Epilogue: Shadow Painting

That day was almost five years ago. I am writing now from my desk, in the upstairs office of the house that Heidi and I share. She has a bedroom, and so do I. There's a guest bedroom, and then the upstairs office that she and I share and the downstairs office that is half library, half impromptu dance studio, and all cluttered. In this office, we each have our own desks. I use mine much more often for work than Heidi does. I'm an accountant for the university where I once went to school. Sometimes I do freelance projects, and usually at least once a week I find an excuse to work from home. Since Heidi is a dancer, she only uses her desk for paying her own bills or writing letters. Or drawing. She's publishing an Internet comic strip that only I have any idea has anything to do with her.

It's Saturday afternoon. It's late October again, and there is already "sticking snow" on the ground. The sun shines brightly on it, and I trace the hills and contours on the front lawn with my eyes as I write these words with my pencil that has the little Care Bear on the top in place of an eraser. I've found some of my inner little girl again. I haven't journeyed far enough from that horrible summer to be Heidi's playmate, but little bits have come back.

We've had three serious fights since moving in together. None of them destroyed our sense of family. None left me with nothing, the way Grace had been left with nothing. We're okay.

The first fight was my fault. It happened right after we unpacked in this house. Heidi moves through all this space like a weightless faerie, and sometimes I still forget that she's a real woman tied to this earth. I forget that I have the power to let her down. I forget how much she missed me during that one horrible summer, and I forget how much she wants me around.

Two weeks after we got our house, Heidi landed her first ballet performance. She assumed I'd be right in the front row with flowers cheering for her. I should have been, if I hadn't let my jealousy get the better of me. I saw the dress rehearsal. It was the first time I saw, how talented and beautiful my friend really was. I knew in that moment that she didn't need me there, and I sat there surrounded by empty seats, smiling and laughing, and crying inside. I drifted off into the numbing snow as people started to file in for the performance. I walked all the way home and hid under the covers, and slept the sleep I would have slept in the Canyon.

If I'd been asleep I would've heard my door softly open and close as someone checked on me. Two hours past dawn the next day my phone chimed. All the text message said was "get your butt on the skating rink before the Saturday morning light show starts."

I got my butt on the skating rink. Literally several times, since I was much too shaken up to balance.

Heidi didn't look too sorry that I'd fallen, but she laughed and swung me into Crazy Duos and Trios just as she had when I still felt as if I was a little girl.

"I'm sorry," I said as we walked back to the car. "I'll be at your performance tonight."

"Talk to me," she said, simply, the three words I'd learned I couldn't deny.

"I was jealous."

"You're human. I'm a better skater than you are, just like I'm a better dancer. Doesn't mean I'm not your sister."

It was all so ridiculous and obvious that I did the first thing that occurred to me, which was to slip under her arm, run to the side of the lot, scoop up snow and throw a snowball at her. For the next two hours we whooped and ran and made idiots of ourselves all over the now-deserted Smart Skate parking lot, and I found out how much clumsier than normal Heidi is the day after dancing.

Two years later we had a series of quarrels about stupid little things. A wall had grown between us gradually, and suddenly little things that Heidi did, like reading in the lounge chair humming, bothered me as they never had before. I sniped, and she scowled, and then she spent an entire afternoon by the lake sketching without me.

I still didn't want to lean on her more than she could bear. But there was this guy in the picture, who'd probably contributed to the wall.

I hadn't slept with anyone since the Grand Canyon. I didn't have the energy to date. But it was more than that. Every time since the Canyon that the opportunity for sex presented itself, I saw and felt Cameron instead. But Alex was different. He was sweet, and he liked to talk about all the same things I did, and the outpouring of words when I was with him was such a welcome change from silence and sniping at Heidi. I could've made out with him anywhere. The first few times we did that in his car or in darkened movie theatres. One evening we got lazy and made out in the couch in my living room.

Heidi walked in from her dance practice. She gave me a disgusted look and walked out the front door.

I told Alex I'd be right back and ran out into the yard after Heidi. "Oy! This is your house too. We'll go back to Alex's to make out if it bothers you."

"Tara, I don't care where you make out! You're not supposed to be doing that at all."

"What?"

"You're not married to him, dumbass."

"I'm not having sex with him, dumbass. And even if I was, I'm not a Christian. It's not wrong for me."

"You don't get to choose right and wrong."

"Yes, I do. You know what? Never mind. We're going to make out right here. If you can't put up with me and Alex, go somewhere else."

"I will."

I never knew where Heidi did go that night.

I didn't want to talk with Alex. I wanted to go back in the house and have sex on the couch and have it be like all those times when I was fifteen. But Alex took the choice out of my hands by appearing on the doorstep behind me. He said softly, "I'm going."

"Alex, wait!"

"I don't need your drama, Tara."

The bright, warm spot he'd made in my heart was gone and there was really no place left to run. I did, though. I went out in the snow and ran for several hours.

Guilt and the ghost-voices of people you've hurt? You can't run from that, not even through the numbing snow.

I gave it up at two AM and slumped back into the house. I vaguely remember changing out of my wet clothes and into pajamas and then getting into bed, so maybe I wasn't as apathetic as before, since I can remember something.

At about three in the morning I heard a key in the front door lock. I hadn't been sleeping, but I turned over on my side in my bed and lay still. I heard the soft swish of my door on the carpet that told me it was Heidi, checking on me. I rolled back over and sat up.

"I'm so sorry," she said before I'd had a chance to get a word out. Then she backed up, vanishing like she used to do on bare feet.

I got up and chased her. Heidi is fast, and quiet, but there are only so many places you can go in this house. Plus, we've played tunnel explorers a zillion times. We both know every nook and cranny. She gave up running, and I found her half-hidden in the shadows in the kitchen, nursing hot tea.

"You're worth ten Alexes," I blurted out.

She pushed away the tea and met my eyes. "I should never have made you choose."

"It doesn't matter. Alex left."

She buried her face in her hands. "I'm sorry."

I padded over behind her. "Heidi, look at me. No, really. We'll talk about right and wrong later. You're home."

"Okay," she said.

"There's still something wrong. What is it?"

"Christianity, I guess," she said. "You know how you said it wasn't wrong for you because you're not a Christian."

"I never was a Christian, you always knew that…but I promised I would be someday," I said. Then I thought of an irrelevant but fascinating question that might break down a little of this awkwardness. "Do Catholics think Protestants aren't Christians?"

Heidi's face lit, and it was like all those things we'd talked about for years came rushing back into her head. "They are," she said, leading me into the living room. "It's different for people who start out Protestant. Most Protestants don't even know what Catholicism is."

"The Sacraments," I said, trying out an unfamiliar word.

"Yeah. Marriage is one of them…" Heidi said, and then she explained exactly why she'd been upset, growing more animated by the moment.

We talked the remainder of the night and into the morning. The next day I found a little note with my coffee. "I'll be in the attic in the lounge chair humming," it said. "I won't come downstairs until I'm done."

I could hear very, very faint notes of the Beauty and the Beast theme from the attic. So I burst up the stairs singing it at the top of my lungs. Then I talked Heidi right back into humming downstairs.

I'm not married now. Neither of us is. Or, well, dating. Probably either Heidi or I, or both, will find someone before our lives are over. We've talked about it quite a bit. She said that we've gone through so much together, that we can handle sharing each other. I said that God would let us stay secure in each other when we had husbands. Heidi gave me one of her ear to ear grins.

The stupidest two things that ever happened this year turned into our third quarrel. Heidi got mad at me for not explaining the mortgage well enough, which was dumb of her. I got mad at her for not mentioning me when she received an award for best female chorus dancer, which was just silly since she didn't have time to thank anyone. So she blurted out what she was mad about, and I blurted out what I was mad about, and we sniped for a few minutes. Then one of us threw in a Terebithian word, and we fell on the floor laughing. I could almost imagine getting up and putting on my Storm costume and chasing Heidi through the house throwing lightning bolts. Maybe I'll be young enough next summer.

I'm not a Christian yet. Somewhere in the five years between meeting Heidi at that first youth group and seeing her again in the snow, the "I'm not a Christian," that I'd told myself every year of my childhood morphed into "I'm not a Christian yet." Then after the Canyon, I found I could honestly promise I would come to the Church someday. Christianity is so quiet. I noticed that the first morning I saw Heidi praying her Rosary while she made coffee and toast. Many nights when we fall asleep talking, tangled on the couch together, I can hear the soft murmur as she prays.

Christianity isn't something that comes into your life and changes everything, the way people used to tell me in my childhood. It doesn't demand so much as shapes. Why do I still get that little wisp of joy on the wind when I reread my X-Men collection? Why is family so precious, and why does losing my mom still hurt so much? Why do I like being an accountant, and what do I do when I don't? Those are the types of questions that weave themselves through the rhythm of each of Heidi's and my days, and somewhere along these years I started answering them with "God," just as Heidi does without even thinking about it.

Some August, I will ask Heidi to be my sponsor as I go through the initiation to be a Catholic Christian. Not next year. I guess I'll know. I'll ask her on her birthday. I think she'd like that.

Heidi has tried to reach her parents twice since I got back from the Grand Canyon. Both times by phone this time. Both times they had polite, civil, conversations, and I sat there with Heidi throughout. And then held her, for the only two times she's broken down completely since I've known her.

But we are family.

A voice filters up through the office door. "I'm going to be at Smart Skate in a half hour!"

I yell, "You'd better mean that you're going to be in the car in ten minutes, unless you want to drive."

"I'll be in the car in five minutes, and you'd better show up and drive, because I can't find my glasses." One of the things that had let me know I was Heidi's sister in fact was the first time she took out her contacts and let me see her in glasses. She doesn't usually wear contacts anymore, except for performances.

I put down my pen.

I had gone to the office closet to get my skates. Heidi and I sometimes sneak in and tie each other's laces together. Well, truthfully, we usually sneak in and tie our own laces together by mistake. But this time Heidi hadn't tied my laces. Two seconds ago I checked the laces to my skates and found a note instead. She could have put it there a week ago or a month ago, or a moment ago. It's a torn piece of paper from the bottom of one of those ever-present notepads accountants keep. It says, "I love you."

I put down my pen again, take my skates, and take the downstairs steps two at a time. I say it out loud as I ease into the driver's seat. "I love you."