She had been the only one to show me kindness, even if it hadn’t been warmth and comforting love, but it had been something.
If it hadn’t been for her offering to take them when I’d finally gotten so desperate to leave, I might have ended up staying for longer in a place that was pretty close to Hell. And who knows what would have happened to my sisters if they had been stuck in that house for longer.
My grandmother had put the seed to leave in my head one day when we had gone over to her house to shower because our water had gotten turned off and told me Go, Luna. I’ll take care of the kids. But you need to go.
I had gone when I couldn’t stay longer… after doing the one and only thing that would ensure Lily and Thea and Kyra wouldn’t be stuck in that house any longer.
I wasn’t sure what would have happened if she wouldn’t have called me when she found out my dad was getting out of jail so that I would go get my sisters.
I had sent her a birthday and Christmas card every year since, but she had never sent me anything back or called when I had left her my phone number in one of the cards. It didn’t change anything though.
Grandma Gen, I’m sorry. I did love you, and I’m always going to be grateful for you helping me get out of here and taking care of the girls as long as you could.
Rip brushed against my arm as he stopped beside me. He was looking around the building, and if I wasn’t imagining it, he was back to being tense again. I could see him lingering on the portrait of my grandmother.
EUGENIA MILLER
1945 – 2018
Seeing her last name was… weird. It hit me stronger than when I saw it on the end of my siblings’ names. I hadn’t seen it on my own since I had decided I didn’t want a reminder of it.
A few people seemed to be hanging around a doorway to the left of the portrait, and I watched them. They didn’t look familiar though.
Now or never, right?
I could do this. I was going to. Then when this was done, I was going back to my house to see my sister, and then I’d have a job to go to the following day.
Breathing in through my nose, I told Rip, “We can go sit.”
He glanced down at me, at six four compared to my five seven, and nodded. We walked forward, him beside me the entire time, as we headed toward the opened doorway. The man and the woman standing there both gave us a serious nod as we went by them. The room was filled with row after row of pews with a raised dais-like area at the front, where a casket lay. Opened. Like I had expected from the parking lot, only the first three rows of pews were filled, and I couldn’t help but glance from the back of one head to another.
I stopped. With the back of my hand, I touched Ripley’s loosely hanging fingers and whispered, “I want to go say bye. If you just want to wait back here, I won’t be long.”
His whispered response wasn’t hesitant at all. “I’ll go.”
I raised my hand and rubbed at my brow bone with it, not because he wanted to go with me—that wasn’t it at all—but just because… that casket and the backs of those heads made me feel hesitant and bad at the same time.
I still nodded at Rip, not able to even muster up any kind of facial expression that told him I was okay. Because I wasn’t really feeling that okay. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t okay.
Ripley tipped his chin down at me, and it was that, that made me keep moving. We headed down the center aisle, where Rip walked to the side as I took a step up onto the raised area.
It was surreal, looking inside it, and it was more surreal—and honestly sad—to take it all in.
Thankfully, it was easy enough to ignore the gazes on the back of my head. Maybe I was imagining it, but I doubted it, and even then, I just couldn’t find it in me to care as I looked at a face that looked familiar but didn’t at the same time. It had been a long time.
A dozen thoughts went through my head, and I told my grandmother a few different things.
Thank you.
I hope you were okay.
Things worked out for me.
The girls are all doing great.
Lily is graduating at the top of her class.
They’re all going to be in college.
Leaving was the best thing I could have done.
I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you more.
It was only the sound of the doors being closed behind me that made me realize how long I had stood there gazing down at the woman with her eyes closed. The familiar but not familiar face. The first person who had taught me that doing the right thing wasn’t easy and would more than likely never be.
It was only then that I took a step back and gave my grandmother’s face a bittersweet smile before I eventually turned around and immediately spotted Ripley maybe four feet away, standing with his back to the wall…
With his gaze on the pews.
I knew what I was doing as I glanced in the direction of what he was focused on. Some part of me knew that chances were I might not like what I saw. But I did it anyway.
It was my luck that the first face I landed on was the last face I would have ever wanted to see sitting there. Staring straight ahead. Face blank. Pretending like I wasn’t even there.
My dad looked twenty years older than he had the last time I had seen him. Like my grandmother, he looked familiar but didn’t. He looked like hell.
A lot could happen in a decade, I guessed.
The main one being that I didn’t feel any kind of terror going through me as I took in his face. My knees didn’t shake. Bile didn’t rise up in my throat.
If anything, this coolness flooded over my skin and through my veins as I took him in.
When my eyes flicked to the woman sitting beside him, I wasn’t sure what to think when I barely recognized her too. Her face was blank and dotted with sores. She was thinner than she had been before. A lot thinner. But if he looked twenty years older, she looked thirty years older. The years hadn’t been kind to her. Not that they ever had.
On the other side of her was a man I had grown up with but barely knew.
My cousin.
Of course they were here. All of them—minus my older brother and my uncle, who was still in jail—but that wasn’t shocking at all. These were the people who were at the top of my list for those human beings I didn’t want to have anything to do with.
I didn’t let myself think as I pivoted where I was standing and went to Rip just as a man in a suit walked down the center aisle. I was looking at Rip as his attention went from the people in the pews that I didn’t want to look at for another second to me, then back to them. They finally went back to me just as I stopped a foot away, his jaw doing that tensing thing again.
Okay.
I nodded, and he blinked slowly enough to agree with me. We moved together down the aisle along the wall. My heart beat, beat, beat just faster than normal as we passed one aisle after another until I stopped at one only a couple of rows before the exit. Sliding all the way in, I took a seat as the man in the suit stopped behind a pulpit set up just to the right of my grandmother’s casket. Ripley took a seat directly beside me, the material of the jacket he’d put on as we walked toward the building brushing against my bare elbow. I had rolled up the sleeves of the black button-down shirt I had tucked into my skirt.
The body contact did nothing for me.
I could see the backs of their heads in the second row, but I made myself focus on the man who started talking about my grandmother in vague, vague words that I wouldn’t remember and that I had a feeling he had to have used generically for others all the time. My face went warm and stayed warm as I sat there, listening but only barely. This hum started buzzing around in my ears, but I did my best to ignore it and the way my heart seemed like it wanted to beat its way out of my chest.
Rip’s arm moved, brushing against my elbow even more.
But I kept my gaze straight forward.
In less time than I ever would have expected, the man stopped talking and explained the instructions for the motorcade that would head to the cemetery where Grandmother Genie would be buried.