Birthday Girl

Jess lowers a lit match to the wick and lights the white candle she’s chosen especially for this occasion. The sight of the golden flame springing into life makes her feel like it’s truly her birthday.

She carries the candle outside so that the flame shines in the darkness.

“Hi, Eden,” she says to the empty porch.

She and Eden had been best friends since they were eight, when Eden’s family first moved to her neighborhood. They went to school together, and then they went to the same college. They even shared a birthday, and Eden was the one to come up with the idea for how they could celebrate it together even if they were apart:

At eight o’clock that night, we’ll light a candle and think of each other. We’ll know the other one’s doing the same thing, and it’ll be like we’re having our birthdays together.

Back then it didn’t seem possible to Jess that there might be a time when Eden wasn’t right down the street from her. Maybe Eden knew something she didn’t. Even then.

It’s late November and chilly and Jess is nervous about sitting outside alone in the dark, but the flame calms her and reassures her.

“Remember how we used to go hide in the library and read during recess?” she says. “And how we’d actually get in trouble for that? I was thinking of that the other day. I swear, it still makes me laugh.”

They were good at keeping in touch for a while after they graduated, even though there was an entire country between them. Jess stayed in Maryland. Eden moved to California to be an actress, and Eden’s parents moved to Florida, giving Eden little incentive to return to her old neighborhood.

The phone calls and emails and visits slowed down, and then they stopped.

Sometimes Jess would watch a new TV program just to see if she’d spot Eden. At the movies she’d lean forward in her seat and scan crowd scenes, looking for a girl with curly red hair and large, expressive hazel eyes. She’d search Eden’s name online, but nothing came up other than links to old social media accounts Eden didn’t use anymore.

Maybe Eden took a stage name. Maybe she met someone and got married and got caught up in her new career, her new life, letting the old life slip away. It happened, right? Even when people had the best of intentions.

But Jess kept up the candle ritual. It didn’t feel like her birthday if she didn’t do it. And she wanted to believe that somewhere out there, Eden was still doing it too.

Jess has never been able to find the words to describe what a burning candle smells like, but she loves it. She lifts the small glass holder closer to her face to breathe in the scent; it’s warm and clean and pure. She’s never bothered with scented candles. What’s the point of heavily perfumed wax, when the fragrance of a plain candle is so intoxicating?

“You know who I ran into at the store the other day? Erik.” Jess grins. “I know you cried for days when he dumped you for Lori, but let me tell you, girlfriend — you are so lucky that ship sailed without you. God, he’s gotten boring. Maybe he always was.”

Jess’s husband Glen didn’t understand her devotion to this ritual at first. One year he tried coming out on the porch to sit with her, but he figured out quickly that this was her party and for just a few minutes, he wasn’t invited.

He was the first one she called on the afternoon she got bored in the office and Googled Eden’s name again. This time she got a result she hadn’t seen before, and her stomach turned to ice when she saw the page summary on the screen. There was Eden’s name. And head-on collision. And dies. And those words did not go together at all.

It’s not her, she told herself. It’s someone else with the same name.

But the article used one of Eden’s headshots, the ones she’d showed to Jess, the ones that made her look so beautiful it was a little scary. Eden was gone. She’d been gone for months by the time Jess found out.

Jess ran to the restroom and threw up, and then she called her husband and cried.

That was four years ago, but Jess still lights a candle at eight o’clock on every birthday. She used to berate herself for not trying harder to track Eden down, to keep in touch.

The candle ritual is something she will not let go, ever. It seems like the least she can do.

She is standing close to a window; she can see Glen fussing around with gift bags in the living room, and it makes her smile.

“I know I say this all the time, but I wish you could have met him. I know I’m biased, but you’d like him.”

A slight wind rustles the pine trees in the yard and she glances over at them for a second. When she looks back towards the house, she freezes.

There are two flickering candle flames reflected in the window.

“Eden,” she whispers. “Hey.”

She can’t believe it. She doesn’t want to look away because if she does, what happens? She looks at the two flames until it hurts to keep staring, and then she closes her eyes and imagines Eden standing there in front of her, laughing.

“You thought I died? Oh, sweetie. The news screwed up, got the name wrong. I’m so sorry, Jess. I never meant to scare you.”

The “What if?” keeps Jess’s eyes closed for several seconds. When she opens them again, there’s only one flame reflecting in the window.

But she knows what she saw.

“You never forgot,” she says. “Of course you didn’t.” She knows she should cry, and maybe later she will. But right now, she’s too happy.

She blows out the candle. The smell of the smoke rising from the wick will always remind her of birthday cakes. Which is fitting, of course.

“Happy birthday to us.”