once I even called her mother for advice.
* * *
Today K is missing a global pandemic, but also the hummingbird that likes to rest on a branch of bamboo. And the clouds above the box houses strung across the hills, and the sea birds heading west from the bay. She would’ve loved this quarantine as much as I do, our first break from work since that year when we were inseparable 151 and only sixteen. She’s missed so much already, and if we make it through this virus, there’ll be more to miss still. I could say that I’ve had some sort of epiphany, that I’ve stopped drinking and procrastinating and learned to meditate and play the guitar and speak Italian and French. That I’ve learned not to kill my orchids, that I’ve stopped falling asleep in front of the TV. That I’ve adopted an older child and donated $25 to the ACLU. Instead I’m on the couch by the picture window in the sunroom, typing away and still in PJs at three. My dog is curled up under a yellow-and-white striped Mexican blanket, and it’s so quiet without cars on the roads that I can hear her breathing, hear robins rustling in the wood chips, hear the breeze through eucalyptus leaves and a lone plane overhead. I could say that I’ve learned something, or that I’m living a fuller life to make sense of the fact that I’m still here and she’s not. Instead I tell Rick that I just feel more alone in the world. And I love him more than I ever have when he turns to me and says, “Well, that’s because you are.”
Mara Finley’s essay “K” is her debut nonfiction publication.