And Madelena would say—I’m happy for you. That is a good thing.
It had happened, without Naomi quite realizing, she was closer to her grandmother now than to her mother. She’d come to love her grandmother more than she loved her mother.
Was that unnatural? It seemed to have happened without her awareness.
But she loved Jenna, too. Her love for Jenna was wary, guarded. She did not quite trust Jenna, as she had grown to trust Madelena. The one had kept her at arm’s length, hinting at an invitation to come, that Naomi might stay with Jenna in Bennington for a while; the other had made it clear that Naomi was welcome to stay with her, to live with her, at any time and for as long as she wished.
Madelena loved her, but Madelena also needed her. It was not clear that Jenna needed any of her children.
On the hike Darren was telling Jenna about his medical school life. His courses, his professors. The climate in Washington, the cabin he and Rachel had built on the Skagit River, which they tried to get to whenever they could. Naomi was half-listening. She had heard some of this before from Darren, and could take pleasure in her brother’s voice. And Jenna’s murmurous—Oh yes? Really? Really! Naomi was staring at her mother’s back, her mother’s head. Wanting to touch her mother’s hair, or her shoulder, or an arm. Just the lightest touch.
They were to have dinner together, at the Light House. Exactly the restaurant Gus would have chosen. And Gus would have insisted upon calling to “book” a table, though it wasn’t likely that a reservation would be needed midweek at this time of year, on Katechay Island.
In his place, Darren had called to “book” a table. Naomi had smiled to hear her brother speaking earnestly on the phone, and had heard Gus’s voice in his. That echo.
Mid-October, a pearlescent cast to the choppy lake. At a distance, a lake freighter passed with the stately aplomb of a prehistoric sea creature. Since they had lived in Michigan, near the Great Lakes, freighter traffic had diminished significantly. (Naomi had learned.) Gus had always pointed out the “lakers,” as they were called; as an undergraduate at U-M he’d worked on one of them in summer months, with the odd name Outlander Integrity, moving cargo from Sault Ste. Marie to Chicago to Buffalo and the Port of Montreal and back.
After a forty-minute hike along the shore, at a beautiful rocky point, Darren called a halt. It was a small cove, amid large sunbaked boulders. There were clouds of iridescent dragonflies here. A faint smell of desiccated life, not unpleasant. Naomi thought that she vaguely recognized this place and Darren was declaring it the “perfect” place.
Darren set the urn down on a rock and labored to open the tight-fitting lid. Both urn and lid were made of some dark earthen-looking material that was probably synthetic, an ingenious kind of plastic meant to mimic the organic.
Naomi shut her eyes, at first not wanting to see.
A spasm of hilarity threatened. What if, after all these years, the lid would not open . . .
In her hoarse, wondering voice Jenna said, “Gus would laugh at us, if he could see. He hated any kind of fuss and formality . . .”
The lid was off. Darren turned, tilted the urn in such a way that ashes began to fall out. (She did not want to see if Darren’s hands were trembling.) (Should she be recording this scene on her camera? She had left her camera behind, she had totally forgotten her camera.) Larger chunks of what had to be bone, at which Noami stared now, not seeming to know what she saw.
“Mom? Y’want to take hold of this? Naomi?”—numbly they came to stand beside him, to assist.
“I feel as if we should ‘pray’—but—”
“No! Daddy would be furious.”
“He might not have minded . . . I saw Daddy once pretending to pray, at some ceremony.”
“At one of your commencements Gus said the pledge of allegiance to the flag, like everyone else.”
“He’d love the attention . . .”
“He’d know we loved him. That’s what matters.”
Almost too quickly the “scattering” was over: ashes and bone-chunks in the choppy water already dissipated, disappearing.
Had it happened so swiftly? And now, now what? For a moment Naomi’s brain was struck blank.
“In the end it’s just—silence. The world without us.”
Why had she said such a thing? She licked her dry lips, that felt scaly. Her eyes now were dry and burnt from the sun and wind.
She did not want to look at her mother’s dead-white ravaged face. The parted lips like her own, parched and numbed.
Is this all there is?—this?
It was not to be believed. What they had done.
Instead of a proper burial in a grassy cemetery where you might kneel, mourn.
Instead of a grave marker, the shore of Lake Huron.
Joking. They’d been trying to joke. Trying to laugh.
Trying to breathe.