Ashes

The silvery blue comforter than looks like a drip of liquid from the moon adorns the wide bed
Outside the thin window rock music and hammering drums blare all too loudly even though it's past ten
Even the Jersey shore's late-night swimmers have driven home in their perfect city cars
My sister---my sister-friend that's more like a sister; we bicker constantly---wants a nice perfect car
She wants a perfect beach house with a perfect husband and perfect children and perfect clothes
But she would never admit any wishes specifically of perfection of anything of the sort, because I guess that's just not what teenagers do
Instead her home is somewhere she never wants to be, so she busies herself with soccer and biking and road trips
Her home is dusty and cluttered to that tipping point where the floor is nearly invisible, and short gray cat hairs coat the imperfect furniture
But most of all, she avoids her home because of that one room just to the right of the door, where she puts all of her trendy shoes
The log-walled room in the messy log cabin of a home is filled to the brim with her fathers' old clothes
Plaid, long-sleeve shirts that he buttoned up all the way to his neck, and khaki shorts from spring camping trips
Last spring, just before we took her on a trip to California, her father vanished in the middle of the night
At the end of the trip, I was there, watching her expression when she learned he'd committed suicide
She called him Poppy, like the flower, and I never knew why, but that was always just how it was
My mother told me I might want to leave because I might be surprised and sad, and that was okay if I was
Poppy's not coming home was the only time I ever saw a hint of real emotion in her blank brown eyes
Now her teenage snark and endless TikTok feed obscure anything that's inside
We're on this trip to the Jersey shore for his memorial just after a year later, and she ceases to shed a tear, even during the service
Her aunt and uncle and father's old friends stop by our AirBnB that we paid for with his life insurance
She smiles and laughs and takes a nap and tells me she's bored when we play a game, then tells me she's just tired from playing in the ocean
Tomorrow morning, I wonder if she will further mask her own mourning as she awakens at 5:30 to spread his ashes on the beach
Where he jumped off bridges with his friends and brother and sister---her own aunt and uncle---as a little kid
Now, her teenage snark offers itself in relentlessly clever comments over my intentionally loud packing up, this last night
When I stumble downstairs for my mother to braid my hair, she and her friend offer a clearly pre-prepped lecture of how
She's just snarky because she's grieving, how it's really nothing personal to me, how I'm already being a good friend by just being here
But when I snap my magnetic sunglasses case shut extra hard and loud and hide her Airpods in it, I don't know how good of a friend that is
She sleeps with her mom because I'm to loud, but pops in to do who-knows what on her phone
I tell her goodnight, but she just walks away without a sound
She told me a little while ago, when she went to sleep with her mom initially, that it was just because of my
Never-ending writing and writing and writing and how loud I was packing, so because of my own annoyingness and nothing more
But even through the blasting yacht music, I can hear her unmistakable sniffles from the room nearby.