Everything All at Once
Katrina Leno
Dedication
To the ones who call me Auntie:
Harper & Alma
Saige & Addison & Whitney
& Locke
Epigraph
You understand that this pain is endless. And that in and of itself is a kind of comfort, because you have found your own eternity.
—from the essay “How to Say Good-bye”
by Abraham Reaves
Keep going, be nice, make friends.
—from Alvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man by Helen Reaves
Prologue
The day we threw Aunt Helen’s ashes into the Atlantic Ocean was very windy. I’m assuming you’ve never seen someone get a mouthful of their dead sister’s ashes, but that is exactly what happened to my dad, in slow motion, his mouth opening into an O as he lifted the top off the urn and thrust it forward. We all watched the ashes fly in a perfect arc out of the urn, and then we all watched them change direction in midair as a sudden gust of wind sent them back, back, directly into my father’s waiting, horrified mouth.
His emotions cycled quickly from surprise to confusion to disgust to alarm to a kind of panic as he choked and spit and dropped the urn on his foot, where it bounced and rolled over a few times and came to rest near my brother’s sneaker. Abe kicked the urn gently, maybe to make sure he wasn’t just imagining it, and then Dad sprinted a few yards into the bushes and we listened to him vomit at least eight times.
“Holy shit,” my mom said, in her soft, lilting accent. She put her hand over her eyes and tilted her head up as if she were praying. But I knew she wasn’t praying. I knew she was trying not to laugh.
“Is this for real?” Abe said softly, kneeling down to pick the urn up from the ground. It was still half full with ashes. Or half empty. I guess it depended on how you looked at it. “I mean . . . did this happen? Lottie?” He looked at me, still kneeling, still holding Aunt Helen’s urn. My favorite aunt, my father’s younger sister, barely forty years old when she found the lump in her breast that would grow and spread and kill her pretty quickly.
“I think Dad just swallowed Aunt Helen,” I said, and although I didn’t mean to, I really didn’t mean to, I started laughing. A powerful, takes-over-your-body kind of laugh, and then Abe joined me. My mother, trying so hard to be the adult, to be the rational one, snorted so loudly that it turned into a half cough, half wheeze. She bent over and held her belly and gasped for breath.
“Well, this is nice,” Dad said, coming back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He grabbed a Thermos of water from our picnic supplies. (The picnic had been one of Aunt Helen’s final requests: spread my ashes, have a picnic. It was all her favorite foods, listed very specifically, a grocery list for the dead.) Dad washed his mouth out once, twice, spitting noisily on the ground, careful not to wet his shoes.
“Dad,” Abe said, struggling to catch his breath, tears streaming down his face. He still clutched the urn, Aunt Helen’s earthly remains, a gray mess that was finer than soot, more delicate. “There’s more.”
“Somebody else do it,” Dad said grumpily, trying not to smile. He settled back into one of the chairs we’d dragged up to the cliff face: plastic and yellow and too cheery for the occasion.
“Lottie?” Abe said, offering me the urn.
I took the urn and looked into it and tried to stop giggling. A manic, panicked giggle, a giggle that covered up the deepest of sadnesses, the most painful of losses.
“Say something,” Mom said, getting control of herself finally, taking deep breaths of the salty air.
“Like a eulogy?” I asked.
“Just some words,” Dad said. He’d found a Tupperware bowl of watermelon and was eating it frantically, one chunk after the other, trying to get the taste of death out of his mouth.
“Like a nice memory,” Mom added.
I wished we were all still laughing, but we had remembered that someone we loved was dead and that was it, that was the moment to say good-bye to her. I held the urn against my stomach and put my hand on the side of it. It was cold and smooth.
I thought of everything that had happened since my aunt Helen had died. I thought of everything I had learned about her and the books she had written, about the magic that had slithered its way into her very existence. I thought about the time when I was six years old when she had plopped me, terrified, on a sled at the top of the schoolyard hill and unceremoniously pushed. I thought of the millions of people who had worn black on the day she died. I thought of Alvin and Margo Hatter, their story complete now, their tale finally finished. And I thought about Sam, of course. Mostly I thought about Sam.
And I thought about the letters, twenty-four of them addressed to me and placed into my hands two months ago by the lawyer who read her will.
It hadn’t seemed real then. It barely seemed real now.
I hugged the urn closer to my chest and tried to think of something to say. Something important and real.
Something immortal.
Two Months Earlier
Alvin Hatter had always liked his birthday. And he had always liked the number thirteen. So he had naturally always looked forward to his thirteenth birthday; it seemed to him inevitable that the day would mark the start of something great.
If only he’d known how right he was, he might never have gotten out of bed.
—from Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods
1
In the weeks leading up to and following her death, I couldn’t buy a carton of eggs without my aunt Helen’s face surrounding me at the checkout. Every newspaper. Every magazine.
Helen Reaves Cancer Diagnosis
Helen Reaves: Months to Live
The World Gets Ready to Say Good-Bye to Helen Reaves
Her face: so familiar but so much like a stranger.
“My camera face,” she’d explained once and demonstrated a fake smile.
We left the TV off for weeks. News reporters sobbed openly on air; producers cut to commercial, not knowing what else to do. They sometimes let the weatherpeople predict the forecast for ten, fifteen minutes, but eventually even the weatherpeople started crying.
The window displays of every bookstore in the world were crowded with her books. The Alvin Hatter series:
Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods
Alvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man
Alvin Hatter and the Mysterious Disappearance
Alvin Hatter and the Everlife Society
Alvin Hatter and the Wild-Goose Chase
Alvin Hatter and the Return of the Overcoat Man
Everybody loved Alvin and Margo Hatter.
Six books, six movies, six adapted graphic novels. Dolls and LEGO sets and even a surprisingly popular old-fashioned radio series.
My aunt’s death affected not just the small circle of our family; it spread out, like an infectious sadness, until eventually the whole world was in mourning.
Or at least, that was what it felt like to me.