Annie stared at her phone, searching for estate sales on a glacially slow Friday afternoon at the title company where she worked as an escrow officer. She and her sister Abby had built a side hustle buying and selling mid-century furniture, vintage clothing, and gift shop souvenirs with the appropriate cringe factor—“Light One Up For Jesus” ashtrays, Barbra Streisand prayer candles, and Rod Stewart bobbleheads. Occasionally, she’d spot an estate sale where the contents of an entire house were to be given away. Now she saw one on Saturday. It was across the Bay in Redwood City, her hometown.
Remember this address? she texted her sister.
An hour passed before she got a response. Nothing personal, Annie thought. She’s busy with her teenage son and his substance abuse problem or their ailing rescue dog Sam. She loved her sister, but there was always drama in play.
Not really, Abby finally responded.
It’s where Shannon lived. Wonder if it’s still her father’s place ...
Another ten minutes passed.
You should check it out. Can’t go.
She hadn’t thought about Shannon much in the past few years. High school memories, good or bad, fade with time. They graduated more than twenty years ago. The recurring dreams had subsided in recent years.
You think so? Could be picked over quick. People get greedy when there’s something for nothing.
That’s not why you want to go.
Neither of them had been back to their old neighborhood in years. Annie wondered if anyone they knew still lived there. She told herself she was fine with the fact that the San Mateo Bridge put seven miles of water between her and the location of her most formative years. No, she knew she was kidding herself.
Suppose you’re right, Annie responded.
She stopped by Abby’s that evening to pick up moving blankets in case she found something worthwhile. Abby and her husband, Chuck, had reached an agreement after Abby and Annie scored on a Mission Oak dining set they sold for three times what they paid for it. Abby’s garage would serve as a storage space for excess inventory. The two sisters had different design sensibilities, but it was clear they shared a gift for spotting items that proved to be a steal.
Chuck was rinsing off his red pickup with an old garden hose as she pulled into the driveway. He was a contractor, adept at flipping houses and working with clients on major renovations, assuming they knew what they wanted. But by his own admission, his aesthetic sense was not on par with that of his wife and sister-in-law.
“Abby says you’re going to check out the old neighborhood,” he said as she climbed out of her SUV. “She’s more curious about it than she’s letting on.”
Chuck had a beer in the hand not holding the garden hose. Annie assumed he was well beyond his first at this hour on a Friday.
“She’s welcome to join me and she knows that,” Annie said, walking past him toward the back of the garage. “Would love to have her company.”
“Personally, I’m kind of curious what you find.”
“She can tell you about it.”
Annie didn’t like Chuck. He hadn’t gotten along with Annie’s ex when she married him ten years ago and barely concealed his conceit at predicting their divorce several years later. But she loved her sister. It was a tough balancing act.
“It’s been a lot of years. I’m going to think of it as an excuse to take a Saturday morning drive.”
Annie moved several sixties-style kitchen chairs to the side to get at the moving blankets. Like her sister, she had piercing blue eyes that immediately brought one’s attention to an otherwise unremarkable face. Both women were tall, solidly built, with sandy blonde hair. While Abby’s presence exuded nervous energy, her sister’s low-key manner made her appear more centered and present. Annie knew it was part of the reason she did so well as an escrow officer at the title company. She made couples feel more relaxed as they signed away their future with 20 percent down and the rest due in monthly installments for the next 30 years.
Abby stepped out of the kitchen and joined them in the garage.
“Do you want me to ride along with you tomorrow morning?” she asked, drying her hands with a dish towel. She glanced at Chuck as if it were something they hadn’t discussed.
“Sure—didn’t think you were up for it,” Annie said.
“Yeah, well, I guess I am.”
***
They left at 8 o’clock the next morning to arrive before the estate sale started at 9. As they set out over the causeway heading west from Hayward across the Bay, traffic slowed to a halt.
“Google says it’s going to take 10 minutes to get past an accident up ahead,” Abby said. “Can’t stand sitting in fucking traffic.”
“Be patient,” Annie said, looking straight ahead, not glancing toward her sister. “Someone may be hurt.”
“If you believe in signs, this isn’t a good one,” Abby said.
“Remember what Shannon’s mother said the day after the funeral?” Annie said. “We bury the dead and then we become the dead.”
“Yeah, I think she meant that we absorb the love of those we’ve lost and are embraced by them for as long as we are alive.”
“It sounded crazy, but I have never stopped thinking about it,” Annie said.
They drove by the accident: one vehicle was on its roof perpendicular to the flow of traffic. The other was on all four wheels facing backward. The driver’s side of the overturned vehicle, a sedan, was crumpled as if a child had grasped an origami figure. The windshield was shattered, and amber-colored plastic lay strewn on the pavement. Emergency vehicles had blocked off two lanes of traffic, leaving a single lane open. They didn’t see an ambulance. The injured must have been taken away.
As Abby looked out the window, she spilled what remained of her coffee on her lap.
“That’s what I get for rubber-necking at other people’s bad luck,” she said, barely above a whisper.
***
People were lining the sidewalk when they pulled up to the estate sale. They had to park a couple of blocks away. Annie’s chest felt heavy as they walked the quiet street toward the house. She hadn’t spent a lot of time at Shannon’s until her senior year, but memories came flooding back: smoking cigarettes on the front porch on Saturday evenings when Shannon’s parents were out, listening to Suzanne Vega on a boombox in her bedroom, raiding the liquor closet to make vodka tonics, Shannon getting so drunk her speech became slurred. Annie hadn’t thought about these things in years.
She counted close to twenty people ahead of them, and the line continued to grow as 9 o’clock approached: college students, young couples with kids, a few people in their sixties who, judging by their haggard appearance, were in need of a bargain. The front door opened, and everyone quietly but anxiously filed into the house and fanned out.
Annie recognized the furniture and artwork. Her hunch was right—Shannon’s parents had never moved. She scanned the living and dining rooms for family photographs but saw none. Abby followed her as they climbed the stairs of the split-level to the two bedrooms on the third floor. A dank, musky odor permeated the house. No one had lived in it for several years.
“Do you remember that time …?” Abby stopped mid-sentence.
Annie’s eyes were filled with tears and she turned away. Other people in the bedroom that had belonged to Shannon glanced at her but kept moving—bureaus, lamps, end tables were being tagged and taken.
“What was I thinking? This was a mistake.”
Abby hugged her sister for several moments. Annie looked around, not so much noticing what was in the room as trying to remember what the room had witnessed.
“You two were close that last year,” Abby said.
“The wrong place at the wrong time.”
A tall, slim man with a shaved head who looked to be in his early forties was speaking to a young couple as the two sisters entered the other bedroom. He had a European accent that Annie couldn’t place. He wore thin, black-framed glasses that gave his square face an intensity that seemed incongruous with his baggy cargo shorts and white t-shirt.
“He hasn’t lived here in four or five years,” the man told the couple. “We’ve shipped the family heirlooms back to Denmark. We want to get rid of everything else with as little hassle as possible.”
Annie walked up to him as the couple left and asked whether he knew the family. Abby trailed behind.
Yes, he was the nephew of the owner. His name was Kai. The owner had passed away a couple of years ago at the beginning of the pandemic. He had no next of kin in the States. It wasn’t until after the owner’s death that Kai found out he had been named executor. Two years had passed before he could get into the States due to COVID restrictions.
Annie introduced herself and nodded toward Abby, who pretended to be focused on an oak armoire. Annie told him they knew the family and were friends with the daughter, Shannon.
Kai’s eyes focused intently on Annie for a moment. He had met his cousin quite a few times over the years, he said, both here and in Denmark. He liked her a lot. She had a lot of spunk.
Kai asked if Annie remembered his uncle, Søren, and his aunt, Birgette.
“Yes, they were very warm toward me,” Annie said. “But I remember Shannon wasn’t getting along with them toward the end.”
“Yes, that sounds right.”
An older couple approached Kai and asked about the dining room set downstairs. He excused himself and followed them down to the dining room.
Kai returned a few moments later. He said Søren and his mother were brother and sister. They were extremely close. When Shannon died, Kai’s mother was devastated. But despite their closeness, Søren refused to say much about what happened.
“Two other girls were in the car and Shannon was driving,” Kai said. “That’s all she told me. It was a mystery to me for years.”
They were interrupted again by the older couple. Did the dining room table have a leaf? The tabletop was divided into two halves, and they saw grooved sliding tracks when they looked underneath.
Annie was aware she was drawn to Kai. They were about the same age, and she sensed he and Shannon could have been close in the way that opposites attract. He wasn’t annoyed as they continued to be interrupted, and his attention was undistracted when he was speaking to her. Abby picked up on it. Her sister’s tone of voice would change when she was captivated by someone. There was a warm and measured cadence she hadn’t heard in a long time.
“When my own mother died a few years ago, we found some letters Søren had written to her,” Kai said. “He didn’t know if he and Birgette would stay together. She withdrew from him and everything else in her life.”
Annie asked Kai if they could step into the backyard to talk. Kai led them outside. The large yard was overgrown and bore little resemblance to the carefully manicured lawn, garden, and small orange grove Annie remembered from her youth.
Annie stood for a moment taking in the purple blossoms of a large Jacaranda tree nearing full bloom in an adjoining yard. She turned, looked at Kai, and stood for a moment.
“I was in the car with Shannon when she died.”
She didn’t know the other girl in the car well. Her name was Cory. Shannon was driving down a hill on a four-lane freeway, returning from the community college where Shannon and Cory were to attend classes in the fall. A week had passed since their high school graduation. Shannon started to accelerate as if to see how much of a thrill she could feel from the speed. They quickly passed five or six other cars as they followed a curve in the road, then saw two delivery trucks ahead traveling well under the speed limit, blocking both lanes. Annie looked toward Cory in the front passenger seat. She saw terror in her eyes.
Shannon slammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the two trucks, but the wheels on the right side grabbed. The car spun clockwise off the pavement, across some tall grass, and into a large eucalyptus tree. The driver’s side took the full impact.
Annie was seated in the back on the right side, the farthest from Shannon. She was banged up and bleeding, but still conscious. Cory, sitting next to Shannon, had a severe concussion and a broken arm. No one was wearing a seat belt.
“Shannon was completely unresponsive,” Annie said. “I knew right away she was dead.”
Abby put her arm around Annie, and the three of them stood together for several moments.
“I have no idea how long we were in the car before help arrived,” Annie said.
She wanted to tell Kai that she tried through sheer force of will to turn time backward and bring Shannon back since she had just felt how it could slow and then stop. It was another memory that she had carried with her for years.
“I knew Shannon had friends in the car who survived,” Kai said. “I never knew who they were.”
Annie said that one evening a few weeks later she was driving down the same freeway hill and started to cry, then scream. She pushed the accelerator to the floor as she approached the turn where the accident took place. The speedometer reached 95 miles per hour before she lifted her foot off the gas pedal to start braking, then pulled off to the shoulder. She could see in the rearview mirror where Shannon had spun off the road and struck the eucalyptus tree. The skin-smooth beige bark was still scraped and torn from the accident. She turned off the engine and sat. Eventually, a cop pulled up. He asked if something was wrong.
“I told him no, I just needed time to think.”
“He didn’t ask for my license or registration, and I didn’t have them with me anyway,” she said. “He just pulled away. I sat there for another 30 minutes. I have no memory of what I might have been thinking—maybe nothing at all.”
She unbuckled herself, opened the door, and walked the 100 yards back to the eucalyptus tree as traffic whizzed by. Drivers stared at her as if she were homeless or disoriented. Dusk approached and long shadows from a stand of oak trees on the other side of the road darkened the area. She sat down, leaned against the tree, and wept.
“I knew the torment that Shannon was in during the weeks before she died and I wanted to soothe her. But what did it matter? She was gone.”
Kai sat down next to Annie and held her hand. She looked into the distance and slowly pulled her hand away. He reached over and held it again. She did not resist.
Kai told them that when Shannon was about 15 years old, she and her parents came to visit his family outside Copenhagen. She was beautiful, spirited and funny.
“I had a terrible crush and I was embarrassed by it,” Kai said “She was my cousin, we had known each other since we were kids. She acted as if she hadn’t a clue.”
They went biking one afternoon on a trail beside a bay near where Kai’s parents lived. She told him a story about a junior high Halloween party that made him laugh so hard he accidentally rolled off the bike path into a field of lavender and fell off.
“She got off her bike, ran down the embankment, and knelt down next to me,” Kai said. “I looked up and her head was blocking the sun. I lay there for a moment catching my breath and smiled at her. She leaned down and kissed me.”
Kai said he could still remember how alive he felt. It remained vivid in his mind all these years later.
Annie knew about the bike ride and the kiss, she said. Shannon had told her when she returned home. She could barely contain herself when she told the story to Annie.
Annie could still remember her own reaction, though said nothing to Kai. It was subdued, even conflicted. Annie had realized she wanted to be the one who had fallen off the bike and whom Shannon had leaned over to kiss.
***
Kai said he had a favor to ask. Would they accompany him next week to the cemetery where Søren’s ashes were to be interred alongside those of Birgitte and Shannon? It would mean a great deal to him and to his family.
Annie glanced at Kai for a moment. She thought it was a bit odd that he would ask. Then again, it was odd to be sitting in Shannon’s backyard after so many years.
“Let me see if I can get off for the afternoon.”
Abby thanked Kai but said she had another commitment. Annie was relieved. She knew her sister tried to avoid any interaction where loss was the theme. She was still surprised that the previous evening Abby said she wanted to join her in the morning.
On the drive back, the two sisters tried to unravel what had happened. Abby said Kai was attracted to Annie, but the idea seemed crazy. Annie wasn’t sure what to think. She had shown no interest in men, nor anyone else, since her divorce.
And how was it that after so many years Kai knew so little about the circumstances under which his own cousin had died?
Annie gazed across the water at the East Bay hills and then south toward the Lick Observatory, a series of white domes faintly visible at the summit of Mount Hamilton high above San Jose. She was trying to make sense of a pattern of events and memories from her past that were not easily revealed, like searching for a new constellation in the familiar night sky.
***
Annie pulled up to the cemetery parking lot, and Kai stood nearby on a sidewalk dressed in a dark blue suit wearing sunglasses. He was speaking to a cemetery employee. He turned his head, smiled at her, and walked over. “Thank you for coming. I did not want to do this alone.”
They strolled quietly down a long gravel path toward the columbarium and turned right through a double set of doors. They passed dozens of small compartments marked by names and birth and death dates of the deceased going back to the early 20th century. It reminded Annie of safe deposit boxes at a bank. She and Kai stopped in front of a half dozen chairs that had been set out and sat down in the center two. At eye height, a compartment door was open. She saw two cedar urns, one with Birgitte’s name and the other with Shannon’s.
The stillness of that moment felt overwhelming—as if the silence itself was eternal. She looked at Kai and was aware of an intense emotion in his eyes, something larger than sadness.
He opened a black canvas tote bag and pulled out another cedar urn. He held it up and Annie read the bronze plate—“Søren Landers 1934–2022.” He handed it to the attendant, who placed the urn in the crypt beside those belonging to his wife and daughter.
They sat and stared silently. Annie reached over and held Kai’s hand. It felt warm and comforting.
“I was here 20 years ago for Shannon’s service,” Annie said. “None of it felt real to me. Abby wouldn’t come. I realized driving down here that Shannon might have had a son or daughter in high school by now.”
Kai squeezed her hand and looked toward her, they caught each other’s eye, and then returned their gazes toward the three cedar urns. After several moments, Kai nodded to the attendant, who walked over and closed the crypt door, then used a small yellow screwdriver to turn the six screws that sealed it.
***
Annie thought about Kai the entire drive home, trying to reconstruct her experience of the day and of him. Her mind shifted back and forth between her attraction toward Kai and the practical implications of what that might mean. Viewing the urn that held her friend’s ashes had rattled her to the core. Her sense of the past had changed as if the narrative she held in her mind for all those years had been transformed, but she didn’t understand how. And she now saw Kai in a way she had seen no one in the past five years; she hungered to spend more time with him.
She called him that evening and asked if they could have dinner before he returned home to Denmark. There was a momentary silence at the other end.
“May I ask why?”
Another pause. “Because I want to know you better.”
“Ah, and then what?” he asked.
“Well, we’ll see.”
When they met at a local Greek restaurant in Redwood Shores a couple of nights later, Annie arrived a few minutes late. Kai was seated at a table near the water with a view of the bay. She hadn’t been to the place in years.
As drinks arrived, Kai thanked Annie for coming with him to the cemetery. Annie said the experience had been a sort of wake-up call, that she had to take the measure of her life, where she was now, and what might lay ahead for her.
“You wake up one day and you suddenly realize you are halfway through the journey,” she said.
Kai nodded and said he agreed.
“Life throws us surprises and we have a choice what to do with them,” she said.
Annie asked if she could tell Kai something he might not know about his cousin.
He nodded.
About a month before the accident, Shannon told Annie she discovered adoption papers in her parents’ bedroom closet after overhearing them argue several nights earlier. They had learned that Shannon’s birth mother had recently died and discussed how the identity of her father had never been established. Shannon was baffled that they would discuss it when they knew she was in the house, but she heard all of it. A few days later, after discovering the papers, she confronted them. The discussion quickly unraveled into a fight that was unresolved when she died.
“We grew so close in that final month,” Annie said. “She confided all of this to me. I wanted to help her. I didn’t know how.”
Kai said he had grown angry at his own parents for hiding the circumstances around Shannon’s death for so many years. It wasn’t until after Søren and Birgette had visited his family in his late twenties that they told him.
“Family secrets are a form of poison,” he said. “They killed Shannon and it took me years after her death to understand how deeply I had been in love with her, maybe the only person I’ve ever loved,” he said. “And she was not my cousin by blood.”
Kai said they had written each other long letters throughout their teen years. On a visit to his family’s home north of Copenhagen, they had slept together in the long dusk of the summer solstice—and several times more over the course of a week.
“‘She died in a car accident.’ That was all they would ever say,” Kai told her.
Kai reached over and squeezed Annie’s hand. He looked down at the table, then lifted his eyes toward her.
“I’ve dreaded coming back, even though it’s been a very long time,” he said. “And I dreaded going to the cemetery alone. Maybe those feelings are beginning to lift.”
***
Annie drove back over the bridge that night, thinking of all the things that Shannon had told her about Kai in that last month before she died. Annie could not figure out if Shannon was infatuated with him, or if it was something deeper. Strange that all these years later she could understand what Shannon had seen in him. Her youth, beauty, and spirit felt alive within Annie now. Perhaps Shannon’s mother had been right—something lives on. Annie wondered why she told Kai she was grateful to have a new friend and then left it there. A moment of disappointment crossed his face, then he gave her a long hug and they said their goodbyes.
She passed her exit on the freeway, drove up into the East Bay hills to a quiet park she knew, and turned off the engine and headlights. She looked up in search of a constellation in the northern sky that Shannon had once shown her. Kai had first taught Shannon its location one winter evening during her last trip to Copenhagen. Annie smiled as she recognized it. She could not remember its name.