Bonnie placed the remainder of her bagel carefully in the foil and turned to them, her face twisted with worry.
“There’s something I’ve never told you,” she said.
Avery and Lucky looked at her in surprise.
“What is it?” Lucky asked.
Bonnie swallowed slowly.
“The day before she died, she asked me…She asked if I could get painkillers for her at the gym and I said no.” Bonnie dropped her head into her hands. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know she was going to buy them.”
“Oh, Bonnie,” said Avery, reaching for her sister instinctively, “no one could have known. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I wanted to protect her,” she said. “Or me. I don’t know.” She looked at them both with a pleading look in her eyes. “Do you think I should have done it?”
“Absolutely not,” said Avery decisively. She couldn’t bear for Bonnie to think that for even one second. “You did the right thing.”
“I never thought she would…What she did,” said Bonnie.
They sat in silence, staring ahead. It was still hard to even name what had happened to Nicky. Overdose always sounded like they were talking about someone else, someone who was nothing like their confident, capable sister.
“You weren’t the only one,” said Lucky quietly. “I knew she was struggling, that she wanted to get off the pain meds.”
“You did?” asked Bonnie.
“There was this wishing tree at her school,” Lucky explained. “Where we wrote our wishes on pieces of paper and tied them to it. I looked at hers without her knowing and that’s what she wished for. No more pills. I saw it, but she denied it afterward and I didn’t push it. I didn’t want to make it worse…Or I was too self-involved to try, I don’t know.”
Lucky hung her head. Avery placed a hand on her back.
“I knew too,” said Avery. “Deep down. It was her eyes.”
More and more frequently, Nicky’s pupils had been tiny black dots. Avery had noticed because it reminded her of how Freja’s pupils used to shrink to pinpricks after they shot up, a mirror of what Avery’s own eyes must have looked like. But Avery had convinced herself it wasn’t the same thing.
“I want you both to listen to me,” she said, turning now to Bonnie and Lucky. “I know we want to make sense of what she did, and blaming ourselves for not doing more is one way to do that, but none of us could have changed what happened to her.” She thought of what their mother had said. “None of us are that important.”
They watched as a knot of pigeons corkscrewed into the sky and disappeared into the blue.
“But how do we live with it?” Lucky asked softly.
It was the question they had all been asking themselves in one form or another for the past year. How to live with this grief. How to love a life without their sister in it. Avery sighed.
“I think Dad told us,” Avery said. “At the funeral.”
Lucky looked up.
“The Breakfast at Tiffany’s thing,” she murmured. “Go lightly. But how?”
“You’re doing it already,” said Avery. “Not drinking anymore, taking care of yourself, that’s going lightly.”
“She’s right,” said Bonnie, nodding.
“What about you two?” Lucky asked. “How are you going lightly?”
Avery looked at Bonnie.
“Well,” Bonnie began. “Don’t make fun of me…but, sometimes, I talk to God.”
“God?” repeated Avery.
Bonnie may as well have said Ronald McDonald for all the comfort the idea of God brought Avery.
“Not Jesus Christ or anything like that,” clarified Bonnie quickly. “It’s a different kind of God, one I kind of made up. It, or She, or I don’t know what to call it, is someone for me to talk to. And I think they’re looking after Nicky until we get to see her again.”
“Do you really think something’s looking after her?” asked Lucky, her voice high with hope.
Bonnie nodded.
“I do.”
“Good,” said Lucky softly.
“I want to believe that, Bon…” said Avery. “But honestly, I’m not sure that I can.”
“Can you just believe that I believe it?” asked Bonnie. “Does that help?”
Avery considered this. The idea of anything helping Bonnie brought her comfort too—that she knew to be true.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it could.”
