Grandma wants Annie in the frilly flower-girl frock she wore at Aunt Lisa's wedding, but Mom insists on the Pooh dress Annie loved best, even though it's too small. She snips a bit of cloth from the underside of the hem before the wake begins, tucks it in her bra. "Your sister's an angel now," she says.

The casket is white and shiny, like my shoes, and nicer than any of our furniture. I'm pretty sure Grandma paid for it. Inside, nestled in white satin, is Annie. She's supposed to look how she was before the chemo, but the wig is too dark, her lips and cheeks too red. Her eyes are closed, hands clasped over a heart-shaped pillow with lacy ribbons trailing from the bottom. It's so pretty, and I wonder if they'll bury it with her, and then I feel bad for wondering.

All the relatives are here, voices low, murmuring. Mostly they don't talk to us. It feels wrong to be alive when Annie is an angel, shameful. Uncle Bob thumb wrestles with us in the corner until Auntie Fran tells him to knock it off.

Uncle Jack bends down to give me a big, wet kiss. I smell his breath on my cheek for hours, even after I go to the bathroom and scrub at it with a soapy paper towel. That cheek is red, so red, and I feel everyone staring at it, wondering what's wrong with me. Maybe they think I've been crying, just on that one side. I rub the other cheek, hard enough to hurt, but I can't make them match.

We wander downstairs, bored, my brother and sister and I in our best clothes and slick-bottomed Sunday shoes. Mine have a new scratch that won't rub off. I wonder if the coffin will get scratched when they bury it. I wonder if we'll have to watch them bury it.

It's dim down there, quiet. An aquarium burbles in the corner, bright fish with feathery fins gliding back and forth. Rumpled magazines on a low table, Ladies' Home Journal with a beaming girl in a lacy white sweater holding a giant reindeer cookie, part of an elaborate cookie sleigh. Our happiest holiday issue! A star glints over her shoulder.

 A few steps lead into the room from either side of the staircase, and after a while we discover you can run up one side, around the mouth of the stairs, and down the other side fast enough that it feels like that moment in dreams where something catches just right and you begin to fly.

Later, when we leave the funeral home, we'll find a trio of heart-shaped lollipops tucked under the windshield wiper, and we'll remember that it's Valentine's Day, and we'll remember that we are three.

Now, though, we are flying. Faster and faster we go, laughing and breathless. I trip, go down on one knee, hard, but spring up again and keep running, even as blood seeps through my tights. We wait for someone to come down and tell us to stop. No one does.



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