Finally, the train pulled to a stop at the 30th Street Station. And as I stepped out onto the platform, I thought about how different the circumstances were from the last time I stood here. I dreaded going to Ada’s house both times, but for such different reasons. It was going to feel so wrong without her.
I walked out into the night air, still hot in this little city that had grown on me so much, and looked around for Thomas. But I spotted Lillian instead, Sally in her arms.
Setting down my suitcase, I embraced her, Sally straining between us to kiss my chin. “How are you holding up?” I asked her.
“I’ve been better,” she said. “She’d hate that I drove her car here.”
I almost laughed at that, but a choking noise came out instead. It was true. She would have been livid. But that was how I knew it was true. If anything would bring her back from the dead to argue, it was that car.
“She’s really gone, isn’t she?” I asked.
Lillian nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. I was dangerously close to needing my own.
“How are we going to stay in that house?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’m glad you’re here.”
It wasn’t until I was back in my bedroom, the clothes that I had left in Avalon boxed in the corner, that the tears began to flow. And once they started, I didn’t think they would ever stop.
I don’t know when I fell asleep, but my dreams were a mix of Ada being alive and realizing she was dead all over again. So when I woke, it took me a minute to remember what was real and what wasn’t. And once I did, I didn’t want to get out of bed. It would be so much easier to stay under the white coverlet, selected by Ada, and let the grief consume me until I joined her.
But I heard Sally whine, and it reminded me that Lillian needed me. So I rose, went to the bathroom to wash my tearstained face, and then dressed to go downstairs.
The next two days blurred together. We met with the rabbi, who tried to dissuade us from following Ada’s request for cremation, as it went against Jewish custom, but Lillian stood firm. I remembered something Dan’s father had said at my grandmother’s funeral, about the tradition of mourners shoveling dirt onto the casket themselves. “It’s a mitzvah to honor her wishes over our own,” I told him, not knowing if that was actually one of the six hundred and thirteen official mitzvahs or not. But that language spoke to him, and he agreed to perform the ceremony as Ada had wished. Before he left, we had set the date and time.
He knew her well enough to give his own eulogy, but he asked if either of us wanted to speak as well. Lillian shook her head. “I don’t think I could get through it,” she said.
“I’ll do it.”
The rabbi turned to look at me in surprise.
“She was—is my family.” Lillian patted my leg, and the rabbi agreed, rising to leave.
Then there were decisions about shiva and notifying the community and my family. Lillian dealt with the crematorium, and I made the other phone calls—an arrangement that worked for me. I couldn’t talk about her remains like that.
Dan and my parents drove down Tuesday night and came to the house to see what they could help with, but I asked them to stay at a hotel instead. I didn’t want my father in Ada’s house, and Dan couldn’t stay with us without more chaperonage. No one argued with me—a first with my parents. We ate a solemn dinner that a silent and drawn Frannie had cooked, and then they prepared to leave for the night.
“How are you?” Dan asked as my parents went down the front steps, my mother clutching my father’s arm. “Really?”
“Numb,” I said. “I just need to get through tomorrow.”
“What can I do?”
I smiled tightly at him. “You’ve already done it. Just be here.”
He pulled me in for a hug, and for a moment I melted against him, letting him hold me. But I couldn’t fall apart. I had to finish my eulogy and figure out how I was going to make it through reading it in the morning.
Once they were gone, I went back to my room and sat at the vanity, looking down at the typewriter that Ada had given me. But the words didn’t come.
“Oh, Ada,” I sighed out loud. “How am I supposed to do this without you?”
I thought of my first glimpse of her. How she took my lipstick. Our night in Atlantic City. The way she called me stupid after Freddy, but made it clear all along that she would take care of me, no matter what happened. Her forcing me and Dan together, seeing what I couldn’t. You do know the ending, she repeated in my head. And I began to write, pausing only to wipe away tears.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
I woke to the sound of the alarm clock Ada had put by my bedside months earlier, my eyes opening on the day I dreaded. Yet the house still contained her presence. It felt impossible to believe that when I went downstairs, she wouldn’t be at the breakfast table, her newspaper in front of her face, a tart remark on her lips about the hours I kept.
But when I made my way down after dressing, the table was empty, save for a place set for me.
I didn’t want breakfast, but I forced myself to nibble on some toast, knowing I needed fortification to make it through the funeral.
The synagogue was only a few blocks away, and Lillian drove us there in Ada’s car. Had we been going to a gravesite as well, we would have hired a limousine, but it seemed wasteful when we were just returning to the house for shiva. Shiva itself seemed wasteful. Who would come other than us, my parents, and Dan? Harold wasn’t even coming down with his wife for the funeral. But Lillian said shiva was always in Ada’s plan. She could have told me she wanted her urn carried in on elephants while a brass band played “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and I would have complied. Anything to assuage the guilt of not having been there for her.
“Are you ready?” Lillian asked me as she parked the car in front of the synagogue.
“No,” I said honestly. “But I’m as ready as I will be.”
She patted my arm. “You don’t have to speak.”
“Yes. I do.”
Lillian nodded. “I know she said she wanted this, but she would have hated the fuss.”
It was true. Splashy as she was, she preferred to be the one pulling the strings. Which she was to the last, with the exacting funeral plans. “That’s why she chose cremation—she didn’t trust anyone else to pick her clothes or do her makeup.”
Lillian smiled sadly. “You know, I think you’re right. Heaven forbid she spend eternity in a dress from a sales rack.”
I almost laughed. “Or in the wrong shoes.”
“She’d haunt every last one of us.”
I imagined Ada as a ghost, yanking the blanket off my bed if I slept too late and howling if I yelled from room to room. I would welcome the haunting if it meant I could see her again.
“I’ll try to do her proud today.”
“You already have,” Lillian said. She opened her car door. “Come on. Let’s give the old girl what she asked for.”
“You’re definitely getting haunted for that one.”
Lillian smiled less sadly. “I hope I do.” She turned to look at me as we got out of the car. “She’s not really gone, you know.”
I nodded. She would be with me for the rest of my life, even if she wasn’t haunting me. I knew that much.