Then she looks at me curiously.
“I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You have?”
She nods and smiles at me. “Yep. She told me you helped out in the garden.”
“Yeah.”
“And how you remind her of herself at your age. She said it sometimes seemed like your mom wasn’t, ah”—she clears her throat—“wasn’t there a lot, and Ruth tried to be there for you when she wasn’t. You were very important to her, you know.”
This all should make me feel good, but instead it makes the bottom drop out under my heart.
“She was ready to go, you know. More than ready. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t have it.” Sally sighed. “Even toward the end, before I flew out here, she seemed very happy. She said she was finally getting to read because she wasn’t nauseated all the time, and nobody treated her like a sick person.”
“Mm-hmm,” I say, gazing off into the middle distance, trying not to cry. I understand, now, that over-the-top Sicilian funeral in The Godfather where the wife is trailing after the casket, wailing. When someone close to you dies, every emotion becomes very close to the surface. The other day at school, the vending machine ate my $1.25 when I tried to buy Combos, and I almost curled into a damp, sobbing fetal position in the hallway.
Sally goes on, “I was wondering if you’d like to speak at the memorial service.”
The prospect of this snaps me out of my semi-catatonia. I want to tell her that Ruth’s death doesn’t make me want to write, the same way my parents’ divorce or my dad’s idiotic novel doesn’t make me want to write. It just feels too big, too fundamental to who I am now, not just something happening around me that I can perceive and filter. Let alone talk about in front of people.
I don’t think I feel feelings right. I think my body processes important feelings the way people with acid reflux digest food wrong—there are abnormal holes in me that make it leak out in unexpected places here and there, and by the time it gets to the end, nothing is left to be flushed out. I don’t know if I can talk about it in front of people.
“I’m not sure that I’m the right, um . . .”
“I figured you might say that. But it helps. I didn’t want to speak at my husband’s service, but Ruth talked me into it. She was very close with him, and she said it’s what he would have wanted. And in retrospect, I’m glad I did.”
I get a sudden flash of clarity, recalling the story Ruth told me about her life. “You’re the widow. I mean, she told me about you.”
Sally gives me a little, polite “nice to meet you” smile, as much as one can under these circumstances. “In any case, when Ruth was in the hospital, we discussed this, in so many words. And she said there wasn’t anybody who could do a better job than you.”
Goddamn it, Ruth. You left me like you found me: being pushed out of my comfort zone.
At least John St. Clair comes through, as usual. Or at least he did a couple of seasons ago, without knowing it. The season two finale featured an evil “boss” that Gillian had to fight—the demon turned out to be a physical manifestation of the grief she hadn’t dealt with when her mentor at her old school, Mrs. Waterbury, was killed by William (when he was evil, obviously). I liked the episode then, but it turns out it’s shockingly gratifying to watch when you’re actually grieving, because there it is: big and mean and corporeal. Were-Heads and critics pretty much agree that it is one of the most well-done—and crushingly sad—episodes of the series.
When I get home from school, I take a long, life-affirming shower for the first time in five days. I’m sitting on the sofa in a towel, halfway through my twenty-first viewing of the episode, when someone knocks on the door. It is not a good time. The episode is almost over, and the way Gillian vanquishes the demon is by hugging it, and that scene has been making me cry for the last ten viewings.
Nevertheless, I pause the episode, jump up, and go to the door to squint out the peephole. Gideon is standing outside, shifting uncomfortably, holding a six-pack of beer.
I sigh. He knocks again, and finally I open the door.
“Oh. Um, hey,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Are you . . . how are you?”
“Fine,” I say flatly, then I cough and say in a joking sexy voice, “Faaaaah-ne.”
He smiles a little as his eyes flick up and down my small towel, followed by sort of a guilty-for-checking-me-out sigh.
“I heard about Ruth.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m really sorry.” Then he winces. “God. Is that what you say? It just sounds so dumb. You say that when you, like, bump into people.”
“It’s okay. There’s not really anything right to say, I think.”
“I thought I’d come see if you were okay and everything.”
“Thanks, I’m f—”
“Are you okay though, really? You seem not okay,” he asks, stepping on my words.