Goldengrove by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page B

or better yet that she missed me or needed me to do her a favor. I wanted her to appear in a dream and say, “Nico, go burn a candle at my Billie Holiday altar.” My logical mind had been invaded and possessed by the spirit of a superstitious lunatic. I thought about Margaret helping me, pulling strings from beyond. But what did I want her to do except not be dead, a miracle that, even I knew, was beyond my sister’s powers?
    I stood, very still, in her doorway. Then I crawled into her bed. The pillow smelled like Margaret. Not like cookies, exactly, but cookielike. Purely her. I inhaled, and it was like sucking on one of those plastic pipes that help asthmatic kids breathe. The lump in my throat dissolved enough for me to get some air, but only for a second, and I was choking again. Maybe I did have a heart condition. I rolled over onto my side and curled up into a ball.
    When I opened my eyes, I was staring into a snow globe on Margaret’s night table. I’d always loved it and wished it were mine. I used to imagine that if I stared into it hard enough, I could dissolve into atoms and pass through the scratched plastic globe, and a miniature version of me would reassemble inside it, twirling in the storm beside the tiny ballerina that I realized, only now, was a figure skater.
    One summer, when I was a toddler, we rented a summer cottage. In the kitchen was a wall-sized ’70s photo mural of a meadow in the Rockies. My parents told me that I used to scoot my walker across the room and get a running start and hurl myself against the wall, trying to break through to the wildflower field. It was the same with the snow globe. I’d shake it, longing to enter that other dimension, staring and staring until Margaret ordered me to stop.
    Now I shook the snow globe and watched the miniature skater stalled in mid-pirouette by the storm of cottony flakes bigger than her yellow head. How wintry Margaret’s room was! My fingertips were frozen. I pulled the tie-quilt up to my neck. I must have slept, because I woke with that ravenous nausea that can follow a restless nap. I dragged myself out of bed and walked over to the closet. I touched a feather boa, a sequined vest, an organdy skirt I couldn’t remember Margaret wearing, until I was stopped by the sight of Margaret’s favorite vintage T-shirt, dark blue with a silver shooting star trailed by a glitter comet.
    As I pushed the shirt toward the back of the closet, Margaret’s Hawaiian shirt pitched itself straight at me. Pineapples, bunches of coconuts, splashy purple orchids grew from palms with fronds like the arms of the hula girls swaying beneath them. Margaret was generous with her clothes, but she would never lend me that one. She claimed it was some ancient synthetic that disintegrated, like Dracula, on contact with the sun. I didn’t see how that could have been true, because Margaret wore it day and night, especially when she went out with Aaron.
    I tried on the Hawaiian shirt. The rayon was cool, almost slimy. I was thinking the unthinkable: I could have anything Margaret owned. My parents would let me, they’d want me to take whatever I wanted. How angry Margaret would be if she came back and discovered what I’d done. But she wasn’t coming back. I felt light-headed, almost weightless.
    I didn’t want Margaret’s snow globe or her clothes. I wanted to see her, just once.
    I looked at myself in the mirror. And I saw her. With each step, Margaret’s ghost expanded. Gingerly, I touched the glass. I thought of those fairy-tale mirrors that show you your dearest wish in return for some terrible price. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Your firstborn son for straw woven into gold, a glimpse of your drowned sister for something more expensive. Margaret filled the mirror and floated off the edges, and by the time I’d backed away far enough for the glass to contain her, Margaret had vanished, and there I was, wearing her hula shirt.
    The girl in the mirror still wasn’t