Free This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart

of buckets against lids and tops against bottoms. Beneath the deck where I stood, someone was hunting, noisy and careless.
    Ready.
    Set.
    Now.
    Be still.
    I held Sterling tight. I never dialed my phone.
    I never heard the back door open or the stairs creak. I only heard, after too much time, the gangplank groaning again, the stranger leaving.
    It was early dark by then. I strained but all I could see was the hunch of a figure lit up by a brand-new lightning strike. A figure fast receding.

I locked the doors.
I closed the windows. I watted out the cottage—turned on every bulb, every spectrum of bright. The rain was falling harder now and Sterling was mewing and I said
shhh,
and poured her a fresh bowl of milk. I dug into the Friskies, put my hand out like a tray. She went from the milk to my hand, from my hand to the milk, and I complimented her on her bravery, told her wait till she meets Jasper Lee, a real trailblazer in the courage department.
    â€œDoesn’t even flinch,” I said, about how Jasper Lee would sit on that hospital bed and open out his arm and take the needle with the enzymes. “Doesn’t flinch at the start and doesn’t flinch at the end when they take the needle out, swab off the blood, lay down a Band-Aid. He stands up like a grown man. Shakes the nurse’s hand. Says goodbye and thank you, politest person you ever saw. They love him at Memorial, and you’ll see why, Sterling. You’ll see why. You’ll love him, too.”
    That’s what I said.
    From the milk to my hand, from my hand to the milk, Sterling’s ears were upright and her whiskers were drippy; that cat was a world-class listener. A curious cat, her tail going back and forth, and now I was telling her about Christmas on the island, the lights we string from place to place, the candles in the jars that Jasper Lee always lit. Next I was saying about Halloween and the parade we do down on the beach, Jasper Lee in whatever costume Mickey and he make, piggyback riding place to place:
I don’t want to scare anybody.
And after that maybe it was a story I told about how Deni and Eva and I had built those model planes that soared above my brother’s room. Landing gear up, I told Sterling. Thrust reversers retracted. The combat aircraft painted to look like weather had already done it in. I told Sterling how Deni had done most of the gluing and Eva most of the painting and how we all three had strung each plane up, standing on Jasper Lee’s bed while he sat below, praising our craft skills and engineering. “You sure know your mechanics,” he’d said, and Eva, a straight C-minus in every Ms. Isabel class, almost died laughing before she caught her breath and said how a girl could get a big head if she stayed near my brother too long. It was shortly after that when Eva lay down on the floor and declared the planes eternal. Iwas thinking of this then, got her image in my head—her blond hair, her tip-of-a-turnip nose, her deliberate way of looking at things so she would not miss a detail. Everything to be lived or imagined. That was Eva. She didn’t care one whit for terms.
    I told Sterling about the little tin men and the road-trip curtains and the canisters of sand from all over the world—the island’s best collection. I told her how Jasper Lee was interviewed last year for the local weekly,
The Sand Dollar
—the topic being his expertise in the crush that spills up from the sea. I told her how when the photographer came to take Jasper Lee’s pic, he’d said there’d be no pic without my mother and me, because if he was going to be famous,
we
were going to be famous, didn’t matter what we knew or didn’t know about sand, only mattered that we were family, all for one. The united Banuls.
    â€œNine years old, and that’s what he’s saying,” I was reciting to Sterling, who was licking my empty palm with her tongue, then licking