Kara Was Here. William Conescu

communications for the Army. She was about to say this but stopped herself. It was none of Mullet’s business.

      “Man, this is not my scene,” Mullet said, shaking his head slowly.

      “It’s no one’s scene,” Margot snapped, before she could control her tone of voice. “It’s a funeral.”

      “Yeah, I know. I meant here,” Mullet said. “Like, the town, the little bicycles and shit . . .”

      Margot couldn’t listen anymore. She felt like she was suffocating, breathing his smoke, his air, his sweat. Through the window she saw Brad passing in the kitchen. She would talk to him. Or she’d remind another college friend who she was. “Excuse me,” she said. “I see someone I should say hello to.”

      Brad slipped around a corner in the kitchen and down a hall to the back of the house. His head was pounding and he rubbed his fingers against his temples. Maybe he was feeling the tumor grow, pushing against the folds of his brain. Could a developing tumor kick, like a fetus? If he put a finger in just the right place at the right time, would he feel it?

      Brad found Kara’s room empty and surprisingly familiar, and he closed the door behind him and took a deep breath. The walls were all white except for one. That’s my graffiti wall, she’d explained the first time she brought Brad home. In her early teens, she’d spray-painted her name on it in giant pink letters, and over time, she’d added doodles, quotes, names, phone numbers, bumper stickers. Standing in the room now, he still had no trouble finding Kara-hearts-Brad. He also had no trouble finding Kara-hearts-Mark, his predecessor from her high school days. Nothing got erased from the graffiti wall. And the wall had remained intact for all these years.

      Looking around the room, Brad saw past all the things that weren’t Kara’s—the treadmill and television set near the entrance, the sewing machine by the window and stack of little boy pants piled next to it. The bedspread wasn’t Kara’s. This one was brown with white flowers; Kara’s had been leopard print. But the bed was exactly where it had been before, in the center of the room, up against the graffiti wall. Across from it, beside the desk, hung Kara’s poster from the movie Grease 2. Still. She was probably the only person on earth who’d ever hung this poster in her bedroom, and throughout her life, when asked, she continued to insist with a deadpan face that it was one of the finest films in American history.

      A bookshelf that Kara had covered in neon-colored paisley wallpaper stood in the far corner of the room, with college textbooks sitting beside Roald Dahl novels and Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting. Kara’s flute, long abandoned, sat dusty on the bottom shelf. Behind the treadmill sat Lucy Ann’s old dollhouse, which she’d given to Kara, and Kara had given to Gwen, and Gwen must have outgrown years ago.

      Kara’s desk had always served as a vanity and was still cluttered with jewelry and bottles of nail polish and lipstick tubes and mascara. Brad looked up from the desk to the mirror hanging above it, and he could picture her looking out at him. The face he saw belonged to the thirty-four-year-old he’d seen in the coffin, but her dark hair was alive again and fell in tangled waves, and her eyes, almost black, had that mischievous glimmer he’d once adored. Her lips were painted a deep burgundy, instead of the softer pink they’d used at the funeral home, and she was showing more cleavage than they’d let her show that morning. She didn’t look too different from the Kara he remembered.

      “Hi,” he said to her.

      He could practically hear her voice. Hey there. How was my funeral?

      “It sucked,” he said.

      The preacher, I know. Not the smoothest operator, but there was entertainment value.

      She was wearing some sort of patchwork plaid top he’d never seen before.

      Don’t be critical, she said. I love this. I found it at a thrift shop.

      “You’re dead.”

       Yeah, but I can still spot a cool shirt when I see one. What’s up with the suit? Are you an investment banker now?

      “Realtor,” he said.

      Difference?

      Brad didn’t have an answer.

      Ibuprofen’s in the nightstand, she told him.

      She’d always kept a bottle there, and he went to the drawer, pulled out the 300-tablet container, and took two. When he turned back around, she was waiting for him in the mirror.

      “So,” he said, “Steve, huh?”

      You’re not going to be jealous, are you? she asked, and she lit a cigarette. When she exhaled, he pictured the smoke penetrating the glass and rising to the ceiling.

      “That was kind of a surprise,” he said.

      The engagement? she asked. Or me dropping dead? Or the whole maybe/maybe not a brain tumor thing—if you don’t mind my bringing it up.

      Another puff. He watched the smoke seep out from between her lips.

      Do you remember my secrets? she asked. He followed her gaze to the dollhouse. A moment later, she stepped out of the mirror and into the room.

      The move startled Brad. He hadn’t felt himself imagining it. And yet there she was—almost—walking past him across the room. Below her shirt, she wore blue jeans and flip-flops. Dress flip-flops, she said. Each had a large plastic daisy clipped to the front.

      When she reached the dollhouse, Kara ashed in a tiny sink and opened the miniature toilet. I think you could use these, she said. Brad looked inside, knowing what he would find. Before she gave the dollhouse to Gwen, Kara had always kept a few Xanax there. For domestic emergencies, she used to say. You’re having one now, she told him.

      “So are you,” he said.

      No, I’m dead. It’s all very simple now. Last Saturday was a different story.

      “How could you let yourself . . .” he began, but he let the words trail off. She was ignoring them anyway.

      She rested a finger on the flusher of the dollhouse toilet. I’m going to offer them up to someone else if you don’t take them, so you might as well.

      “I don’t do that anymore.”

      At least take two for your little trip through the MRI tube. Your doctor would give them to you, if you asked. That’s why God invented Xanax.

      Kara drifted back across the room and into the mirror, and Brad felt his eyes start to water, his vision grow blurry.

       It’s okay, Brad. Did you ever imagine I’d turn forty one day? Or sixty?

      “What about me?”

      She ran her eyes up and down him. I think growing old will suit you—if you can manage it.

      For a solid minute, Brad stared into the mirror where the image of Kara was and then wasn’t. He could remember standing in front of this mirror with her, both of them grinning and naked. Now he felt like an imposter. Being in this room. Being older than twenty-two. Wearing a tie and shoes that he’d polished. Owning shoe polish in the first place. He turned back to the dollhouse and with his finger slid two Xanax out of the toilet bowl. It felt like there were probably four more inside. He dropped the two pills into his shirt pocket.

      “Did you just take—?”

      Brad turned to face the door, and for a second he thought he was seeing Kara again. But no, it was Gwen. And once again he was conscious of his vision, of a transparent outline around the girl that might have been her sister hiding behind her.

      He didn’t have a chance to respond before Gwen was walking past him and reaching into the dollhouse. But she wasn’t going for the bathroom. She was