“Soon,” Hazel said. “Give me a minute.”
In the muted chaos, no one noticed Hazel slipping out the front door.
Her ears rang with the sudden silence of the outside world. Hazel slid into her car, parked across the street because the driveway was full. The empty block was dim. A buggy, navy blue. From out here, the house looked like a television screen, playing a sad movie. A relief, to be alone. Hazel did not turn on the engine, only sat in the quiet, reveling, before she leaned over and opened the glove compartment.
It was still there. Just as heavy as she remembered. That cursed and miserable ring.
Just ten months ago, Hazel had dropped Jenny off at the airport—had seen her sister for the very last time. Now, she held the jewel in her palm as a simmering rage arrived, along with a memory she’d stowed away years ago: Ansel, the day he gifted Jenny this ring. Ansel, out in the moonlight, digging.
Hazel stumbled through her parents’ back gate, the purple ring glistening, beckoning her forward. The maple tree was just as Hazel had always known it, the branches like fatherly arms, reaching to comfort. Hazel paced circles around it—all those winters ago, she had seen Ansel from her bedroom, holding her dad’s shovel. She had convinced her teenage self that it had been a dream, but as Hazel trailed the base of the tree, it seemed crucial that she find the spot.
She crouched, squinted. Alert for the first time in days, Hazel stood over a patch of earth where the grass had been flattened, turned up bare. As Hazel pulled her father’s shovel off the wall of the garage, the plastic handle cold beneath her fingers, she knew it had not been a dream. She had seen Ansel out here, in the glow of the winter moon. He had been digging.
By the time Hazel’s shovel hit the little box, her nails were black with dirt. She flicked on her cell phone light, aimed it into the pit—she’d hit an old jewelry box of Jenny’s, plastic and unsentimental. The sort of clutter Jenny would never miss. Hazel brushed the soil away and tucked the box awkwardly beneath her dress, before pushing discreetly back into the house. Head down, she ducked for the stairs.
Her parents had recently renovated—they’d turned Hazel and Jenny’s old bedroom into a gym. When Hazel creaked the door open, she almost expected to see her ballet shoes hanging from hooks on the wall, makeup scattered across the surface of Jenny’s dresser. The smell of exercise equipment hit her instead, the metallic tang of the dumbbells her father never used. A treadmill sat in the center of the room and a series of workout DVDs were lined up beneath the static television. In the corner, Hazel could still see the imprints in the carpet where the feet of Jenny’s bed had dug in.
She sat on the edge of the treadmill, ran a hand along the track of unmoving vinyl. She let a wave of grief engulf her, then pass. Like when they were little, playing in the surf on the Nantucket shore. When you see a wave, you have to make a choice, Jenny had instructed, bossy as always. Either swim against it or ride it home.
The box in Hazel’s lap was caked in a sheet of dirt. She cleared it away, flecking soil onto the carpet as she clicked open the lid. There was no wave of recognition. No crush of nostalgia. The jewelry inside did not belong to Jenny. Hazel had never seen it before. A beaded barrette, and a small pearl bracelet.
Disappointment crashed down, a foamy burst. Luis would know what to do with the jewelry, the hole in the ground, the unanswerable questions. Hazel could only revel in the unfairness. The inescapability.
This was her story now. It would always be something that had happened to Jenny, and to Hazel, and she would be rewriting the narrative for the rest of her life, shaping it, defining it, hurling it against the wall. It would be years before she learned to inhabit a world without her sister, if such a thing were even possible. The magnitude of what she’d lost felt reckless, inexhaustible. She had not yet considered Ansel in any real way—she pushed the anger away when it nudged at her ribs, too immersed in the long swim through shock. This was not about him. It never had been. It seemed insane, almost laughable, that one person—Ansel, a single man, so deeply average—had created a chasm so colossal.
Hazel closed her eyes and wished the gym equipment away. She prayed desperately for a Summoning, but all she got was this: the reception clattering on downstairs, the pattering unfairness of her own ragged breath. It seemed that from now on, nothing would be a Summoning, or everything would be, depending how she saw it. Hazel was no longer one half of a whole, but instead the whole itself—a Summoning was not magic, or telepathy, or some freaky twin thing. Jenny was gone, and now their connection was as primal and elusive as the fluid in which they’d both been formed. It was cellular. It was infinite. Simply, it was memory.