I Sent My Sister Fake Anthrax Because Grief

Those days after Emily’s funeral, when not even the business of her death was there to fill the vacancy, were a blur of numbness, crying in the car, and irregular sleep patterns. The days and nights ran together with no work, no normalcy to regulate them. I spent hours meandering between the kitchen and the couch, clinging to Nick for company, incapable of being alone. Fortunately, with Nick by my side, Sarah, my older sister, two blocks away, and Joey and Lisa, our closest couple friends another block up, I never had to be.

Joey stopped by to check in on us, really me, one weekday afternoon while Lisa was at work. The three of us sat around the dining room table. Joey and Nick carried the conversation as I blankly shuffled through pieces of mail that had formed a small tower in honor of my apathy at life. I could contribute nothing of substance. I had nothing to give and no will to give it even if I did. I sat, stuck in my nothingness. Joey kept trying to pull something out of the void. Each conversation topic was a tap against my walls, him listening to the hollowness inside, searching for just the hint that there was a place he could breakthrough to anchor me. He wanted a smile. A sign that I knew “okayness” was in my future even if it wasn’t here right now. He was the Atreyu to my Artax.

In the 1984 fantasy genre classic, “The Neverending Story” the storybook warrior, Atreyu, goes on a quest to help save his world, Fantasia, from crumbling. In a scene that continues to traumatize every human with a beating heart that watches it, Atreyu’s best friend and trusty horse, Artax, gets stuck in the Swamp of Sadness and loses his will to live. Atreyu unsuccessfully pulls, cries, pleas, and begs Artax to save himself. Unable or unwilling, viewers and Atreyu watch Artax sink into oblivion. Joey’s approach to saving me from my swamp of sadness was less direct.

I mechanically opened some junk mail that had blank greeting cards, the ones with perforated edges and generic, bucolic scenery on what can barely be considered cardstock. They came as an anticipated “thank you” from a presumptive solicitation for money. I put them in the recycle pile. Joey snatched them as if from a fire and waved them around as he admonished me.

“You can’t throw these out. These are gold.”

“You’re joking.”

“I used to use these all the time when I was younger. I would write stuff in them and send them anonymously to people.”

“What do you put in the card?”

“Anything you want. You can draw something. You can write something. Make it funny or stupid or weird” he said.

“Won’t the person be able to tell it’s you from your handwriting?”

“Just use your left hand.”

“That’s like serial killer handwriting then”

“Yeah well, then write something creepy, and then they’ll tell you about this creepy letter they got in the mail on some cheap card. It’ll confuse them. It’s great.”

The combination of his sincerity and the sheer absurdity of the prank made me laugh for what felt like the first time. I wanted to keep the sensation going even though it felt like a room I should walk by and look into rather than enter and stay.

Under normal circumstances, Joey’s stories about his outrageous and inappropriate humor ended with laughter at the awfulness and relief at never being on the receiving end of it. But these weren’t normal circumstances. It was so juvenile. So clearly beneath us in age, intellect, and humor. It was lowest common denominator kind of clever. It was absurd. And it was exactly what I needed. I started to wonder out loud.

“So who would I even send it to?”

“I don’t know, send it to your neighbors.”

“No! I don’t know them like that. I don’t think they’d find it funny.”

“Okay, send it to someone at random.”

“I don’t want to do it to anyone I can’t have a reveal to. Oh! I can send it to Sarah.”

Sarah is and always will be my favorite person to play a trick on, not because she can take the joke or enjoy the joke, quite the opposite. I love messing with her because she hates it but loves me. I am sure to get a reaction, but I just never know which. I read somewhere that lab rats perform better when rewards are intermittent rather than consistent. I was the rat that just had to press that button to see what would happen this time; Sarah’s reaction was the intermittent reward.

My favorite target came with the challenging bonus of convincing her I wasn’t behind the prank despite what I predicted would be immediate suspicion of me. Sending it to Sarah made perfect sense. I could extend the joke, keep it going as long as I wanted. It was a controlled environment. I looked at how many cards I had and started to think about sending a card every week for a month and then maybe 3 months and how every time we’d get together as a family, it’d be the big family joke of whether Sarah got any more, weird cards, and we’d all try and guess who could it be. My family, the new version of us, could have a new joke. We could all laugh again.

I used my left hand and my best serial killer flare on the handicapped penmanship. I wrote “I’m watching you” in one. Joey lent his artistic skills to another and drew a horse, not knowing until after he had drawn it that Sarah owns a horse. It was the perfect red herring of a clue.

The horse was disproportionately well endowed to make sure we heavily contrasted the serenity of the farm scene on the front. It was stupid and gross. It was vulgar and sophomoric. We kept going. We ended up filling out three pretty, little cards with various phrases and drawings that were ominous, obscene, or both. Then I decided to add a prop to my comedy routine. The only appropriate addition to a completely inappropriate mail campaign was obviously fake anthrax. I put a pinch of flour to the second card. Outrageous. Over the line. We were laughing. I couldn’t wait to deliver the masterpiece of a joke.

It wasn’t enough to just mail them. I’d be the first person accused. I needed to set something up so that she would think it couldn’t be me. I had three cards filled out. I could space out sending them.

Our family was about to head to the Outer Banks for a vacation, a tradition we’d kept for over a decade at that point. On paper, it was awkward timing, a family beach vacation a week after losing a member of our family. But in reality, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves except be together, so it was exactly what we needed. Nick couldn’t take off work because it coincided with school, and a teacher taking off in the first two weeks of school is about as good an idea as sending fake anthrax to someone in a greeting card with pornographic pictures of a horse and vague, threatening messages.

I addressed and stamped the envelopes and put the first one in the mail. It would have been quicker for me to walk it to her house, but I couldn’t get caught dropping it off. A day later,

Sarah got the first card and, predictably, I was her first call.

“Francesca.”

That’s all she had to say. I knew in her tone what she was referring to.

“What?” I asked innocently. I tried to mix in the right amount of “I-know-that-tone-but-what-in-the-world-is-this-in-reference-to” in my voice to seem genuine.

“Is this you?”

“Is what me?” She went on to describe the card she got with the “weird” message in it.

“Come on. This is you.”

“It’s not me!” I protested, knowing that my best argument was sitting on a table, addressed, stamped, and ready to be sent while I was away with my sister. I didn’t successfully convince her it wasn’t me behind the mail, but I had sown a seed of doubt into her field of certainty.

It was healing to be with my family and painful to be our newly fractured unit and lonely to not have my partner with me. Everything had duality to it, and I couldn’t figure out how to feel or just be. Our return home came soon enough, and I rode home with my sister, her husband Kris, and their pup Moxie. I made sure not to bring it up, but when the subject of the mystery card organically came up, I asked if she had any more leads on the case. Sarah used her plain-speaking voice that meant all joking aside,

“It really wasn’t you?”

“It really wasn’t me. I promise.” I assured her falsely.

I had a twinge, an inkling that maybe she wasn’t going to enjoy the big reveal the way I had hoped. I pushed it aside. I had checked with Nick for a letter update mid-week, and he had dropped the card into the mail at some point, so the flour filled card would be waiting for her when she got home.

“Okay, well if it’s seriously not you, then it’s kind of creepy. If I get another one of those things, I swear I’m calling the cops.”

Uh-oh. I had to course correct without letting anything on. Maybe this was just a bluff she was using to call my bluff of denial. I wouldn’t be so easily defeated, but I had to make sure she wasn’t going to call the cops either.

“Don’t do that. If you get another one, just don’t do anything. Send me a picture or something and I’ll help you figure it out. I’m sure it’s a joke.”

I was so sure.

She dropped me off and we said our goodbyes. It didn’t take long for her to see what was waiting for her when she got home.

When I picked up the phone, I could tell by the sound of tears and terror in my sister’s voice that I had messed up. She had gotten my second card, the one with the flour in it and coincidentally postmarked September 11th. A touch too far. My plan to throw her off had worked so well she wasn’t even calling to accuse me of anything, she was calling because she didn’t feel safe. The harder she cried out the details of receiving the mail with the mysterious white powder, the more I cringed. She concluded with “so I locked myself upstairs in my room with Moxie and I’ve called the cops. They’re sending a detective over.”

It was my turn to be scared.

“No! You didn’t call the cops, did you? I told you to call me if you got another one! Sarah, it was me! I sent you the cards. I sent you the first one and then Nick sent the other one while we were away. It was supposed to be a joke. There’s more I was going to send. You were supposed to call me, and we were going to have fun trying to guess who it could be.” The confession that shared the blame poured out of me as though if I could just explain fast enough, I could somehow stop the call to the police that she already put in.

The fear fueled fury that followed concluded with what I hoped was her pranking me back. But I knew better. She was not kidding.

“Then you have to call the detective back and explain it to him.” She practically spat as rage overtook fear. My stomach summersaulted and split into two. Half of it plunged to bottom of feet. The other half flew up into my throat. I swallowed hard, a cartoonish gulp.

“No no no no no no. Can’t you do it?” The default programming of a little sister request took over. “Just tell them you figured out who it is and it was a prank gone wrong.” I had no leverage to make such a request and we both knew it.

She gave me the detective’s name and number and hung up.

***

The first summer without Emily, I found myself looking forward to a friend’s wedding. It was a mini-reunion of former co-workers turned friends. Heather, Jen, and I had taught English at the same private high school and had left the same year. They scattered to different states for different reasons, and this was our first time together since then. We had kept in touch through social media and both Heather, the bride-to-be, and Jen had been there for me in my inbox and via text for Emily’s passing with their sincere condolences. Although we hadn’t seen each other since Emily’s death, I was looking forward to an event that would upstage that subject, a break from being reminded of my loss at the top of the meeting with reassuring hugs, “how are you doings” and pity filled eye contact only to be responsible for letting everyone off the hook quickly thereafter so we can enjoy living. A wedding was going to be the setting and subject of the reunion. I had joy I could defer attention to. I was ready to be happy for someone else.

Shortly before her wedding, Heather’s father died. I sent her all the words on loss I had collected over the last year from Delaware to where she was in Chicago. I felt those hundreds of miles between us because I wanted to be there for her so badly. I knew the preciousness of presence, but I waited for the wedding know the specter of grief would be more than my plus one on the day.

I was standing with Jen outside the tent when I saw Heather come from wherever the venue stashed the bride after the ceremony. Beaming, we locked eyes and came in for a hug that was for missing each other, missing the ones we lost, and her happy occasion. She pulled back, and before I could tell her what I had not yet figured out how to say, she said it all first.

“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I thought I knew, when Emily died, you know of course I was sorry, and I felt bad, but like in that way you do when…and I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” She didn’t need to be sorry. Nobody ever knows, so we have weddings and go to the beach as a family and send sisters fake anthrax in anonymous cards.

***

I started thinking through my prank. I distanced: it was Joey’s idea. I deflected blame: if she had just called me and not the cops, I would have been able to tell her. This is her fault! But I knew that, as hard as I tried, I really only had one person to blame. I had to turn myself in. I wondered what the punishment would be. I imagined recording my confession in a windowless room of the police station, sitting on a metal chair, surrounded by concrete. “I should probably eat and drink before I go because they interview people for hours in those little rooms and withhold things like food and drink if they don’t need to surreptitiously get DNA” I thought, scenes of Law and Order SVU flashing through my head. Did I need a lawyer? Should I change? Is this going to cost me money? How long could I put this off by asking myself questions I didn’t have answers to? There was nothing left to do but shake uncontrollably and call the detective assigned to my prank.

The universe blessed me with his voicemail. I left a message that sounded equal parts insane, inane, abjectly apologetic, covered in the thinnest facade of being a responsible adult owning a mistake.

“Hi, uh detective. My name is Francesca Vavala, and you’re working with my sister, Sarah Selvaggio, and uh she uh called you about some…mail? She got with some…stuff in it? I was just calling because that was *gulp* from me. I sent her that mail. It was supposed to be a joke between sisters, and we’re just going through a really hard time right now, and not that that’s an excuse or anything, I definitely should know better because it is totally inappropriate. I’m way too old to be doing this kind of thing, and I certainly didn’t mean to bother you or have it go this far, I just uh misjudged my sister’s sense of humor, and not that it’s her fault. It’s not. It’s all mine. It’s not funny, and I’m really sorry but there’s nothing actually dangerous going on. I’m happy to prove who I am or have you talk to my sister and check, I’ve told her everything, so now I’m just calling to kind of straighten things out. So, yeah if you need me for anything, please don’t hesitate to call. I’m happy to do whatever I need to fix this. Again, I’m sorry and I don’t think it’s funny to waste our city’s policing resources, so I apologize for that too. And…yup. I’m sorry. I’m here if you need me. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you if you need anything further. Thanks. You can call me back at…”

I left my number, hung up, and exhaled. The phone rang. I slid my finger across the screen to connect the call and did a full body clench as I brought the phone to my ear.

“Hello. This is Francesca.”

“Hi, is this Francesca Vavala?”

“Yes, this is she”

“This is detective WhatsHisFace. I got your voicemail.”

“Yes, hi I’m so sorry. I hope that made sense. I tried to play a prank and it was a bad idea and…” I trailed when I heard a soft chuckling under my rambling. He went on to thank me for the laugh he and his buddies got and for giving him an evening unexpectedly off. I asked if he needed to see my ID or anything and he assured me he’d speak to Sarah and confirm my story, and that I was free from any legal consequences. Finally able to breathe again, I promised him I would not be making the same mistake again and we said our goodbyes, him still laughing as we hung up.

I called Lisa to fill in her and my co-conspirator. I ended up telling her the whole story, which she was hearing for the first time. She had one question she incredulously asked.

“Why in the world would you think Sarah would find this funny?”

“I don’t know. I just remember at the time it seemed like she would. But she wouldn’t. Why did I think she would?”

I couldn’t see for the life of me what was so clear just a week ago. I sent my sister fake anthrax because…grief? I didn’t know either. Nobody ever does.