Maria

The organ pipes exhaled the muffled tones of “Be Not Afraid,” and Natalie Keene’s family, until then crying, and hugging, and fussing near the door like one massive failing heart, filed tightly together. Only two men were needed to carry the shiny white coffin. Any more and they would have been bumping into each other.

When you die, you become perfect. I’d be like Princess Diana. Everyone loves her now.”

It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.

What was it like growing up next to the room of a dead sister you never met?

How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow.

I had shattered some delicate dynamic. A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister.