Vivien Zemaitis

Honorable Mention: Nonfiction

“So She Never Forgets” 
by Vivien Zemaitis
12th grade, West Morris Mendham High School

—

I remember that hike as if it was only yesterday; the golden stalks whispering in the meadow, the bright chirp chirp of the birds, the glistening, crimson wineberries on their prickly bushes dangling like little throbbing hearts, and the sky. Oh, the sky. Unmarred by planes and cloudless and so blue.

We had bounded so eagerly, my two sisters and I, ahead of my father and stepmother Sarah on the trail. He kept pausing to identify plants, and Sarah cradled a ladybug in her hand, watching it as it lazily took flight onto a nearby thistle. She tilted her face toward the sun and closed her eyes. The rays only glanced off her cheeks. Nothing but birdsong.

That was until my father’s phone blared in his back pocket, ringtone slicing the thick air like a knife through cellophane. The breeze stilled.

My father answered quickly because Sarah’s mother, Gigi, was on the line. He said nothing, only listened, and we watched as the color drained from his face like juice leaking from a peach. The birds had stopped singing.

Wordlessly, he hung up and embraced Sarah, a single tear slipped silently down his left cheek. “James, what happened?” she demanded. “Tell me what—”

“There’s been an accident—a crash—mechanical failure,” he said. “There were no survivors,” he added, “and Courtney is dead.”

My stepmother screamed.

“I am so sorry. This shouldn’t have happened. No one survived. William is dead. The pilots are dead. Gigi said something happened during takeoff. They hit a building,” he gasped, each sentence whispered into my stepmother’s hair like a terrible secret.

She began murmuring into his chest: How could this have happened, I just saw her, why did it have to be her, oh god, what about Ellen, it’s only been two weeks since Ellen, oh god, oh god—

“Do you want to turn around? Why don’t we go home?” my father asked while untangling himself from her arms.

“No, no, no, we can’t,” she moaned. “Please no, I can’t go to the car because my phone, and I don’t want to see the house or photos or—”

My father looked at the ground, then told me to keep going.

We kept walking that day because we believed that if we went home, it would be true that the plane really had crashed. As long as we stayed in those sun-soaked woods, it would still be in the air, flying.

The more miles we logged, the farther away the call seemed. Had anything really happened? We were still hiking. Were all those people really dead? We had just seen them last week. Did Gigi really call? I only had to look over my shoulder and see my stepmother’s shaking body pulled upright like a marionette by my father to find out.

I hadn’t known Ellen, not really, nor her husband, but still I felt a heaviness deep inside me, like lead had filled my lungs. I found myself grieving, not for the people, but for the consequences on our family; that phone call had hacked my stepmother’s life in half, creating a clear before and an even clearer after.

She has never been the same woman since.

***

Five years later, on a raw November afternoon, my father leaned over the table at the pub he’d selected for us to catch up over lunch, his chafed elbows pressing down on the varnished oak as the bench seat creaked beneath him. He asked if I remembered that day, if I remembered the meadow and the berries and the birds, and hesitantly, I told him that I did.

He smiled. His voice lowered and took on a confidential tone, “You been to Schiff lately?” I had, I replied, mentioning that I had volunteered at the nature preserve only a few weeks before. He leaned forward even further. I could smell the steak frites he had just devoured on his breath, like fresh blood and fryer oil. “Did you see a new tree there, maybe planted near the picnic tables?”

My heart dropped. A small sapling grew and unfurled its silvery leaves in my mind.

“I planted that tree there for Sarah as a birthday gift. It’s for her to remember that day and all of the hard moments we have weathered together since.”

Why? I prompted him.

“So she never forgets.”