matchbook

he school had been leaving messages about Ellie’s jacket. I had to pick it up in person and tell them when I would be coming. They couldn’t send it home because of something they found in the pockets. Both pockets. That’s all they would say on the phone. 

The front office directed me to a room on the second floor where the principal and Ellie’s teacher stood over a desk with the jacket in question laid out before them. On another desk, over by the wall, was a pile of jackets and coats that had gotten so big, it was spilling over onto the floor. 

I knew right away that this coat wasn’t Ellie’s. It wasn’t even the right size. Still, I had them check the lining, along the seam of the zipper, where we always write her name. 

On my way out, I saw a dead cricket in the corner of the stairs. Schools are always full of crickets. I remember times back when I went here, when we would hear crickets in class. The teacher would demand to know who was making the noise, and if it really was a cricket, then we had better be able to tell her where it was. 

The class would fall over itself to explain that crickets can throw their sound. We framed this as something willful. And, we would add, crickets also tell the temperature with the rhythm of their chirps. We just have to decode it. There is an equation. Memorizing it is like memorizing one letter of Morse code, but none of us has taken the time. 

The other thing we knew, but didn’t share, is that crickets can’t move from one place to another until they have been understood. 

Even back then, there were students who knew that someday their own kids would go to this school, and they would come home one day and say the funniest thing in the world just happened. We heard a cricket in class and the teacher made us look for it. When we found it, it was dead, so the whole class sat on the floor in a circle, and we put the cricket on a desk in the middle, and we all said seventy-one, seventy-one, seventy-one, because the temperature in the room was seventy-one degrees. That’s what crickets tell us with their chirps. No one in class is quite sure how. We just know that’s what it’s supposed to tell us so we checked the thermostat and that's what we said back to it. 

The cricket didn’t exactly come back to life, but we did hear a chirp come from somewhere, so we called it a miracle, pinned the cricket in a shadowbox and hung it on the wall. This way we all see it if it actually starts moving again. 

I sit in the car and think of the cells growing inside of me. When I look them up online, the pictures all show five cells grouped together, in various stages. They are in their original state. They are preparing to grow. They are connecting to the receptors in different medicines. I always scroll until I find the name of my own medicine.  

Back in Ellie’s classroom, one of the cricket’s legs extends against the shadowbox glass and pushes until it breaks off.  

I count the times I told myself I was going to leave before I ever found out I was sick.  

There were three. Two of them serious enough that I wrote a letter for Ellie to find later. I taped it to the back of her dresser mirror. 

The next leg extends.

The letter is still there. There are eight more days until the deadline I gave myself to tell Ellie about the cells. 

The leg finds the glass and pushes. This one breaks off as well. 

I hear my mother, on her first visit after Ellie was born, telling me that no one else may see this, but she does. She sees that I am barely hanging on by a thread. A single thread. 

The rest of the legs push against the glass together and break off one at a time. 

I say these numbers over and over. If I repeat them enough, they will become an equation I can solve to connect things that have no business being connected. 

I should have asked about the pockets. I should have asked if there was anything I could have done to slow this down or make it stop. I never have asked the right questions, though.

It will become an equation I can solve to explain why love always feels like an overdue task.

The cricket doesn't know its legs are gone. It thinks it is still pushing. It thinks it is still making a sound. 

I say something out loud to Ellie even though she is not there. I say, This is what remembering feels like. 

This is what remembering me feels like.

I say it now, so she will hear it when I am gone.