Page 59 of The Seven Year Slip

“Oh my god, really?Thank you,” Fiona said in relief, and shoved the rest of the granola into her mouth.

“We’ll pay you,” Drew added.

“A bottle of rosé and I’m yours for as long as you need,” I replied, and with one last bite of yogurt, I shoved my plastic spoon into the empty cup and stood. “I should probably get back to work.”

I had begun to leave when Drew said, “Hey, you forgot your package.”

Fiona picked it up and flipped it over. “I wonder who it’s f—Oh.”

I winced.

Fiona showed Drew the name on the package, and her eyes widened. “Your aunt?” Drew asked. “But...”

“It must’ve gotten lost in the mail,” I mumbled.

My friends exchanged a worried look. Sometimes, when my aunt was alive, she’d send packages to my work to surprise me—leather-bound notebooks from Spain, teas from Vietnam, lederhosen from Germany—whenever she went traveling on her own.

But my aunt had been dead for six months.

The package must have been lost in the mail for averylong time. She hadn’t gone anywhere since last November, when she visited the last place she’d never been—Antarctica. She’d said it was the coldest she’d ever felt in her life, so cold that her fingertips still hadn’t warmed in the weeks since she’d come home.

“Is your heater working?” I had asked, and she’d laughed it off.

“Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine, my darling. Sometimes the cold just sticks to you.”

“If you say so.” I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing then—I think I was walking home from work, having just come out of the subway, my nose cold and snow sloshing the ground, but I couldn’t quite remember. You never commit a mundane moment to memory, thinking it’ll be the last time you’ll hear their voice, or seetheir smile, or smell their perfume. Your head never remembers the things your heart wants to in hindsight.

My aunt said, “I’m feeling restless. Let’s go on an adventure, my darling. I’ll meet you at the airport. Let’s pick the first flight out—”

“I can’t, I have work,” I interrupted, “and besides, I just bought our tickets to Iceland today for our trip in August. They were a real steal, so I couldn’t resist.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t want to go to Iceland?”

“No—no, I do. It’s just we’ve been before.”

“But not in August! You can apparently see the sun at midnight, and there’s this hot spring I want to try—I hear it’s really good for arthritis, so it’ll be great for you,” I added, and my aunt made a noise in her throat because it was getting more and more apparent that she didn’t like the thought of slowing down. She was sixty-two, so in her mind, she shouldn’thavearthritis. Not at least until seventy. My phone beeped. “Oh, Mom’s calling. I’ll see you in the New Year—dinner at my parents, you’ll be there?”

“Of course, darling,” she replied.

“Promise you won’t fly off on the next plane out of JFK?”

She laughed at that. “I promise, I promise. Not without you.”

And suddenly, I was back to last New Year’s morning, my phone ringing and ringing and ringing, as my head pounded. I’d drank too much the night before—too much of everything. My mouth felt like cotton candy, and I think I kissed someone at midnight, but I couldn’t remember his face. Drew and Fiona always dragged me to New Year’s Eve bashes, and it never failed that every party was all the same kind of awful.

I had felt for my phone on my nightstand, and when I’d finally found it, I unplugged it and answered. “Mom, it’s too earl—”

“She’s gone.” I had never heard my mom sound like that before. High and hysterical. Her voice cracking. Her words forced. “She’s gone! Sweetheart—sweetheart, she’s gone.”

I didn’t understand. My head was still sleepy. “Who? What do you mean? Mom?”

“Analea.” Then, quieter: “The neighbors found her. She...”

The thing no one tells you, the thing you have to find out on your own through firsthand experience, is that there is never an easy way to talk about suicide. There never was, there never will be. If ever someone asked, I’d tell them the truth: that my aunt was amazing, that she lived widely, that she had the most infectious laugh, that she knew four different languages and had a passport cluttered with so many stamps from different countries that it’d make any world traveler green with envy, and that she had a monster over her shoulder she didn’t let anyone else see.

And, in turn, that monster didn’t let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not toblameher all in the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you evenknewto ask, if you could just read between the lines and—

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