I

Celia died in September, a few weeks after my birthday, the day before the autumn leaves changed their first colors. I’ve made the announcement so many times now that I guess it feels as real as it ever will… but I still catch myself sometimes wondering when her next postcard will come, starting to leave a lamp on in case she gets back late, counting the days she has been gone.

One hundred forty-eight.

I had just conceded in a staring contest with my laundry and was moving on to balancing a pencil on my pinkie fingernail when the phone call came.

“Hulloh,” I said in my best imitation of a British accent, seeing my mom’s name on caller ID.

I always think it’s odd that I remember those moments with perfect clarity. I remember the lilt in my voice, the feeling of my own smirk stretching across my face, the slight crackle in my phone’s reception. I remember glancing out of the window, noticing the yellowed leaves for the first time, and then giving my laundry the squint-eye, as if to say it would not beat me so easily again.

“Gina, where are you?” My mother’s voice was sober and quiet, calm.

But I knew instantly that the call must be about Celia; there was a devastation in my mother’s voice that I had never heard. Once, when my father had lost his job, my mother had been frantic, chaotic in her speech; when my grandmother died, my mother’s voice had been tear-stained and muffled. I don’t remember anything so dynamic in her voice that day – nothing except a quiet calmness, resignation perhaps. And that was how I knew it was about Celia.

“I’m at home, Mom. What’s wrong?”

The thought never crossed my mind that Celia might be dead. Celia wasn’t one of those people who die. Furthermore, I had seen her the previous morning when she set off on her trip; she hadn’t had time to arrive anywhere dangerous yet. Still, Celia didn’t need much time to get into trouble, and, recalling some of the stories she had told me over the past two days, I pictured her incarcerated, her lithe body swallowed up in the bright orange suit, wanting me to pack an overnight bag for her. “It’ll just be a night or two,” I could hear her saying. “I didn’t do anything illegal.” And then the characteristic, charming pause. “Per se.” A smile, and then her quick reassuring nod, drawing the whole world in.

“Gina, Dad and I are on our way over.” Celia and I lived five doors down from my parents.

There was a knock at the door, and I opened it, clutching the pencil I had previously been trying to balance. Mom’s face was calm, except for her eyes: blank, lost and grey. Dad had been crying; his eyes and nose were red.

“Just tell me,” I said, watching Mom grapple with the right words. I knew they were going to try and shelter me, but I thought I had figured their news out; Gina’s incarcerated figure flashed again in my mind. We all sat down. Dad spoke at last.

“Celia was in a plane crash last night. A small private jet off the coast. It was a pretty brutal wreck, and – ” he paused and leaned in. “Gina, there were no survivors.”

It is the most horrible way to say that someone died: “no survivors.” Your brain wades through the process of elimination before the realization settles in. No survivors means that Celia did not survive. If Celia did not survive, it means she died. If she died, she is dead. And even then, I struggled to understand how that could be.

Perhaps it was so hard to grasp Celia’s death because things didn’t seem that different at first; I was used to life without Celia. She was thirteen years older than me, and by the time I was old enough to appreciate that I had a sister, she had moved off to college – and she never stopped moving after that. From college to graduate school abroad, foreign internships, and then one grand adventure after another. In her wake, she always left a whirlwind of postcards and letters and photographs that I savored with idolatrous adoration. Though I had spent very little face-time with my older sister, I had spent countless hours reading and re-reading the things she wrote me.

Not that Celia ever wrote much. That isn’t to say she didn’t write often – she sent me something every week or so. But those “somethings” were often not very much: a postcard from her current location, a napkin from a local restaurant with a heart on it, a few pictures, a smiley face on a matchbook, a poker chip. Still, no matter how wordless the correspondence was, I clung to every piece of it.

When I graduated from college, my parents proposed that Celia and I get a house together; I guess everyone knew it was a nominal arrangement. Celia was “home” no more than a month or two each year, and never for more than a week at a time. But she liked to have a place called home, she said, and my parents, as enamored of her as I was, liked that.

Having the house to myself, then, was nothing new. The halls were only as dark as they had been before, and the emptiness not alarming in its familiarity. No, it was the absence of her correspondence that was so marked, and after a week or so, the weight of the grief became pronounced. No postcards came; no envelopes with only a few pictures and a note that said, “I love you, baby girl;” no text messages at 3 am (and then: “oops sry, g! noon my time :) x”).

And somehow, it was without all of that that the house grew quieter.

I had saved everything Celia had ever sent me, all organized in boxes in the attic, labeled by year, and a few days after hearing the news, I opened a box and began re-reading through the notes. Over the years, I had set aside the most poignant pieces of mail, pinning them to my bulletin board, my mirror, closet doors – now I began to take comfort in the ordinary, small ones. I savored each smudged scrap of paper and blurry photograph afresh, and thirty-nine days after she had left, I had made it through every box.

I had cried at Celia’s funeral and several times in the course of going through her notes to me, but mostly sentimentally. I was touched by the words spoken at her funeral, touched by her phrases and specific memories as I read through the notes. It was when I finished the final box of correspondence, though, that at last I wept with grief.

I felt her absence acutely after that; I could not rationalize it—for all practical purposes, Celia was more of an acquaintance than anything else. This is what bereft means, I realized one night, slightly surprised to learn I had not known it before.

One evening, shortly after finishing reading through the boxes, I found myself wandering into her bedroom, furtively, as if she had been the kind of older sister who scolded invasive younger siblings.

Neither my parents nor I had yet gone in to Celia’s room to clear things out. I realized then  that my parents must have been waiting for me to be ready before they suggested it, and until that very moment it had not occurred to me that such a thing needed to be done. In any case, clearing Celia’s room out would have been more symbolic than anything else. It was more or less bare; the bed was made, and there were a few clothes hanging in the closet, but most of Celia’s possessions belonged in an oversized duffle bag that went everywhere she went, and now, I supposed was resting at the bottom of the sea as well. Her desk was the only thing with any signs of life – papers were scattered on the top, a book of stamps, some ballpoint pens, and a headband I recognized as my own.

I had given up the headband for lost long ago, and I snatched it up, a fresh sense of indignation trumping all else. As I grabbed the headband, I noticed a neat stack of envelopes underneath it. The top envelope was stamped and addressed to a Mr. Brandon Gould. My heart did a little flip – I knew that name! Brandon and Celia had been best friends, perhaps even a couple, all through college. I remembered him coming to our house for Thanksgiving one year and asking him if he was going to marry Celia. Celia had lit up with amusement and adamant denials, and Brandon had turned bright pink. “Brandon is a boy who’s my friend,” Celia had tried to explain letter. “It’s not the same as a boyfriend.” But I was six, and the difference seemed moot. They spent all their time together, traveled together, and he let Celia eat off his plate.  To my young eyes, it looked remarkably like love. I turned the envelope over in my hand a few times, feeling the bulk of paper within it; stamped, sealed and addressed, but not mailed.

Intrigued, I went through the rest of the envelopes. The next addressee caught my attention as well: Mr. James Hubble—Celia’s high school English teacher, and mine, too, for that matter. I had not kept in touch with Mr. Hubble, but I remembered hearing that Celia had; the letter was addressed to our old high school, so he must still be teaching there. I smiled, a few memories of my own trickling in. Mr. Hubble standing on a table top, trying to demonstrate the poet’s wonder at the world; his melancholy voice reading Edgar Allan Poe on Halloween; coming to class dressed as Nick Carraway. “When he was my teacher,” Celia told me once, “years ago, obviously, he came dressed as Jay Gatsby himself. I guess he didn’t want to mar the image for you now.” We had shared a laugh, Celia remembering and me imaging jolly Mr. Hubble as a young and dashing Gatsby.

There were three other envelopes: one to Dr. Julian Goring, one to Evelyn Pail, and one to Sasha Velasco. Two of those names, again, I knew. Sasha Velasco and Celia had been roommates for a year or so before I moved in with my sister. I gathered that they weren’t close friends, merely housemates, because once Celia moved in with me, she never mentioned Sasha again. That wasn’t terribly surprising, though; Celia was always on the move, and she picked up friends as easily as she set them down. I suppose that Celia was the kind of person who is friends with those near her. When she was in town, she kept in touch with local friends; when she was abroad, those local friends never heard from her. If that were true, though, I mused, these letters were all the more mysterious. Celia wasn’t a great correspondent; I had always known it was an honor to be one of a few people she remembered to keep in touch with regardless of where she was.

A letter to Dr. Julian Goring made a little more sense, though. Dr. Goring is, of course, as familiar a name to you as to me, but I had not known that Celia and the famous travel correspondent were acquainted—though I was hardly surprised. I had seen enough of his documentaries and TV specials to know that he and Celia were cut of the same adventurous cloth, and it made sense to me that they would share their fantastic tales and explorations. I imagined them meeting up in a café in Kabul, Morocco or Jerusalem, sipping tea and discussing all the sorts of things that brilliant, beautiful, engaging people discuss in foreign cafes.

The other letter was addressed to Mrs. Evelyn Pail, a name I had never heard.

I sat down on the floor between Celia’s bed and desk, the stack of letters still in my hands. I looked through once, twice, more. I wondered how long ago she had written them, if she had meant to mail them before she left or was planning to upon her return.

I  had a pretty good idea of what the letter to Brandon would say. Brandon and Celia were so perfect for each other. I had always wanted to know, but never been brave enough to ask, why they had broken up. Some girls dream of fairy princesses and princes, of movie stars or models; I dreamed of Celia and Brandon. Long after they were no longer together (though Celia claimed they never were together), I liked to imagine how they would be reconciled, how their love would begin again, unhindered.

I traced my fingers around Brandon’s name on the envelope. I could hear Celia’s voice within.

Dear Brandon,

It’s been a while, I know; I’ve tried to write you so many times, but the right words never come. I’m going to be in Nova Scotia for a few weeks, and then in northern California. Is there any chance we could meet up for coffee while I’m there? I think there are things to say – things I wish I had said a long, long time ago.

Celia

I tucked the letter under my leg, all but forgetting that Celia was not going to northern California anymore. Of course, if Celia had realized she was truly supposed to be with Brandon, that would explain the letter to Dr. Julian Goring.

Celia’s relationship with Dr. Goring had always mystified me, but I was pretty sure they were dating—or something like it. It couldn’t have been easy for either of them since they weren’t even in the same hemisphere half of the time. Which would explain why Celia missed Brandon. There was something so solid, dependable, and true about Brandon. And besides, Dr. Goring and Celia couldn’t have been very serious; how could it be when the tabloids showed him parading around arm in arm with a myriad of other women?

Julian, Celia would tell him,

I’m sorry I had to write this in a letter—didn’t know when we would cross paths next, you know how it’s been.

Well, I wasn’t quite sure how one would go about telling one man you loved another man more, but Celia would have known. She would have done it with charm and wit.

That explained two of the letters, but not the other three. What Celia and Mr. Hubble talked about had always been a mystery to me; perhaps she told him about her trips, sent him and Mrs. Hubble pictures?

I felt my face tense into a frown.

No, Celia’s correspondence with the Hubbles must have been different from that. She wouldn’t have sent them pictures that she didn’t send to me and my parents. Perhaps the Hubbles kept in touch with her, and not the other way around. I could see Mr. Hubble probing her for philosophical reflections on certain pieces of literature and history.

It was the next letter, the one addressed to Evelyn Pail, that truly bothered me. I felt a pang of reject as I turned the envelope over in my hands, the unfamiliar name a sharp reminder of how little of my sister had actually been mine. There was a world of people out there, Evelyn Pail among them, that my sister might have known better than she had known me, people she had written proper letters to. There were people that I would never see, hear, or meet who probably knew my sister better than I did, better than I ever could now.

I shrugged the feeling off, and turned to the final envelope: addressed to Sasha. I could not even imagine what Celia would have to say to her former roommate. It would probably have been something very mundane, though. I found myself less interested in this letter than the previous ones. Perhaps Celia had found some long-lost article of clothing or houseware that was Sasha’s. Perhaps Sasha had written Celia first and this was merely a gratuitous reply. In any case, I couldn’t picture Celia writing Sasha to be social, without any clear purpose. Not only was that contrary to Celia’s style, but Celia hadn’t spoken to Sasha for years as far as I knew.

Looking back now, I am struck with how little thought preceded my next actions; I suppose it seemed like the natural thing to do. In any case, I put the letters out for the mailman to take, put the headband in my bathroom drawer with some others, and wandered to bed, inexplicably drained.