my sister's city

I don’t tell anybody where I’m from. If they ask, I say I’m from ‘here’, or just outside a major city, or Canada. Nobody asks for details when you say you’re from Canada. I lie because there’s nothing in my hometown but weeds, and the cemetery, and my sister, who paints things that aren’t real and faints a lot. If you saw her paintings, you’d recognize them. She’s famous, my sister. Famous and crazy and fainting.

We grew up normal. As normal as you can, living in a funeral home and passing out remembrance programs on Saturdays, but normal. Maybe it would make sense if our parents filled our heads with magic and religion and stories of some sort of afterlife. But they didn’t.

In fact, I remember sitting at the kitchen table, all of seven years old, asking my dad what happens to people after they die.

“Nothing,” he’d said, “Nothing happens.” And then, “Ava, eat your potatoes.

We had to do that, sometimes. Remind my sister to eat. She would just -- stop. Eating, walking, brushing her teeth. Whatever it was, you’d look over and she wouldn’t be moving, stuck mid-motion, eyes hazy and unfocused.

“Where do you go?” I asked, once. “What happens when you Stop?”

“Nothing,” she’d say, with Mom’s smile and Dad’s empty eyes. “Nothing happens.”

When I was twelve, Skyler Warren invited me to a sleepover. Ava was fourteen. She wasn’t invited. I was the younger one, but I was always dragging Ava along. It wasn’t that kids her age didn’t like her -- or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know -- it’s just that you’d be talking to her and she’d stop answering, stop listening. Just… stop. It was creepy. I didn’t always think so. I grew up with it.

But I was twelve.

So when my mom asked me if I could bring Ava, I lied and said Skyler’s mom said no.

So maybe it was my fault.

I was at Skyler’s, so I wasn’t there to clean up after the last service, so Mom had to do it, so Ava had to do Mom’s job, which was boxing up the rest of the effects for the family. But then the phone rang while Ava was in the morgue, which meant she took her headphones out to answer it, which meant she left her pink iPod nano on the desk down there, and by the time she remembered, Mom was locking up for the night, except Ava was downstairs, grabbing her iPod, and I was at Skyler’s, which meant Mom didn’t come to tuck me in, which meant she didn’t walk by Ava’s room to say goodnight.

It wasn’t until Mom unlocked the door the next morning that she realized Ava was down there the whole time. With Mr. Haversham, who was supposed to be buried that day.

All I knew was that Mom was really late picking me up. I didn’t care. We were playing video games, which Mom didn’t let me have, so I was losing. And then Dad was in the car, which was weird, and we stopped at the Burger King, which was weirder, and then we drove into town and to the hospital and that was the day I learned the words “catatonic” and “absence seizure” and “syncope.”

I felt so guilty I crawled right into the hospital bed with Ava and wouldn’t move, even when the nurses came in to take her blood and check her blood pressure, which I still held her hand for, even though she said it didn’t hurt.

While Mom and Dad were talking to the doctors, I whispered, “You should’ve been at Skyler’s. You should’ve been with me.”

She just said “Maybe.”

Then I cried, and said, “I didn’t ask if you could come. I’m sorry.”

She only squeezed my hand and said “I know.”

Anyway, the fainting started after that. So maybe it was my fault.

Ava got really into art in high school, which Mom and Dad were absolutely thrilled about, because Ava wasn’t very good at school or sports or anything else, and I think they were afraid she was dumb. Or slow. Or developmentally delayed, except that’s not what they would’ve called it.

She wasn’t, though. Dumb, I mean. Or any of those other things. She knew a lot about a lot of stuff. She knew Geraldine Vance liked daisies, and that Fred Geller had a sweet tooth, and that Betty Hargreeves only talked to two of her sons, but all of her daughters. She noticed everything. Mom used to say Ava lived in her own little world. I think she lived in all the little pieces that she collected of other people’s worlds. She knew everyone. And knew them well.

That’s why the portraits were so good.

When Ava was fifteen, she started doing portraits for the customers, pictures of the loved ones they’d lost, backed by clouds and lit with a sort of heavenly glow. I thought they were cheesy, but the families loved them, and Mom added them to the list of services you could get, like flower delivery and silk coffin linings.

Ava used to slip me some of the cash she got doing the paintings, because she was so busy with them I had to do all the program-stuffing and cemetery cleanup, and she felt bad. I probably shouldn’t have taken it, except I wanted a car when I got older so I didn’t have to go to school in the hand-me-down hearse that Ava drove anymore.

Ava saved her cash so she could go to college.

I think she could’ve, except things started to get worse. Her junior year, she had to drop out. The fainting got so bad it was happening every day, and she fell off the risers during choir class and cracked her head on the tile floor. I found out before Mom and Dad did, because Macy Edwards was in Ava’s class, and she thought I was cute, and she texted me in the middle of freshman English. I probably should have raised my hand and asked to be excused, but I just stood up so fast my chair fell over and ran out the door.

A few days later, Ava painted The City for the first time. Until then, she’d painted the funeral portraits and our cats and some stuff from her favorite books and stuff around town or the fields and woods around it. But never anything completely from scratch, out of her own head, and from nowhere else. Even the pretend games we’d play or the stories she’d tell when we were kids were ripoffs from movies or shows or books we had. Any world she’d create was just like her own -- made up of little pieces of everyone else’s.

We lived in rural Pennsylvania, halfway between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. In the summers, we’d drive down to our grandparents’ house in West Virginia. If Ava had ever seen a real city, it was from the interstate, through the window of a minivan.

That first painting -- it shook the three of us. Mom, Dad, and me. Dark, moody colors, violent brushstrokes, hard lines and sharp corners of broken scaffolding and shattered windows of half-made skyscrapers, the street below lit in garish neon, streaked with the blur of a rain-soaked crowd, as if captured by a long-exposure lens. The viewer hung halfway up, cloaked in the dark upper levels. Looking at it gave me an acute sense of anxiety, like watching a family as they scattered handfuls of dirt over a coffin, or catching a group of kids gossiping about me at school. Grief, suspicion, isolation. Part of something, but separate. There, and not there.

Ava finished it a week after she came home from the hospital, barefoot and bathrobed, speckled with paint and greasy-haired, unable to wash it because of the bandages I wrapped around her head twice a day.

When I asked her where The City was, she said “It’s where I’ve been trying to get to.” Then she smiled -- Mom’s smile, Grandma’s smile, my smile -- but those same empty eyes, Dad’s eyes, the kind that told children truths they weren’t ready to hear. “It’s where I’ve always been.”

They let her finish the semester from home.

A few months later, Mom made me take Ava’s AP Art profile into school with me to turn in, when she was still clinging to the hope that my sister was sane, that Ava would recover over the summer and graduate and go to college and get a business degree and take over the family business and Mom could retire to Florida like all her older sisters. By then, Mom was the only one who still thought that would happen.

Even Ava, who nodded politely at the dinner table as Mom talked about safety schools and scholarships, always agreed in a placating, distracted way before wandering off to paint, or weave grass crowns, or fall unconscious somewhere the cats would lead me to when it was time to go to bed.

The folio was thick, and half the size of my lanky, pubescent body, catching the wind at the bus stop and bumping into the seats as I tried to board, unsure of the social hierarchies or where to sit after most of the year in the passenger seat of Ava’s dingy white hearse.

I don’t know why I stayed as Mrs. Black flipped through the folio in her empty classroom before first period. Maybe it was the colored-pencil portrait of me on the first page, bathed in golden light like all of Ava’s funeral portraits, passed out in an armchair with a paperback in my hand and a cat in my lap. Maybe it was because I remembered the cityscape tucked neatly in halfway through, and I was searching for hints of it in the rest of my sister’s work, or maybe the lack of them, desperate to believe her recent, unchanged darkness was really just a product of the injury. Random. Temporary. Fixable.

Mrs. Black and I watched my sister’s light fade as we paged through sketches and watercolors and acrylic. Edges blurred and lines shook, the world focusing from landscapes and whole scenes to shadowed still lifes, and then to single-object studies with spare backgrounds, bordered by hazy clouds of gray.

Then, Mrs. Black turned a page, and there it was, sharp and abrupt, the zoomed-out street, watched in the dark.

“She painted this after…” Mrs. Black whispered.

I nodded, and reached to turn the page.

Mrs. Black slammed the folio shut, said something about emailing my mother when it was graded, and sent me back to class.

As Ava got worse, Mom kept pretending she was getting better. In between, there was me, soothing her back to sleep out of screaming nightmares, making her breakfast before Mom got up for work, leaving practice to come get her from places she couldn’t remember getting to, sleeping with her keys under my pillow, installing the lock on her bedroom door. I quit soccer, and then marching band, and then my AP classes, which Mom was so proud of me for taking.

I don’t remember much of the rest of high school.

But I remember The City.

Ava’s city, that spilled out of her into sketchbooks and onto canvas and then her bedroom walls in paint and pencil and permanent marker. I remember the otherworldly spire and the six hexagonal towers and the jagged teeth of the wharf, details repeated again and again, always in the same places, viewed from a hundred different street corners and tunnels and fire escapes.

The consistency and detail made it frightening and real, a place only Ava could visit, a maze only she knew how to navigate. There was the sinkhole, and the roofless church, and a hundred different hideouts.

And The Man.

Ava never named him, but he was everywhere, wrapped in leather and black denim, leaning against walls or a black-and-chrome motorcycle, always with the same long scuff in the paint. The scene would lighten and darken with his presence or absence, his distance from the viewer. I knew his hands almost as well as my own, with how frequently Ava drew them. Always the same long white scar down his index finger, always the onyx-and silver ring.

“Who is he?” I’d ask.

The reply was always the same.

“No one you know.”

Mom started selling Ava’s paintings when the nursing home in town went under. Business dried up, and there were hospital bills and therapy bills and insurance bills. It was a desperate, last-ditch attempt, and I don’t think she thought it would work. She just called the number Mrs. Black gave her after Ava passed AP Art, and hoped.

The day of my high school graduation, Mom and Dad drove to Philadelphia with a backseat full of Ava’s paintings to talk to a gallery owner. But Ava came to watch. She sat with Mallory Hargreeves, who framed the portrait Ava did of her mother in her living room, and helped me look after my sister, sometimes. After I parked the hearse, Ava kept me from getting out, grabbing my elbow.

“What?” I asked. She handed me an envelope. “What’s this?”

“Open it.”

I did. Then, I read the number on the check.

“Ava --”

“For school,” she said, patting my hand on the bench seat. She smiled, and for a second, her eyes looked like Mom’s. Then, she got out of the car.

I went to a small school in the county seat. I lived with the son of a man we buried that owed my dad several discount-related favors in a basement apartment I rented with Ava’s money. I came home every weekend, and then every other, and then only for breaks. Ava went on medication. Mom and Dad got a home nurse for her as they sold more and more of her art. Things got… well. Better. Not good, per se, but better.

Then Ava killed our parents.

Well, that’s what everyone in town thinks is what happened. According to Martin, the coroner, Ava’s night nurse, Ava, and the state of Pennsylvania, it’s not. Everybody wants to know what I think. Truthfully, I don’t know what I believe. I don’t think Ava did it. At least, not in the way everyone else does.

Physically, Ava’s symptoms were managed. She wasn’t fainting as much, she was sleeping regularly and without wandering, and she was having fewer blackouts. But in those last few months, she was more agitated, more confused, harder to manage. We caught her trying to induce episodes, trying to puke up her meds, even drinking.

“I need to get back to them,” she said once, sobbing in my arms.

“Who?” I asked.

“My family,” she whimpered. “They need me.”

She painted the first monster not long after that.

It was a long-limbed, mossy-skinned… thing, with too many arms and double the teeth. Blood pooled around its misshapen, broken body in the corner of something that looked like a warehouse, or some other abandoned, empty place. Mom and Dad scheduled an emergency session with Ava’s therapist. They thought it was a metaphor. I don’t remember what I thought, if it was anything at all. I had a midterm. Or a project. Or an essay. Maybe if I’d paid attention. Maybe if I’d been there.

So I don’t know.

Maybe it was my fault.

I was with a girl, when they called me. Her name was Danielle. She was in my anthropology class, and we studied together. She was redheaded and funny and listened to a ton of indie musicians I’d never heard of. I liked her. I thought -- well, I don’t know what I thought. But I knew Ava would have loved her.

Did you know that the police don’t pay for crime scene cleaners? I didn’t. Officers show up, and take photos, fingerprints, journals, family pictures -- a whole host of things that don’t belong to them, like the bodies of your parents, and a few too many mints from the courtesy basket in the lobby.

They leave the blood, though, all over the walls, soaking into the carpet and the mattress, the curtains and the sheets. They leave your sister, who you are now legally in charge of, and a business card for a company who quotes you an insane amount of money to get the last of your parents off the furniture. Then they leave, and all you have left is a failing family business, and a crazy older sister, and blood on your hands, from where you opened the bedroom door.

The officers laughed when they asked Ava for a sketch of the culprit and she led them to her studio and showed them the painting of the monster. I knew, of course, that my older sister was crazy. I’d known for most of my life. But hearing her plead, and beg them to listen, while they stood, and laughed -- it wrenched open the scars made by a lifetime of hidden shame. I remember the way Ava looked at me, all doe-eyes and tears. I knew what she was asking. Instead of explaining, instead of insisting, all I did was turn away.

I think about that day every night before I fall asleep.

Anyway. We moved, after that.

I sold the funeral home to a developer that wanted to turn it into apartments, and we moved into the neighborhood behind the big box store that was built when I was in high school. My college let me finish my degree online, and Ava got worse. I sold the hearse and got a remote job doing data entry, and Ava got worse. I took my sister to appointments and picked her medication up from the pharmacy and pinched her nose and covered her mouth to make her swallow pills and Ava got worse.

I don’t like to think about those days. Sometimes, I think if I might’ve been better -- at any of it -- maybe… I don’t know. Maybe things would be different.

Collectors bought paintings of dead monsters and then living monsters and then the same darkness and shattered reflection, shards arranged in a thousand different ways.

Ava woke up screaming and then woke up crying and then one day, didn’t wake up at all.

I don’t know.

Maybe it was my fault.

There was one last painting.

A grave. Not like the ones we grew up with, in a grassy field surrounded by neat rows of headstones carved with dates decades apart and dressed with faded fabric flowers that will outlast the bones beneath them. No, this grave is shallowly and hastily dug, surrounded by fresh mounds of dirt, the last dignity gifted to the casualties of war. Beside it, a stained white sheet covers a body.

It is The Man.

I know this only in the way a student of my sister’s art would know. I know this because it is his shoulders stretching the fabric, his boots peeking out the bottom. I know this because on the index finger of the hand that has escaped the covering, there is a singular long scar, and an onyx and silver ring.

I call Martin, the coroner, who gave me my first pack of Pokemon cards and always brought me a new one when I helped him unload the bodies from the nursing home. When I met him, he had a head of thick, golden-brown hair. Now, it is gunmetal gray, and I can see his skull through the thinning strands.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he says, as he stands in my sister’s room. I shrug. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think. I just know yesterday I had a sister, and today I don’t. I feel hollowed out, and wrong. I wanted to leave, but not like this. Never like this. Martin performs his exam, and asks me questions, and I answer them, leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, watching without seeing.

“Kid,” Martin says, frowning into Ava’s blank, lifeless eyes, “you got guns around?”

“No,” I answer, dread creeping up my throat. “Why?” Martin gestures to my sister’s face, and steps aside. He looks at me expectantly.

I don’t want to step inside Ava’s room. The City watches from the walls, twinkling with artificial light and broken glass. Ava’s monsters lurk in corners, shaped like claws and teeth and reflective, intelligent eyes.

I asked her not to paint it in the new house. The City, I mean. But, without it, Ava said it “would never really feel like home.” Crossing the threshold, I wish I hadn’t let her. I wish I’d stopped buying her paint. I wish I’d taken away her brushes and canvases and ability to hide.

I don’t know.

Maybe it was my fault.

Martin puts his hand on my shoulder as I step up to see the bullet hole in my sister’s forehead. It is there, undeniably dark, small and round and impossible. Her pillow is soaked with blood and brain matter. In one hand, there is a paintbrush, sticky and black, and in the other, our great-grandmother’s hand mirror. In neither is there a gun.

With a shaking hand, I reach out and close my sister’s eyes. The blood smears and the painted wound flakes away under my touch. Underneath, her forehead is stained, but unmarred. She is still dead.

“Well,” Martin says, in the tone of a man unused to surprise, “Ain’t that something.”

Yes, Martin. Yes it is.

I never told anyone, but I knew my sister was going to kill herself. Not actually, not for sure. I mean, you always hope you’re wrong, right? But I knew, in the way you just know things, sometimes.

There was lots of talk of going, in those last days. She made me promise her things. That I’d leave. That I’d see the ocean, fall in love, name my daughter after her. I told her therapist I was worried, but they just upped her meds. I cried when I found the pile of pills under her mattress. I didn’t stop for three days.

So I don’t know.

Maybe it was my fault.

I asked her why she had to go, once.

When I was a kid, the therapist told us not to “feed into her delusions.” But to deny Ava The City was to deny a part of her. And she is -- was -- my sister. To deny a part of her was to deny a part of myself. Like pretending I didn’t have a left foot, or something. So I asked her.

When she looked at me, I felt eight years old again, learning fractions. There was something she knew that I didn’t, something I might learn, if only I would listen to her. Growing up, I hated that look. In adulthood, it was jarring. Truthful, somehow. Like this crazy, fainting Ava was still my Ava, who sang songs and captured frogs and read to me under the covers with a flashlight.

It is that moment, I remember the most.

Since Ava died, I see The City everywhere. I sold the house. I moved away. I run as fast as I can, but The City follows. Hexagonal towers haunt every skyline. The spire lurks around every turn, looming over me, disappearing with a blink or the turn of my head. Ava’s monsters peek around corners in motel rooms and the spare bedrooms of strangers.

At night, my sister is a flash of hair and the echo of a bright laugh, disappearing around bends and through doors that open into bombed-out high rises. I wake up covered in bruises and scrapes and blood that isn’t mine. Sharp teeth and long limbs live in every closet, behind every dumpster. In a biker bar, I meet a man with a scar on his index finger. We play cards, and I win his onyx-and-silver ring.

“If I stay,” she’d said, “It will start to follow me.”

Oh, Ava.

It already did.