Remembering Stella

Some deaths bring greatness, even in the wake of their devastating loss. The sad ones roll around like rocks, pinging and knocking against us with friction and grief. But the great deaths also blanket us with a sense of comfort, closure, and pure bliss for even knowing such a soul. This is what it’s like with Stella.

It’s been hard to be here these last two weeks, but she’d asked for me to come, and I could never refuse her. Not even after everything.

The hospital smells like antiseptic and rubber. All that sterility has robbed me of her scent that I’ve missed so much.

I watch her as she searches the room, finds me, and closes her eyes. I don't want to watch her die. It cements her absence in a way I am not ready to deal with.

Her breath is coming in quick bursts, the sound of a steam engine pushing along the tracks, not quite able to reach its destination.

She holds her hand out for me. Her eyes are still closed, but somehow I feel like she can still see me. She was always the one who saw me, in every way I needed. Even when I was invisible.

We sit this way for an hour, holding hands. Eventually, her head falls to the side. The beauty mark below her ear calls out to me.

I try to leave, dislodging my hand from her delicate one. She stirs. As I walk out of the room, I hear her words, "Don’t forget me." I take a breath, inhaling the last of her.

How could I possibly forget what is forged onto my bones, etched into the tissue and muscles and ivory of everything that I am?

When I first met Stella, she was painting on the beach. I sat and watched for hours. When she finished her picture, she stood up and danced barefoot, her skirt swishing around her calves as the hem dipped into the frothy waves of the Pacific Ocean. Her laugh was enchanting, her body dangerously inviting.

We were eighteen and penniless. We’d both run away from our lives to the farthest place we could go; me from responsibility and family obligations, her from the fists and fury and father figure who was anything but.

On the third day, she asked me to be her roommate and we moved into a tiny two-room apartment the following week. We spent that summer living off peanut butter sandwiches and cartons of rice from the Chinese food place below us. She always put too much soy sauce on it, but I ate it anyways.

On the weekends, I played the guitar on the corner while she danced, passersby throwing loose change and crumpled bills into an empty coffee can. They thought we were sisters, and if we played it just right, we sometimes made enough to eat at Olive Garden. Stella always hid breadsticks in her beach bag as we ate as many bowls of soup and salad as we could stand.

At night, she would lie across my bed in her t-shirt and panties, and I would play for her, lining up the curves of my Gibson with the curves of her hips. I sang “Black Magic Woman” and “Stairway to Heaven” while she lay on her side, tracing patterns on my grandmother’s quilt. Sometimes, she’d paint one of her pictures. She wore shiny bangles on her wrist, and they jingled together whenever she moved.

She was the music I wanted to make. She was every song I heard. And she was an admission I wasn’t ready to acknowledge.

The first time I kissed her was on Halloween, a year after we’d moved in together. She was dressed as a mermaid, real sand dollars pressed against her breasts, her satin skirt ruffled at her ankles like the shimmery fins of a siren’s tail. We gave away seashells and fortune cookies instead of candy, and she hugged every kid who knocked on the door.

When the last of the trick-or-treaters finally left, she opened all the leftover fortune cookies and divided them up between us.

In a fake accent, she read our fortunes. “OK, ok, this is your REAL fortune,” she said, laughing as she got to the last one. “Are you ready?” she asked mysteriously. I nodded. “Some people come into our life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”

I knew in that moment that Stella was my lifetime, even if I was just her season.

I leaned across the table and kissed her quick; a soft brush of my lips against hers. She pulled back and stared at me for a full minute, her face unreadable. Then she walked out of the room, leaving me sitting at the table.

She came back wearing only my guitar, the strap slung over her shoulder. We spent the night wrapped in my grandmother’s quilt, making promises and telling secrets between nervous kisses.

We had very little but we were so happy in those days. We bought an old VW Bug and delivered flowers for a florist whose shop was two doors down. Sometimes, we’d splurge on a weekend drive to Big Sur. Gas would cost a fortune, and we’d have to eat Ramen the rest of the week, but it was worth it to put the top down and see the wind in her hair, her freckles standing out on her porcelain skin.

We spent our nights planning all the places we’d travel to. Paris to see the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Spain to see the Sagrada Família, and Amsterdam to get high and visit the Van Gogh Museum.

“We’ll backpack across Europe. Eat Belgium chocolate. Pray in India. Stay in cottages in Ireland. Swim the English Channel!” she said breathlessly.

“I hate swimming,” I’d laughed.

“Yes, but you love the water. And you love me.”

And I did. I loved her hungrily. I was starved for her. Every time I took a breath, I inhaled what I could of Stella. Because I knew she would be gone from me one day, and I wanted to savor every bit of my forever with her.

For a whole year, Stella was mine. Every beautiful freckled inch of her. Until she fell in love with someone else.

The week after her death passes by in a black-clothed blur and I drown myself in the sweet burn of amber-colored rum and hand-rolled cigarettes. People come and go—casseroles and meat platters and pies show up on counter tops covered with tents of crinkled foil, brought by neighbors, friends, family.

Food brings little consolation in the hollow silence her death has presented. I nod and accept the half-hugs of comfort but I am far removed from it all. I am lost in the past, thinking of the strands of hair that coiled tightly against her smooth skin, the way her mouth tasted like butterscotch candies, the smell of her conditioner.

A hand curls around my shoulder.

I turn and look at my brother, the grief painted so heavily onto his face that I have to look away, positive it mirrors my own.

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know about Stella and me. I’d never told him, not even when they met. And I’m sure Stella didn’t tell him.

They’d met when we drove out to his college one weekend during his big football game, and I’d introduced her as my roommate. I was too afraid to put a name or mile marker on our relationship. Too afraid to ask her if she would let me give her the world. And that was probably my undoing.

He asked her out the next week.

“I’m going to say no,” she told me. But she bit her lip in that way she did when she wasn’t being honest about her feelings.

“I want you to go.” I made sure not to look at her when I said it. Lies were easier that way.

Two years later, they got married on the beach, a few miles from where she and I’d crashed into each other’s lives.

“Be my maid of honor?” she’d asked, smiling brighter than the California sun.

“I’d love to,” I said, turning away from her to tell the lie that burnt my tongue.

“You okay?” my brother asks now, as we stand outside, away from the stark emptiness of their house.

I should be comforting him, but the truth is, I’m still the same pitiful bit of wreckage I’d been since she crashed into me all those years ago, her laughter a siren’s song that lured me in. Now that she’s gone, I’m haunted by all of our could-have-beens.

“I’m okay. How are you, Brian?”

“I would be lost without you here, Coral” he smiles, his eyes laced with red from crying too much.

We’re standing on the porch, looking out at Stella’s garden.

“She left something for you,” he says. He points out at the yard. “In the middle of the sunflower ring. It’s under the bench. She said you’ll know.”

My heart lurches at the thought of Stella, still leaving pieces of herself for me to find in this world.

I sprint off the porch and run to the garden, my heels digging into the soft earth. In the middle of the circle of sunflowers, there’s a stone bench. Beneath it, is a VW Bug planter, just like the one we used to have.

Inside, is a small intricately carved box. There are seashells and fortune cookies etched onto the box. In the middle are the words My Reason.

I open the box and I see an envelope with my name scrawled on it, and her little black book. She’d carried it everywhere, never letting me see it. She wrote in it every night at midnight.

“A witch needs her secrets,” she’d said. I was sure she had a thousand spells in there, because she bewitched everyone she met.

I open the book to the first page. There’s a note inside.

Dear Coral,

You were never the moon. You were always the sun. You once said I was the center of it all, but the truth is, I was in your orbit first. We were two supernovas that just burned too bright to be next to each other for too long. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t love you. And it doesn’t mean you aren’t all the stars in the sky. You are. You’re an entire universe. And it’s time for you to expand like the force of nature you are. This is for you. Please take it. And go on our adventures. Blow me kisses from the Eiffel. Eat a pound of chocolate. And dammit, lovely, swim in the English Channel (because you have to work that chocolate off somehow!). Go and play your music and write songs about me, about us.

Don’t forget me,

Stella

I open the envelope and see the check she’d written me years ago, a joke we’d made one night years ago. We’d both written each other checks for large amounts of money, promising we’d cash them when we both had enough. This one is made out for $35,000.

“It’s good, Coral. You can cash it.” My brother is standing behind me. I wipe away my tears and turn to him. But of course, I know it’s good. Stella became an artist and sold millions of paintings. Her most famous one was of me and my guitar. It was called My Reason.

“She loved you, you know,” Brian says. And I realize, he probably does know about us.

Five days later, I board the plane to Paris, the first stop on my Stella World Tour. When I sit down in my seat, I open the little black book.

I met a bit of magic today. Her name is Coral. And she’s my reason to smile today.

I close my eyes, my heart both full and empty, remembering Stella.