“We all will,” said Alison, the tears starting up again. It had been a terrible, long week. “I can’t stop crying,” she muttered. “I feel like I’ve been crying for a week.”
“It’s okay, Alison, at least you were there,” said Megan. “Maybe you have to cry for all of us.”
Maybe that’s what artists did; maybe they cried for everybody who couldn’t. Certainly the rest of her family had fallen into a sort of dull sobriety. Her father up front, unable to move. Paul endlessly making sure that everyone had a ride. Jeff almost single-mindedly focused on his Chinese wife. And now, in the middle of this, there was Kyle.
“Don’t you think you should talk to him?” Megan said. “It’s nice that he came.”
Was it nice that Kyle came? Alison wasn’t so sure. But she really didn’t need much of a push. She corralled her grief, and drifted through the mourners who were now drifting away. He looked up. He knew she was there.
“Hey, Kyle.”
“Hey,” he said. His greeting was husky, heartfelt and simple, and tragically, you could see he was better looking than ever, once you were within five or six feet of him. His hair had gotten darker, which made those gray eyes even more startling.
“I’m sorry,” he said. She knew he was talking about her mother, but for a moment she allowed the sentiment to float over her. Sorry we never got it together, sorry I let you go so easily, sorry sorry.
“Yeah, it’s kind of a big shock,” she said. “She wasn’t even sick, so nobody, you know. Nobody thought this could happen.”
“I wish there was something I could have done,” he said. This was actually so aggravating it was better. Better to be on antagonistic footing. It made more sense, honestly, to just stick with the facts, and to express some of what she had been feeling for five days, while everyone mourned the fact that there was “nothing to be done.”
“I wish that too. When I called you I was really in the soup. Those stupid hospitals, they act like everybody’s just going to die anyway, so what’s the point. I could have used some help, because she didn’t, actually. She didn’t have to die. She didn’t.” Okay, crying had not been in her plan, but what are you going to do. Her mother was dead.
“It was her time.”
Did he actually say that? “It wasn’t her time,” she informed him. “It, there were a lot of things that were—that’s why I called you, because I couldn’t get anyone at the hospital to help me. I tried, but I, and no one would help me.” Her face was a mess now, she knew it. She had really been careful with her makeup, too; she wanted to look beautiful for Mom, so she had also gone out and bought the chicest black dress she could find in Cincinnati. And now her makeup was running all over and as far as she could tell, there was snot dripping down her face, and of course not a Kleenex in sight. Her utter failure to be a good daughter to Rose hung over her like a curse.
Kyle fortunately had a handkerchief, which he handed over silently while she sobbed. She blew her nose like a ten-year-old, and tried to use the corners to blot the mascara carefully but without a mirror it was impossible to tell if this operation was even remotely successful.
The funeral party was nearly gone and all that was left was a bewildered little wave of people in black trudging to their cars. Kyle glanced behind her, taking note of the retreating mourners. She considered handing his handkerchief back to him, but that would surely be the end of the whole conversation and she didn’t want to let him go yet. There he was, right in front of her. He was still there. She wanted to tell him everything that had happened, the strangeness of her journey, the years of floating in the demimonde, the hurtling upward to a place where she was no one, and what it felt like to be no one, to be a no one who everyone could see, the collapse of the dreams that she had never dreamed for herself, the recognition that she had betrayed herself more than anyone, the hunger to be whole and at peace. She wanted to take his hand and go to his car with him, drive back to Mom and Dad’s, sit around the family room with Andrew and Megan and Jeff and even Lianne, snuggle under his shoulder, feel the earth firm under her feet.
“But by the time you called, she was gone,” Kyle said.
It was so incongruous and strange it took her a moment; she didn’t know what he was talking about. He continued, an urgency growing in his explanation. “I called you back as soon as I got your call. Well, a couple hours, it did take me a few hours.” She could see that those few hours smote him—he had probably needed those few hours to get up the nerve to call her, and he felt bad about it. But what he was saying other than that didn’t make sense. “I should have called back immediately, I’m sorry about that,” he said, “but Van didn’t tell me there was any urgency. And your mother was already gone, wasn’t she? She must have been gone, even, when you called.”