Fear Her

I slip into Mrs. H’s bakery an hour before the memorial. She’s preparing food and she’s still, as she called it the day I arrived, grief baking. When she sees me, she rushes toward the door. The pain in her eyes is as visible as the relief. She’s gone pale. She grabs my arms as though I might otherwise disappear. “Corey. You left hours ago. We didn’t know where you’d gone.”

Those few words are enough to make me feel small and selfish.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. H, I—” I stop myself. What can I tell her? “I went to the spa and lost track of time.”

“I should be used to that, shouldn’t I? The two of you always did.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She shakes her head, and I wait for her to say more. To acknowledge why she’s worried, or how Kyra simply walked out of our lives and she keeps waiting for her to come back too.

Instead, Mrs. H returns to her dough. She kneads with determination, but her methodic pounding doesn’t mask the way her shoulders shake. Or the way tears drip from her cheeks, one at a time.

The bakery smells of yeast, cinnamon, and sugar. The heat from the ovens makes the space cozy. But it’s not comfortable. Comfort implies an ease I don’t feel. I’m stifled—and I want to get out. I want to leave Lost after the memorial.

Most of the bakery is used for actual baking, and Mrs. H has an impressive workspace that’s open to the front. A few stools stand at the counter, for those visitors who drop by for a baked good and coffee and want to stay. I grab one. I hook my feet around the legs and balance on the edge of the seat.

“Mrs. H?” My voice sounds small, even to my ears, and maybe she picks up on it. She sets the dough aside and meets my gaze. “Mrs. H, I’ve seen the garden. I’ve seen the paintings.”

“Oh.”

I want to ask, How could you let this happen? What I ask instead is, “What happened?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’m here to listen.”

She pauses, and I can see that she’s weighing how much to tell me. I want the truth, but apparently, that’s not a simple request.

“Fear,” she says, eventually. “The people of Lost Creek were afraid of Kyra because she was so different. I can’t tell you how much that hurt. Especially because, at times, I was afraid of her myself. I didn’t always understand her, but I wanted her to be happy.” She shakes her head when I start to interrupt. “I only began to understand Kyra when I began to understand her art. She painted that.”

Mrs. H points to a small canvas of Kyra and her sitting on a rickety bench outside the hot springs. The spa was our special place, but I knew that Kyra wanted to share the hot springs with her parents. She wanted to tell them about her stories. She wanted to talk them into letting her travel and go to college.

In the painting, Kyra shows her mother a book. The two of them are surrounded by salmonberry flowers.

“The same held true for most everyone in Lost Creek. Once they understood—”

“She was a person with hopes and dreams.” Try as I might, I can’t keep the anger out of my voice.

“She helped the community, and they learned to stop fearing her. She was different, yes, but we finally understood that that was good. Until then, we hadn’t understood that we could help her too, better than any outsider could.”

“Rowanne? She was a therapist. Kyra needed therapy and medication.”

“Even when they didn’t work?” Mrs. H counters. Kyra struggled with medication from the time she first got her diagnosis. She responded to drugs, but marginally. They dimmed her mania for a while, but it would only come back stronger. “She was my daughter. All I wanted was for the therapy and medication to work. It broke my heart when they didn’t. It was only then that Joe realized—that we realized—that we’d been wrong all along.”

“But when I left—”

“We tried everything,” Mrs. H interrupts me quietly. “I wish you would believe me.”

When I left, Kyra was talking about therapy regimens. Other options. When I left, she still had hope. But if the state of the spa is anything to go by, at the end, she had nothing left but her paintings to draw out her restless energy.

It takes me a moment to register Mrs. H’s earlier words. “What do you mean you’d been wrong?”

“All of the medications she’d tried only suppressed her creativity.”

I blink. Something clicks.

Kyra never mentioned that. And Rowanne would never have left of her own volition. And the depths of Kyra’s mania… I push off the stool and it clatters to the floor. “You withheld her medication?”

“We didn’t give up without a fight.” I turn to find Mr. H standing in the doorway. He clings to his briefcase like a lifeline, his shoulders still sagging. “The medication didn’t work, Corey,” he says. “You know that. She would feel better for brief increments of time, but she’d inevitably get worse again. It was cruel to make her go through those ups and downs.”

I ball my fists and I honest-to-God see red. “But the medication did work. Maybe not perfectly. Maybe not as much as she wanted it to, but she wanted to keep exploring other options. And between the medication and her sessions with Rowanne, she wanted to be better.”

“She couldn’t paint,” Mr. H says.

“She didn’t want to!” Kyra wasn’t happy when she was painting. She was coping.

“But we did,” he says softly. He walks over to Mrs. H, who keeps her head down. “You don’t understand, Corey. We needed the light that she brought.”

His words join the refrain of Lost Creek. You don’t belong here. Outsider. Stranger.

I want to pound the wall in frustration. “She was deeply unhappy.”

Mr. H merely shakes his head. “There’s no way for you to know that. We understood our daughter. We did what was best for her, and for all of us.”

“You didn’t understand her. You didn’t listen to her. And you aren’t listening to me now.” I’m not sure how much of this I think and how much of it I actually speak aloud, but Mr. H blanches.

I take a step back, but he pulls himself together. “The memorial is starting soon. Make sure you’re ready. We will remember her the way she deserved—with respect.”

I keep hearing those words: understand, respect, ours. But repetition doesn’t give them meaning. I don’t care how they want to remember her. “Do you really think…” I bite my tongue.

“Speak your mind, Corey,” Mr. H says, his voice carefully pleasant.

“Do you really think she cared about a memorial? Don’t you think she’d rather still be here?”

He flushes, and I expect him to yell at me. But after another heartbeat, his mouth thins and he nods. “Yes, I do think my daughter cared. She and I talked about this memorial, and I know she wanted you to be present. But you are not a necessity. We leave in thirty minutes.”

I should feel badly for speaking to him so harshly, but I don’t. I’m cycling through anger and grief and guilt and heartbreak. I’m homesick for a person, homesick for Kyra.

As I turn on my heels and head for the door, I overhear Mr. Henderson soothing his wife. “You know this was meant to be, don’t you, Lynda? It’s better this way. She’s at peace.”

Mrs. H’s voice sounds tiny. “I know.”

I close the door behind me, but I can’t shut the conversation from my mind.

• • •

In the small cabin, I stare at myself in the mirror. The strapless black tunic I wear is the only piece of clothing I own that even remotely resembles a dress, and combined with a pair of dark jeans and a gray blazer, I hope it looks appropriate. Kyra wouldn’t care, but Lost and I are mourning different people. The Kyra who died a week ago isn’t the friend I left behind. Still, I lost them both.

I pick up my makeup bag and put on some foundation and mascara—just enough to not feel like a ghost myself. Then I dig around until I find the small jewelry purse I packed. My hands tremble, and the bracelet slips through my fingers the first two times, but I finally grab hold of it.

Kyra gave it to me before I left. It takes some messing with the clasp before it dangles around my wrist, but when it does, I feel calmer. I could tell you stories about this, she’d said when she gave it to me.

She never did.

Lost Creek insists on wearing pink, so I do the same. I put on a tourmaline petal charm Kyra made for me.

This new Lost doesn’t seem real, but at least this piece of jewelry, this reminder of our friendship, isn’t fake.

I look back into the mirror, and a sudden breeze plays with my hair, disheveling it. I don’t know where it came from—not from an open window or the heating vent.

Kyra?

A chill runs down my spine as my heart aches. I grab my coat. It’s time to leave for the memorial.