“When shall we three meet again?” Elle whispers.
A burst of laughter pushes past my barricaded lips, and I cover my mouth with my hand, partly to hide my lapse from the welcoming trio, partly out of guilt. I’ve always thought grief would be one uniform texture of sadness, but mine is so many layers of guilt and anger and now laughter.
I’ve just gotten myself under control and am formulating an admonishment for my daughter when Dad starts to sing, in his tone-deaf way: There were three ravens sat on a tree, Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe . . .
“Dad!”
We are definitely the crazy car. If the three black crows out on the sidewalk had the powers of Macbeth’s witches, all three of us would turn into toads on the spot.
“I’m just a crazy old man,” Dad says, with an exaggerated shrug. “Who can blame me?”
Then, just as suddenly as he started to sing, his face falls. “I don’t want to get out of the car. I suppose we have to go through with this?”
I reach for his hand. It has gotten so bony over the years, the knuckles red and swollen, the skin fragile and transparent. Elle leans forward from the back and puts her strong, young hand on top. “All for one, one for all,” she says. “And all of us for Grandma.”
We sit there, the three of us, linked by the bond of our hands and our grief.
Mrs. Carlton, tired of waiting or else convinced that we’re too inept to open the doors, takes matters into her own hands. She breaks ranks with her sisters and yanks open the passenger door. “You are late,” she scolds. “If we don’t hurry, you’ll miss the viewing.”
“I’ve already seen her,” Dad says. “She was dead before they took her from the house.”
The scandalized expression on Mrs. Carlton’s face goads my rebellious black heart into action. I get out of the car. Elle follows.
“I’ve already seen her as well. And Elle will pass.”
In my heels, I’m a whole head taller than Mrs. Carlton, and I use my height to stare her down.
“Fine. But you’re still late. Follow me.”
She stumps off into the church. Alison glances my way, takes a step after Edna, then turns back and hugs all three of us in turn. Her body is warm, but the cheek she presses against mine is cool and damp with tears. “We’re all so broken up. Edna means well. Are you ready?”
My throat swells in response to her kindness. “Ready as I’m going to be,” I say, as she steps back.
“This way.” Nancy leads us in a sad little procession, Elle, Dad, then me, with Alison guarding the rear. We walk through a side door into a hallway that smells of old carpet and air freshener and holiness. Thin strains of an inexpertly played organ seep through the walls and the ceiling and up through the floor.
Elle jams a wrench into the works and brings the whole program to a halt when she stops and turns to face me. “What if I want to see Grandma?”
I stare at her, heart in my throat. “You don’t want to remember her this way, Elle Belle. Truly.”
She stares back. Chin lifted, feet planted, centered like a discus thrower. “I’m not scared of feeling things. I want to see her.”
I open my mouth to tell her no, absolutely not, under no condition, and then stop. Isn’t that what I’ve always hated myself? Other people protecting me from what they think I shouldn’t see or know? Things like having a sister, for example.
“She’s not pretty to look at, sweetheart. Death wasn’t easy.”
“You were there. You saw her die. I haven’t seen her for three years, and I want to see her now.”
“I’ll take her,” Alison says. “If you’d rather not.”
“No,” I hear myself saying. “I’ll go.”
Elle wilts and bites her lower lip. Maybe I’ve made a wrong decision yet again. Maybe she wanted me to say no so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty. Psychology is not my strong suit.
“Me, too,” Dad says. He takes my hand. Elle backtracks and does the same on the other side. The hallway is just wide enough for the three of us.
“Off to see the wizard,” Elle murmurs. I squeeze her hand.
“I don’t know that there’s time for a viewing now,” Nancy says. “Listen.”
The organ music has shifted from hymns to a semiclassical dirge. “That’s the signal for the family to come in and sit down,” she says. “Everybody will be waiting.”
It’s a reprieve. Elle and Dad both look at me. I open my mouth to comply, but I swear to God all at once I’m channeling my mother. “It’s a funeral, not a party. They can wait.”
Nancy’s mouth opens, then snaps shut. There is lipstick on one of her teeth. This fact makes me feel better, sure and certain that I am mean-spirited and destined for hellfire. Her back is even straighter as she marches ahead of us, and I’m pretty sure that if she had an imaginative bone in her body, she’d be picturing herself as Joan of Arc right now, heroically walking to her death.
The hallway passes classrooms and a study, where an elderly gentleman stands in the doorway, clasping a well-worn Bible. From the look he exchanges with Nancy, I’m pretty sure he’s her husband, Pastor McLean. My father confirms this with a nod and a murmured, “Pastor.”
McLean is man of God enough to set aside his Bible and clasp my father’s hand warmly in both of his, despite the fact that we are inconveniently late and messing up the program. The organ comes to the end of the song. There’s a long hesitation, and then it starts all over again at the beginning.
Just past the study a set of narrow stairs leads to an open door, and through that door I know there is a platform and an open coffin with my mother lying inside it. Everybody in the church is already seated, and they will be staring at us, the best of them pitying our grief, the others storing away tidbits to share in gossip sessions later.
My feet falter.
This is a very bad idea.
But my father, the same man who said he didn’t want to do this, lets go of my hand and forges ahead on his own. The toe of his right foot catches on a step, and he stumbles. Both Elle and I surge ahead and grab his arms, and the three of us walk out to see my mother as a linked unit after all.
The woman in the coffin looks about as much like the woman who raised me as one of those branded dolls looks like the celebrity it represents. The shape of her face is vaguely wrong, her hair styled in a way she never would have worn it.
My imagination runs away down several different rabbit holes of conspiracy theory before I realize that nobody has run off with her body. It’s just the makeup and the hair.
Mom never wore makeup. Her face looks strange with brow liner and blush, her lips a little redder than they ever were in life. And she never wore her hair combed back from her forehead like that. A faint white line of a scar parallels her hairline on the right, a thing I never noticed before.
Dad sees it, too. He reaches down and tries to rearrange her hair, but it’s stiff with gel and spray and isn’t going anywhere. Elle stands statue still beside me, expressionless, not giving me any cues to her emotional state.
The organ reaches the end of the song again, and the organist, a small woman who has to perch on the edge of the bench to reach the pedals, glares at me directly before turning a page and going back to the beginning one more time.
“Are we done?” I whisper to Elle, and she nods.
I’m pretty sure that what we’re supposed to do now is go back the way we came and then ceremoniously traipse up the central aisle, but since we’ve already shot the program to hell and gone, I don’t see the point. We could just as easily walk around the coffin and down the steps from the platform to the front pew reserved for family.
Looking down to assess this option is almost my undoing.