The bathroom was exactly as I remembered it, the cracked tile, the toothpaste hardened onto the rim of the sink, and the medicine cabinet mirrored to infinity if you angled it just right.
I stripped and ducked into the shower, the hot water a weak but welcome jet. As I rinsed the last of the shampoo from my hair, I thought about Billie. Not just about last night, but about all the mornings and evenings and in-betweens we’d shared as kids. How she and her sisters would come into our backyard to pick the wild blackberries, or how they’d line up on the curb and wait for my dad to finish mowing our lawn so they could run barefoot through the grass cuttings. Billie was never really a kid, at least around her sisters, she was always the one in charge, the one with the plan, the one who never cried when someone got a scraped knee. The one who would make dinner when my dad would be out on dates and forget to cook.
I tried to reconcile that girl with the grown-up Billie who’d shown up and jumped right back into her old the role and did the after-bath braids and bedtime stories before tucking the girls and me in, and then setting out the cereal bowls this morning. She hadn’t changed. I’d taken her maturity for granted. She’d always been the glue that held things together.
The water went lukewarm, so I shut off the tap and toweled off in the foggy mirror. Got dressed, and as I brushed my teeth, the reflection staring back at me was older, more worn, but still me. The same uneven jaw, the same scar above my left eyebrow from where I’d split my head open on the monkey bars in second grade. I looked out the window, half-expecting to see Billie’s house, but what I saw instead was Bailey’s, familiar but subtly altered, like the set of a play after a scene change. The deck was new, and there was now a built-in trampoline.
The backyard was alive with early morning activity. Birdsongs echoed against the fence, and two figures darted across the lawn—Bailey’s soon-to-be nephews, each rocking a superhero cape. They chased each other in loops, using the trampoline to catapult themselves onto a pile of leaves.
As I watched the scene play out, I wondered what it would mean for Billie, now that she wasn’t the anchor of her sisters’ orbit anymore. The thought left me even more frustrated at myself because I hadn’t asked her, not really, what she wanted or what she needed from her life now that her sisters were both starting their lives with their own families.
A familiar ache started behind my sternum. I’d spent so long getting used to my own company, to the rhythm of my own drum, that having anyone else in the mix—even someone as effortless as Billie—was difficult. At the same time, her absence left a jagged void in me, a gap I hadn’t noticed was there until she filled it.
I’d forgotten just how lonely this house had felt before Billie moved next door. I still don’t know what drew me to her that first day, why my six-year-old self was so instantly, viscerally certain that her presence was the missing puzzle piece. The tiny, sad little girl sitting on the porch crying.
People always say they remember the details of life-changing moments: the exact color of the sky, the way the grass smelled,what song was playing in the background. For me, it was a feeling, a certainty that beside her was where I belonged. At six, I understood that sometimes words were the last thing a person needed. We sat on that porch for who knows how long, Billie silently letting out her grief beside me, and I just kept her company as if I’d been born for that job.
If I believed in reincarnation or past lives, then I would have said my six-year-old soul knew her, because that’s what it had felt like. Something inside of me sparked with recognition the second I laid eyes on her. When I was next to her, it was like my entire body relaxed. It was the first time since my mom left that my life made sense.
We sat there in total silence. A girl whose name I didn’t even know was crying beside me, and I justknewshe needed me to sit beside her quietly. She just needed me to be there.
When she got called in to dinner, it felt like a foregone conclusion that I was going to see her the next day and the day after that and the one after that. Being with her was as natural as breathing. The only part of my life that had felt unnatural, after meeting her, was when I left for bootcamp and then cut her out of it.
I don’t know if I ever “fell” for Billie. There was no moment, no fireworks, or sudden realization, only the slow, inevitable fact of her. It was always her, always us.
There was a loud knock on the door, and I quickly spit out my toothpaste into the sink, rinsed my mouth, and turned the water off. On the way down I heard the girls running to the door.
“Someone’s here!” Joey called out.
“You girls know you’re never allowed to answer the door, right?” I didn’t know if they knew that. I didn’t know what the rules were at their grandma’s or their mom’s house.
“We have to look out the window to see if we know them,” Andi explained.
I didn’t want them to answer the door for anyone, period. But I also didn’t want to overwhelm them with rules. I was getting a security system installed along with a childproof front door lock, so it was one less thing on my list I needed to worry about. Which made it one million, five hundred, and ninety-seven things.
“Can I open it?” Joey asked since she reached the foyer first.
“Yes, because I’m here, you can.”
She flung the door open, and instead of a person, there was a brown Amazon box. I’d planned on ordering some things from Amazon today, but I hadn’t. Maybe it was Maddox, Nick, and Alex. They had some things delivered yesterday.
“Grammy’s boyfriend found us,” Joey said to Andi as they looked at each other and giggled, then got sad.
“Grammy’s boyfriend?” I repeated.
Joey’s lip started to quiver, and Andi looked up at me then explained, “When the delivery man came, Grammy used to say it was her boyfriend bringing her presents.”
Ah. I felt the ache twist in my chest. The girls hadn’t talked much about their grandma, probably because nobody wanted to be the first one to get sad. “I know you guys miss her,” I said, as gently as I could. “You can talk about her anytime you want. Even if it makes you cry. It’s okay to be sad. Being sad is good sometimes. Crying is good sometimes.”
Neither of them responded, but I could tell they’d heard me.
I scooped up the box and brought it into the kitchen, setting it on the table. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” I said, reaching for my Leatherman. The act of slicing through packing tape felt weirdly satisfying, like breaking a seal between my old life and the new.
The box popped open, and inside were two smaller boxes and a note, hand-written in blue pen:
These are for the girls’ room. Believe me, they’ll need them. Give them my love. —Billie
Billie. Of course it was Billie.
