There Will Come a Time (3 page)

The first year Jenny lived with us, she tried to cook Filipino food, which Dad thought was cute. Grace reminded her each time that we didn't just eat Filipino food, which was true, but it was our comfort food.

Jenny started with
adobo
. Now, everyone knows that each family makes
adobo
differently, some with chicken, some with pork, some more dry. Jenny found a recipe that called for coconut milk. Mom never used coconut milk. I know she was trying to please us, but yeah, it didn't come out right.

I will say, Mom makes a perfect
adobo
, better than the aunties', though I'd never tell them that. Sometimes I'll order it at a restaurant. It's never the same. I explained it once to Jenny:
adobo
's like Italians and their pasta sauce. She stopped trying after that. The aunties taught her how to make awesome
lumpia
, though, and she'll make that every now and then.

“Good. Dinner's at six p.m.,” Jenny says.

We're discussing food, but we're not talking food. Jenny's subtext is,
We're worried about you. We want to spend time together, to act like we're a normal family. I'm making your favorite dish. Please try. For us.

When Grace died, I thought I was going insane. I bailed on everything: school, friends, music. I started “acting out.” After I
screamed at Dad and Jenny to “Leave me the fuck alone” and slammed my fist into a wall, they set up appointments with Chris. Chris said I might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which I didn't believe. I know guys come back from war with that. I hadn't been in any war. Chris said PTSD could happen after any kind of trauma, and explained that it could make you emotionally detached, prone to bouts of anger and replaying the incident of trauma over and over.

I told Chris, “I lost my twin. She died. People die every day. It's called grief. People handle it.”

“How do you think you're handling it?”

The way he said
handling it,
as if the words had quotations around them, set my mouth, and I didn't say anything for the rest of our time.

“Mom, zip me up!” Fern yells as she runs into my room. Fern is named after the girl in
Charlotte's Web
, one of Jenny's favorite books. She looks nothing like a little white farm girl, but the name somehow fits her. She takes after Jenny with her lighter olive skin tone, but she looks like Grace and me in the eyes and the dark hair. Jenny's more of a dark blond. When Fern smiles, the small space between her two front teeth is just like Dad's. She's the perfect Filipino-Italian-American girl.

“Is that how we ask?” Jenny says.

“Please?”

Jenny helps Fern with her blue princess dress.

Fern twirls in front of me. Today she's Cinderella.

Jenny fixes the bun in Fern's hair so that a couple of black strands are loose and frame her face. “Beautiful girl.”

“You want to play princess with me, Mark?” she asks.

“Tempting,” I say, “but I need to practice.”

“You always say that.”

“It's true.”

She pouts. “Grace would play with me.”

It takes everything inside of me to not throw my bass across the room.

“Fern,” Jenny says, “why don't you go to your room? I'll come play with you in a minute.” Fern's pink slippers scamper across the wood floor like little bunnies.

Jenny looks around as if she's working up the courage to say something. I speak up instead.

“She's just a kid.” Kids talk and don't always know what they're saying. I remember this one time we were standing at a stop sign next to a very large man and Fern told me, “He's fat.” I had been so embarrassed. The man could obviously hear her, but he didn't even look in our direction.

Of the two of us, Grace spent more time with Fern. I kind of treat her like she's an experiment, pushing buttons and pulling levers to see how she'll react. Fern is my sister, but our age
gap is so huge, I feel more like an uncle than a brother. There is no way we could be as close as Grace and me.

Since Grace and I were twins, we shared more than blood and a last name. Most twins, I think, have this uncanny closeness. I've heard stories about the ones who can actually feel pain when the other is hurt. We didn't have any superpowers like that. We couldn't read each other's minds, though it wasn't for lack of trying. When we were kids, we'd sometimes practice for hours, staring at each other, flinging our thoughts across the room, but it never worked. But I did know
how
Grace thought. I knew how she felt. I knew how she'd answer questions, how she only liked nuts in ice cream and not in cookies.

And when Grace died, I knew rationally she wasn't here anymore. I knew she was gone. She
is
gone.

But I can still feel her. Sometimes she speaks to me. I'm not talking voices in my head, more like whispers of past conversations. It's like being an amputee with a missing arm, reaching out to scratch an itch or still feeling pain. Grace is my phantom limb. I told this to my friend Sebastian once and he understood it right away. It was the one true thing I offered to Chris in our sessions. He said to give it time, that eventually the feeling would go away. That pissed me off because what made him think I wanted it to go away?

Maybe it's because I've shared my life with Grace from
the very beginning, since we were pressed back to back in our mom's womb. The story is that when the doctor delivered us by C-section, we were holding hands. The doctor had to literally unclasp our fingers because I wouldn't or she wouldn't let go. I came out first, so Grace jokingly called me her big brother.

“School's almost here,” Jenny says. “Looking forward to it or hating the idea?” I'm surprised to see tears in the corners of her eyes. Fern's comment about Grace must be the cause. I try not to show it, but the tears make me angry. I don't even know why, but I feel like breaking something again.

“More like neutral about it.”

She holds out her hand for my empty plate. “Well, I loved senior year. Let me know if you need anything.” I imagine dropping it and watching it shatter on the floor, but I give it to Jenny because I am
handling it
just fine.

•  •  •  •

After showering, I tell Jenny I'm going out and make my way over to Sebastian's family's Korean BBQ food truck. It's parked at one of their usual Sunday spots in Los Feliz.

Since it's lunchtime, there's a substantial line at the food truck. I go to the front, probably pissing off some people, but I don't care. I met Sebastian freshman year in jazz band. He's the drummer and I'm the bass player, so it's not really a surprise that we became friends. Now I'm practically family. Sebastian's dad
sees me through the window and waves me away with a quick flip of his wrist, but Sebastian gives me a nod, the acknowledgment I was looking for.

I sit on a brick wall and wait for things to calm down. Their truck is very popular, and people follow it from place to place. Sebastian's family actually owns a couple in the area. They started with one in LA when the food truck craze hit years back and then expanded.

Sebastian eventually brings me a plate of beef ribs, rice, and kimchee and joins me on the wall. Sebastian's short, about 5'5". He's half-Korean and half-white, but all skinny.

“How's work?” I take a bite. Damn, it's good food.

“Crazy.” He removes the black fishnet hat he has to wear. “What's going on?”

“Nothing.”

“What does your dad put in this stuff?”

“Old family recipe,” Sebastian says with a mock Korean accent, and smiles.

After Grace died, Sebastian came over with his drum kit and we played for hours until we were both sweating and exhausted. He didn't ask me any questions or tell me stupid stuff, like
She's in a better place
or
God needed another angel in Heaven
.

I hated that last one, because it didn't make any sense. Angels aren't former people, for one thing. Angels are their own
separate beings. So there's no way that Grace is now an angel in Heaven. Maybe she is in a better place, but we don't really know that. We can't really say with certainty what happens after we die, where we go, if our souls live on or if they just evaporate.

Some people say that God has a plan for everything, and when life is going well that sounds good. But to think God's plan was to let a seventeen-year-old girl die in a car accident before she's really lived her life, before she was able to figure out why she's here in the first place, and leave me behind like a cruel joke—well, that would be one screwed-up plan by one screwed-up God. I believe in God—so did Grace—but not that kind of God. God isn't a sadist. God is supposed to be all loving and shit.

Grace's death was tragedy. Pure tragedy. No amount of explaining could erase the meaninglessness of her death. If I thought about it too much, I started acting like a person Grace would be disappointed in.

“I've been thinking,” Sebastian says.

He's got that faraway look of his. The one that comes when he's going to get all profound about the universe. I prepare myself. “What?” I wipe my mouth with a small rough white napkin.

“With all this space and stars and galaxies, the probability of extraterrestrial life is a given. It's only a matter of time before
there's contact. I hope I'm here to see it.” He looks up as if he's expecting something to fall from the clear blue sky.

Sebastian's obsession with the stars and the idea of alien life apparently started in the sixth grade when an uncle bought him a telescope. He is a member of some club at the observatory. I tend to overlook his major geekiness because Sebastian is a kick-ass drummer and beat maker and my friend. I also indulge him in these conversations, because what else were we going to talk about?

“I've been thinking the same thing,” I say with a bit of humor that isn't lost on Sebastian.

“I'm serious.”

“No, really. I bet they're out there—aliens, I mean. They're, like, millions of miles away—”

“Light-years,” Sebastian says. “Maybe even trillions.”

“Lots of light-years away. And they're wondering if they are the only life-forms in the universe, except they only have to think it because they speak telepathically.”

“It's plausible.” Sebastian seems pleased with my response.

“You think they eat kimchee?” I ask.

“Maybe. You ready for school Monday?”

“Sure. You?”

“Yeah. Senior year. Should be cool, right?”

“Right.” Though I feel more like I'm going through the
motions. If I were honest, I'd tell him I don't know how I'll make it through the first class.

“Come on. You can help me clean up.”

I start to protest, but he points to my now-empty plate.

“Nothing's for free, man.”

I follow Sebastian to the truck. No, nothing's for free. I toss my plate in the black trash bin. Most things come with a great cost.

O
n Monday morning Sebastian and I sit in his car in the school parking lot. Normally I would have driven myself, but the car Grace and I shared was totaled in the accident. Sebastian agreed to be my ride to school until I got a new car. The insurance gave us plenty of money to replace the car, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. The accident was the other driver's fault. He had reached for something he'd dropped and swerved into our lane, hitting us head-on. He came out without a single scratch. I had to get stitches in my head and Grace was pronounced dead at the hospital at 8:43 p.m., but I knew that wasn't true. She died at the scene. I saw her. She never took a breath.

When the clock on Sebastian's dashboard turns to eight, he says, “Ready?”

“Yep.”

Eleven minutes. I have eleven minutes to walk across the campus to my first-period class. Outside of the car, I pull my beanie low, sling my electric bass over my shoulder, and do a quick check in the passenger-side window. I changed my plugs from black to white this year. Something different. They're small. I don't want to have my lobes hanging down to my shoulders when I'm twenty-five or something, but I like the way they look.

I walk like I'm supposed to be here, with my shoulders back and head up. I look people in the eyes. I don't give them the option to avoid mine. The more normal I act, the more comfortable they'll be. In a few days, it'll be like nothing happened. I just have to get through today.

Stephanie comes up and puts her hand on my arm. “So good to see you, Mark.” She gives a little squeeze. Even though Grace and I didn't go to the same school, everyone knows what happened last year on the bridge.

“You too,” I say, and push past her, a smile on my face. Seven minutes.

I go to this high school for the arts, which is pretty cool and kick back, but demanding, especially during recital and concert
times. I got in after auditioning in the eighth grade. It was the first time Grace and I were really separated. We had always attended the same school. Most of the time we were even in the same classes. She could have gotten in here for her writing, but she didn't want to apply. She preferred going to the same high school as Hanna.

The school day is divided. During the first half we function like a normal high school, with typical academic classes like English, math, and science. But the second half is different. The second half is playtime. We spend the rest of the day working in our artistic areas. It's a long day, some of us don't leave the campus till six, and sometimes it's tough managing everything, but we are there for a reason. We are doing what we love to do. We are artists first, brothers, friends, skaters, athletes, whatever, second. Freaks at any other school, I guess, except here, where everyone is a bit odd in their own way.