Gwen and I stood beside each other, silent. We made ourselves look, and then we turned around and walked slowly back out to the hall. If we spoke, the words are lost. In my memory we are blank to each other; we are, of all things, embarrassed. There was no way to know what to say or do. We weren’t there to say goodbye; she was already gone.
Townspeople and friends and distant relatives soon began to arrive, shuffling slowly through an outer room where we sat to receive them. Mom’s death was something that had happened to many people, but I remember being furious that there were people there whom I didn’t know, who I suspected didn’t really know her, who had come to see the murdered woman. I wanted to protect her. I wanted her all to myself.
My father, Tom, and Dale and Dennis and Tim were all conspicuously missing from the funeral. At the time, I thought that as suspects they’d been banned from attending. So I was glad that none of them came. And anyway, it was easier to cast them all out of my heart, all at once, if I never saw any of them again.
Sitting next to my aunts in the receiving line, I shook hands and thanked people, whether I felt like it or not, and, gradually, the buzzing energy I’d felt out on the lawn with Vicki returned. People handed me cards, and I read some of them as they arrived, got distracted and set others aside for later. It was my classmate Jessica, a girl I wasn’t even that close to, who had the misfortune of dissolving me. She walked up to me, not looking uncomfortable like most of the other kids who came, but just terribly sad, and handed me a pale pink card—a simple thing with a picture of fall leaves on the front next to a quotation from Thoreau: “Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.” I read it and then my hand dropped to my side and my spine slumped and I started crying, weeping as I felt the weight of everything coming down. It hadn’t even been possible to make her look nice for the coffin she probably had never wanted. Those lovely words were empty; Mom had been robbed of her right to die beautifully.
And how very beautiful my mother had been, less than one hundred hours before.
* * *
The service itself was a brief blur of sonorous platitudes, the whisper of clothing shifting in seats, the occasional loud sniffle from the back row. There was one long pause during which the pastor, a woman, stopped and gave me an opportunity to get up and read a poem. I was known as a writer and had written a poem just a few weeks earlier for my friend Adrienne, whose mother had been killed in a car accident. But for my own mother, for this, I had no words. The pastor gestured to me with a small smile, but I shook my head. I had nothing.
I sat in front with my aunts, head bowed. I wept quietly but obviously, my shoulders shaking and heaving from the beginning of the ceremony to the end, and I didn’t look at that strange, inert version of her once, although a voice in my head kept telling me that I should. And I felt ashamed of both of these failures.
15
* * *
before
During the months of fighting at Dale’s, Mom and I moved out of his house and into my grandmother Grace’s over and over, spending a week or so at her house until Mom and Dale made up, a week or two back at his house until they broke up again. One night Mom packed a few of our belongings and we got in the car once more, headed across town to Grammy’s—the same house where Mom had spent most of her childhood. I had pajamas and some clothes in my pink plastic suitcase, and brought three of my favorite stuffed animals along. I hated being apart from the rest of them, and had started to cry when I saw them looking at me from my bed, even as I tried to tell myself that I should be tough, that their glass eyes were empty. I could barely look at our dog, our two cats. I was ten years old, had not yet learned to brace for disappointment. A week earlier we had moved back into Dale’s house, and like all the other times, I had thought we were back for good.
As we entered town and the yellow streetlights spilled over my lap, one after another, I glared out the passenger window. I was furious at my mother for calmly steering us back toward Grammy’s house, where it was becoming clearer each time that we were a burden. Finally I burst out, “I don’t want to go to Grammy’s! Why do we have to do this? Why can’t we ever just stay at home?”
Just then, we pulled up to the stoplight at the center of town. It was red. Mom threw the car into park, leaned over, and clamped a hand onto my kneecap. “You should be glad we have somewhere to go!” she said, her voice filling the car. “Do you want to be homeless? Do you want to live on the street?” Her eyes were big, and her voice shook with anger. I was shocked: she rarely ever yelled at me, and she never touched me when she was angry. Was Grammy’s really our only option? For a moment I saw us wandering around town like the one homeless person I knew of, a man named Ski, who was always thin and dirty, a shambling drug addict who seemed to take pleasure in scaring kids. I imagined Mom’s white Keds dingy and gray, my ankles sticking out of pants I’d outgrown, both of us shivering under tattered wool blankets. The scene was Dickensian, melodramatic, and terrifying. We couldn’t bring our cats to Grammy’s house, because she didn’t like them, but we certainly couldn’t have cats if we didn’t have a place to live at all. I drifted back into the present. I mumbled, “No. I’m sorry,” as tears slid out of my eyes again. Mom’s grip on my knee relaxed, and her whole body seemed to slump back into her seat. The light turned green. She put the car into drive. And I got a glimpse of how hard everything was for her.
* * *
When I was younger, I had spent cozy nights at Grammy’s while Mom and Dale went out, once or twice a month. Back then, she was a sweet, smushy grandma whose eccentric habits were endearing. Chief among these was her insistence on proper, antiquated names for things; jeans were “dungarees,” her well was always her “artesian well,” and her monochrome bedroom wasn’t purple—it was “orchid.” That bedroom perfectly reflected her obsessive personality: the walls, the bedspread, the sheets, the rugs, the picture frames, the silk flowers—absolutely everything was orchid.