Suzanna

by Sophie Castro

Original artwork by Lauren Felvus

When Suzanna asks me what dying feels like, she’s drunk, laying with her head hung upside down off the side of my bed.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, my legs curled into the beanbag chair we’ve displaced from Phillip’s bedroom—the chair that used to be ours, that’s too small for us now, but still molds best to the soft indentations of our bodies.

Suzanna lets her eyes travel the length of my bare calf, where a white scar cuts a path through my unshaven hair. “You died though.”

I nod, but it was ten years ago now, and almost no one asks me to remember. If anything, they ask me to forget. When Mom stares too long at my leg, when Dad brushes his fingers across my scar. They are remembering torn metal, and a mangled car, a failed DWI test, and an elderly paramedic cracking the ribs of my seven-year-old skeleton. There is heartbreak in their gaze, and in their heartbreak, I know they are asking me to forget.

“So how do you not know?” Blood starts to pool in Suzanna’s upside-down face. Red hides the freckles along her forehead. In the carpet beside her, there is a bottle of Sprite that’s almost entirely vodka.

“I don’t really remember,” I say. There is a small silence as Suzanna wonders if the not-remembering is a failure of my memory or simply death itself.

“I remember,” Suzanna tells me.

Again, I nod.

She told me when we were fourteen, when she learned how to pick a lock, and stole the good scotch from Dad’s liquor cabinet. She told me again when we were fifteen, and Aunt Lindsey snuck us wine at Christmas. She told me the first time she took tequila shots, and the last time she shotgunned a beer.

“I saw you stop breathing,” she says, staring at the popcorn bumps in my ceiling. “I heard your ribs break.”

Instinctually, I lean back, feel the click of where the cartilage never fully healed.

“Your blood was on my dress,” she adds.

I close my eyes, and this part I do remember. Suzanna in a blue-green dress, red stains set in her satin, siren lights reflecting off her bare feet. It’s the image I come back to when strangers ask if we’re identical, when distant relatives inspect us like wax figures in a museum. “You’re sure?” they ask, and we smile. “We’re sure,” we tell them. “We’re not even real twins,” we shock them. “We’re Irish twins,” we explain. I was born eleven months before Suzanna.

“No!” they say.

Later, in the safe silence of our car, Suzanna rolls her eyes. “We don’t even have the same hair,” she says. “Do you see it?”

I think of Suzanna on the highway median. Her looking at me, and me thinking that I was looking at myself. That some intangible part of my soul had detached, and I was looking at the body left behind.

“They wouldn’t let me ride in the ambulance.”

Suzanna’s flipped onto her stomach now. She has the Sprite that’s mostly vodka pressed to her lips, and I know she won’t remember this in the morning.

“They wouldn’t let me see you in the hospital.”

She asked me once, if I get annoyed when she blacks out. No, I told her. I like being the keeper of our memories.

“I snuck in anyway.” Suzanna holds her bottle out towards me. “Do you remember that?” she asks.

I take the bottle, but don’t drink. I don’t want to be hungover tomorrow, and the soda is flat now, anyway. “Yes,” I say.

She climbed into my bed when Mom and Dad were talking with the doctors. She curled around me the way she used to when we shared a crib. The weight of her body tugged the IV away from my vein.

I smile. “You got in trouble for that.” I hand the bottle back to her.

“Worth it,” Suzanna says. She turns again onto her back; lets her hair tangle with the pilling yarn of my carpet. In the sheets beside her, her phone buzzes softly. It’s Friday night. There are six parties she could be at right now, two boys she could be kissing, countless strangers who could be falling in love with her.

Suzanna attempts to sip her drink while still upside down and laughs as liquor dribbles down her nose. I smile. I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t loved Suzanna for at least for a little while. I hand her an old shirt that she uses to wipe her face. Her phone buzzes.

“Somewhere you need to be?” I ask.

She shakes her head, then thinks. She glances to where my suitcases are packed in the corner. “Here,” she corrects herself. She turns onto her stomach, and stretches her hand out to where I’m folded in the beanbag chair, but she’s too far away, and I have to extend my leg until she can just barely brush the skin on my ankle, her hands cold, and still sticky from spilled Sprite. The gesture is more absurd than endearing, but I don’t pull away. I let her linger, gleaning whatever comfort she can from the bones of my ankle.

On the back of her hand, there is the black marker outline of two sparrows on a telephone wire. Not the nondescript silhouette of birds, but sparrows, with conical beaks and rounded wings, and not for the first time I think of what a beautiful artist she would have made.

I asked her once why she doesn’t try art school.

“What would I do?” she asked.

“Be an artist,” I told her.

“I’m not good enough,” she said. Not in a self-deprecatory way. She wasn’t fishing for a compliment or asking for reassurance. Her tone had the apathetic finality of a fact.

“You could teach," I told her, and she smiled. We both knew she would never teach. She didn’t have the patience, she wasn’t good with kids. She lacked the capacity to care for anyone who was not herself or me. Even Phillip, who was born when we were ten years old and is now seven, who worships the ground she walks on, who shares her eyes and artistic drive, who is probably the only person in the world as funny as her. Even him she doesn’t fully understand or acknowledge. She oscillates between finding him vaguely amusing and simply forgetting he exists.

I hear Mom and Dad talking about it sometimes when Suzanna is out of earshot. “She just doesn’t care about anything,” they tell each other. They cite her lists of ex-boyfriends, ex-best friends, abandoned hobbies, and quit sports.

“She cares about me,” I tell them, and they look at me as if surprised to find I’m still in the room.

“That’s true,” they say.

In my bedroom, Suzanna’s hand is still pressed against my ankle. “Do you know how long you were gone?” she asks.

I frown at her. I don’t understand the question.

“When you died,” she says. “How long were you gone?” She pulls her hand back to where she lays on the bed. She rests her chin on the sparrows.

“Oh.” I pull my leg back into the bean bag chair. “I don’t know.”

But she knows I don’t know. Neither of us even knew I had died until two years after the accident, when Aunt Lindsey drank too much at a campfire and hugged us a little too tightly.

“She’s your guardian angel, you know,” she told Suzanna, which was something that had been said to us before by our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends, and anyone else who knew that our car had been hit on the right passenger’s side, that I had absorbed ninety percent of the blow, and that when paramedics pried the car doors open, they found my body wrapped in a cocoon around Suzanna.

“I know,” Suzanna told Aunt Lindsey, even though I knew she didn’t like when people told her this, even though I knew she would have infinitely preferred to be the one wrapped around me.

“No.” Aunt Lindsey shook her head, she pressed her hand harder against my cheek. “She went to heaven for you,” she told Suzanna. “Did you know that?”

Suzanna and I looked at each other because we hadn’t known that. She watched the paramedics give me CPR, but neither of us fully comprehended that that meant I’d died.

Suzanna tugs a loose thread from my comforter. “Did it hurt?”

I shake my head. “Not at first,” I say. “I don’t really remember anything until the hospital.”

Suzanna lifts her eyes to meet mine. “Did it hurt in the hospital?”

“A little,” I say. “It hurt when you pulled out my IV.”

I mean it as a tease, but Suzanna doesn’t laugh. She winces, she looks down at the pulled thread. “I’m sorry,” she says.

It’s the first time she has ever apologized to me. Maybe the first time she has ever apologized.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, because it is. Because the sting of a tugged needle hurt so much less than the pain of not knowing where she was.

She turns, for the last time, onto her back, and lets her head dangle from the side of my bed. The bottle of Sprite that is mostly vodka is gone now, forgotten on the carpeted floor. Suzanna studies the upside-down posters on my wall—the engraved spiral of the golden ratio, the soft curves of an illustrated chaos theory.

“Sometimes, I think it’s good that you died,” she tells me. She turns her head to my bookshelf—towards my accumulation of academic medals, the trophy from the eleventh grade decathlon, the framed certificate for my scholarship. “You died and came back with a passion.”

I follow her gaze to the bookshelf and shake my head. “I liked math before the accident,” I tell her. “I liked math the first time I heard Dad’s friend describe an equation as the language of the universe.”

Suzanna closes her eyes and lets her head go limp. “You don’t always have to be honest.”

I watch as blood colors her cheeks again, as her eyes turn sad beneath her eyelids. “I’m sorry,” I say, and she nods. She doesn’t tell me it’s okay.

Somewhere in the distance, Dad’s grandfather clock chimes. It’s midnight now and I’m leaving early tomorrow. Suzanna doesn’t open her eyes, but curls instinctually inward when she feels my weight on the bed. She adjusts her feet as I pull the comforter over me. She lets her legs fall over the lump of my body. She tangles herself into me in the same way she did when we were kids, in a way she hasn’t done since middle school.

“Goodnight,” she whispers.

Her hand stretches across my stomach, and I try to memorize the weight of her against me. Try to preserve this memory and hold it as long as I can.

About the Author

Sophie Castro is a recent graduate from both the University of Maryland and the Jiminez-Porter Writers’ House. She is the recipient of the 2024 Sebastian Herbstein Memorial Scholarship in fiction writing. Her work has appeared in Flash Frog and the National Endowment for Humanities magazine.