New Year, Old Sorrows

It was this time of the year again.

As usual, I forced Quentin to go home, assuring him that I could hold the fort by myself. He insisted, but I knew he wanted to leave, to spend time with his delightful daughter. There wouldn’t be a lot of customers today anyways, only reckless people would want to buy a pet on the last day of the year. It did happen two or three years ago, on a particularly snowy day. The pet store had just opened, and I hadn’t decided yet to enlarge my selection of exotic pets, and there were only three sections then: the first one for the cats, the one in the middle for the few birds I had and then it was the dogs. I remember rubbing my hands while trying to find the keys of the shop, mumbling under my breath because the radiator wasn’t working. I had just found them in my left pocket when two clients entered the store, a man in his seventies and a young boy, welcomed by the barks of the agitated little corgi who joined us a week earlier. I scratched him behind his ears to silence him, and I forced a commercial smile out of my lips before I went to greet my two unexpected clients.

“Bonjour. How can I help you?”

“I promised my grandson here that I would get him a parrot before the end of the year, and unfortunately he did not forget,” the old man said with a deeper voice than I expected from his frail stature.

The boy said nothing, only observing me with sparkly hazel eyes and a mischievous grin. Drawing on my last remnants of patience, I pointed them to the bird section, wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the bitter cold got into the boy, and he settled on the second one I showed them, a beautiful and curious African Grey parrot. I gathered the accessories they would need and after I accepted the payment, they left. With one hand, the boy held the cage where his new companion rested, and the other was tightly held by the old man’s callous hand. When I finally got out and closed the pet shop, she was leaning against the back of her car, wearing a pink down jacket and smoking a cigarette. She mockingly giggled at my jerky walk and my assassin gaze, but I ignored her and walked straight to the car, closing the passenger door a little harder than necessary.

“Why do you look so grim? It’s New Year’s Eve,” she said, climbing into the old Corolla.

“Exactly,” I mumbled. “I could’ve been home already, under my duvet and not out here, with my fingers about to freeze and fall off.”

“Well, your fingers will have to hang on and survive the ride home,” she said, giving me a playful nudge, wearing that famous smirk of hers. I instantly felt more relaxed, leaning on the fogged window while staring at her. Her sapphire eyes were focused on the road, and she pushed back one of the mahogany locks that had escaped from her bonnet and held it behind her ear. The same physical features we shared, despite our polar opposite behavior.

Béatrice.

I snapped out of that remembrance as I locked the door behind me. I couldn’t allow myself to drown into those memories, not after I tried so hard to bury them. But days like this were the toughest.

Béatrice was my twin sister, and our tradition for the last day of the year was to sit in front of the TV, binge-watching all Harry Potter movies while writing down our resolutions for the new year. We started doing that when we moved together after finishing college, and although I have never been the planner type, it has always helped me start the year off on the right foot. Even if, on the outside, my sister looked more rational and cool-headed than I was, her goals were always a little eccentric. At the beginning of the year, she decided that she would travel to Singapore for at least a month, and convinced me to get matching tattoos of our pet snake, Basil. Béatrice bought the plane tickets a week later, but I guess destiny had other plans.

In order to silence the threatening thoughts buzzing my head, I pulled my earphones from my pocket and settled on some ambient music, since I decided I would walk home since it was still early. I was in for a long walk, the pet shop being located in La Part-Dieu, a district considered to be the nerve center of our city, Lyon. The modern and lean architecture was a high-contrast with the neighborhood I lived in, where people were always greeting each other from their windows and a lot of nationalities met.

The psychedelic tones flowed my parched ears, and I looked up to see that snow had started to fall. Funny how it seemed so clean and immaculate, just like what Christmas romantic movies wanted us to believe snow looked like, but but soon it formed thick pools of filthy mud that I kept tripping over, being my usual clumsy self.

I stopped at a pedestrian gateway, waiting for the light to turn red so that I could cross, taking the occasion to wipe off my glasses fogged up with mist. It was difficult enough for me to see clearly, since the timid sun of late December was already lying down, bathed in the crimson glow of twilight. It was only after I finished cleaning them that I acknowledged the three women standing on my right, who were also waiting to cross. I buried my trembling hand into my purse, taking out my phone and staring hopelessly at my lock screen, trying and failing to distract myself from what I just noticed.

Two of them were twin sisters, with a rich umber skin and thick dreadlocks. An old woman, slender but hunched over by the weight of years, had her arms around the twins’ shoulders, smile wrinkles around her mouth while she gazed upon them with an affectionate eye. They seemed to be arguing about something, and my jaw clenched when the one wearing a black denim jacket took a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket, and lit one up as she stared defiantly at her sister. Without me realizing it, I had taken a small notebook with green and black stripes out of my bag, and it had fell out of my grasp, the pages soiled by the slushy ground. As I crouched to pick it up, the fire had turned red and I stood in the now desert curb, streaming eyes focused on the page I left it opened this morning.

From her fly-legged handwriting, Béatrice had scribbled down her last resolution of the year: quit smoking. But it was already too late for her, and that was the reason why the next page, where I was supposed to write my resolutions for the new year, had been left blank.

Going to the hospital for what she thought was a simple cold, she received her diagnosis in early February: bronchopulmonary cancer.

Those two words changed everything for the both of us. My sister had always been the lively one, but she had accepted her diagnosis with a defeatism that was unknown to her. She had to stop smoking, and every time I went to her hospital room, she was staring out the window with her dead eyes. I was the one who had to put on the costume of the bubbly, good-humored sister, but I couldn’t even convince myself, let alone her. Our mother died when we were teenagers, and we never knew our father. Béatrice and I had always been here for each other, and it was as if we could read each other’s minds, and always knew if the other one wasn’t feeling alright. Yet his time, she had isolated herself in her own purgatory, where even I couldn’t reach her.

We spent her last days together, as I held her hand and cried silently, hoping that my distress would not hurt her even more. At the end, it was only masks. We were both trying to hide our feelings, and it was like we were strangers more than we were sisters.

Béatrice passed away on October 30th, as everyone was getting ready to celebrate Halloween. A nasty infection had worsened her prognosis, and I had to be kept aside to let the doctors do their job, my eyes reddened with all the tears I had shed. The last image I had of her was of a woman with a withered skin, attempting to smile at me even if she had already lost the battle.

Like a robot, I started walking, putting one foot in front of the other, oblivious to my surroundings, oblivious to the infuriated honking of horns, the anxious shouts of the other pedestrians and my muddled glasses. All I could see was that blank page I refused to fill this morning, my dead sister’s dead face and the realization that my life had no meaning without her.

Removing my glasses, I watched patiently as the motorbike ran towards me, skidding on the icy road in a vain attempt to stop.

My world went into darkness as the inevitable happened. No tunnels leading to the light, no angelic choirs welcoming me into an illusory heaven.

Nothing but a dark, lonely and oppressive void.

The incessant beeping of the monitors dragged me from my heavy slumber. Despite my every hope and every fear, I somehow was still alive.

Ironically, I ended up in the same place my sister died, the Édouard-Herriot hospital, but in a different wing. Despite my blurry vision, I recognized the walls painted in a depressing peach color.

My little effort sent waves of excruciating pain that seemed to flay every single one of my nerve endings, like an icy brazier was swallowing me whole. I was seriously injured, a neck brace preventing me from moving my head too freely, and my left leg surrounding by a cast plaster.

I must have passed out from the pain after that, and probably hallucinated a little because for one moment, I thought I saw Béatrice sitting on the sofa underneath my window. She had one of those wild grins, like the ones she wore when she was still my reckless, cancer-free twin sister.

But when I woke up later that night, I realized it might not have been a dream after all.

The black-and-green notebook was placed on my lap, opened to the dreaded blank page. On a barely decipherable handwriting, recognizable among a thousand, my name was mentioned in the middle of the page.

Céleste.