When I Was Death

The girls arrived on a bleak morning in May, eight months after my sister’s death. I first saw them through my bedroom window, three vehicles—rust-eaten pickup truck, an old station wagon, and an Airstream RV—crawling down the street and around the bend of the cul‑de‑sac. There were three teenage girls sitting in the bed of the pickup truck, all of them staring at my house as though it were a landmark. I stared back, and I swore one of them—pale girl with hair like fire—looked up at my window and smiled. But by the time I scrambled downstairs and burst through the front door, they were gone. I might’ve thought I’d dreamed them if not for the smell of diesel hanging like a ghost in the cool morning air.

A few hours later, I left my house and walked down the sorry little main street of my hometown in Michigan. But calling it a town at all is generous. Towns are comprised of people, and once emp­tied of them, they lose their respective designations and become something else. The something else is what I walked through that day. Cracked streets licked with heat waves, a thin trickle of traffic passing by. The dusty storefronts of antique shops and jewelry stores that never had any customers. The remnants of a place that barely existed.

I scanned the streets, half hoping to spot the girls who had driven past my house that morning, but they seemed to have dis­appeared without a trace.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

It was a two-mile walk from my house to Conny’s Coney Dogs, the twenty-four-hour diner where I worked as a waitress. The diner’s owner and namesake, Conny—tall, grave woman who smelled perpetually of patchouli and pot smoke—had hired me, probably out of pity, because I’d never waited a table in my life. By that time, the whole town knew about my sister and had closed ranks around my family the way small towns are supposed to when something tragic and terrible happens to one of their own.

But Conny had offered something others hadn’t: distraction. In the long months that followed my sister’s death, she taught me the rhythms of the diner—how to flirt tips from begrudging patrons who had next to nothing in their pockets, how to anticipate their needs with no more than a passing glance. In the grimy staff bath­room, I gathered my curls into a fat braid, scrubbed at my armpits with hand soap and a soggy wad of paper towels (I’d slept through my alarm and hadn’t had the chance to shower) before changing into my uniform. It was a peach-pink dress—the color of a new­born baby’s flush—with snagged stockings and a paper-ale apron so small it didn’t cover much of anything. Once dressed, I pinned on my name tag just a few inches below my starched collar. It read Roslyn Volk in smudged Sharpie, because Conny liked it when her servers introduced themselves by their first and last names. Some­thing about the importance of family, of knowing where a person was from and, in her words, exactly what stuff they were made of.

My sneakers squelched on the sticky tile floors as I carried steaming plates of pancakes and scrambled eggs, biscuits half sub­merged in gravy, and burnt triangles of toast to their respective tables. I refilled coffeepots and chatted with the regulars, trying my best to keep up with the breakfast rush.

On a staticky TV screen above the bar, the news was playing, though the sound was partly drowned out by the clamor of the kitchen—pots and pans clattering, slabs of bacon sizzling on the grill, cooks shouting orders above the din. The headline of the day was a string of violent storms that had washed across the Midwest the night before, spawning a series of tornadoes, one of which flat­tened a small town in Ohio, claiming the lives of more than a dozen people. It was the first bad storm of the year, and the meteo­rologist predicted more would follow.
There was a congressman on TV crying about the devastation when the girls entered the diner, the five of them streaming in sin­gle file.

One of the girls wore a long fur-collared coat despite the thick­ening heat. Another swept past in a heavy peasant skirt paired with a cropped and pilled flannel shirt. A third wore heavy boots and ripped men’s jeans that looked like they were fished from the bowels of a Salvation Army bin and attacked with a razor.

They were around my age, but they dressed the way sixth graders imagined themselves dressing at twenty, without the smothering supervision of their parents or the pressure of their peers. Their hair was wild, as if none of them owned a brush. And they were all pretty, but in the way that girls find each other pretty. Which is to say, unkempt and decidedly intimidating, like a boy’s idea of a dream girl gone ragged at the edges.