It was a bright sunny day, almost like the beginning of summer. The sun heated up the black vehicle quickly, causing me to sweat. The funeral was to start in half an hour, and instead of driving home or to the church, I saw a grocery store not a block away. I went in and picked out a large chocolate sheet cake for after the funeral. Set inside the grocery store was a little flower shop. I had some money left over from what my adoptive father gave me, and I decided I would use that money to buy new flowers, to replace the ones I had killed. I could even pitch in some of my own money, I thought. There was a gay man at the counter, and an older woman who was small with curly black hair and glasses that sat on the tip of her nose. They helped me select a wonderful and diverse arrangement of subtle flowers that I knew would do nothing but brighten and cheer up the drab and depressing ceremony. The brightness of the flowers would cancel out the dark and morbid poster display, I thought.
I pictured the people already beginning to stream into the church, my adoptive mother and father, the grief counselor at their side, standing near the altar, not on it, but near it, as people lined up to give them their condolences. I heard a few people, mostly parents of their own children, telling my adoptive parents not to blame themselves. I imagined people crying and giving my adoptive parents envelopes with cards. Of course, I would play the estranged adoptive daughter in distress. I would keep my mouth shut for a while. For a year. For a decade. For a life. The altar would appear somber and sparse without the posters and the flowers. Someone would play a fugue on the organ, perhaps Bach in B minor. The grief counselor would whisper to them terrible, brainless things about the invisible and cancerous tumors. There would be a dreadful service, notable only for its dreadfulness, nothing would take on meaning, the center would not hold. The priest would say many unremarkable things. A few young men, mostly my adoptive father’s coworkers’ sons, would carry the casket out to the hearse. After the service, my adoptive father would invite everyone to a luncheon in the basement, where everyone would devour my sheet cake. People would sit awkwardly at numerous card tables, and some people would come up to console me, to say how sorry they were, and then I would begin to ask them questions. I saw all of this very clearly and mercilessly.
We do whatever we have to do to keep ourselves from going into the abyss, I once listened to five hours of Fiona Apple albums to distract myself from the abyss, that itself is the abyss, I thought. My adoptive father had texted me the address of the church. I entered it into my phone. It was approximately thirty minutes away, on the edge of a bad neighborhood, far from the suburb they lived in. Of course my adoptive parents would go to a church with all the poor people. At the fifteen-minute mark, there were signs indicating a detour due to construction, which confused me. My phone went crazy, and the GPS failed to find a new route. I decided to ignore the detour, to just drive through the way I was routed originally, because I had no idea where the detour would lead me. So in the space of five minutes, I made a couple terrible decisions. How do we live with ourselves? I asked myself. There must be a way, but no one has ever told me.
TO LIVE AND LIVE ON, I shouted in the car.
Then everything turned slowly into a disaster, the street that I thought I was somewhat familiar with turned into a different street that led into a segregated part of the city, and ultimately ignoring the detour became the fatal error of the day, because as I drove through the bad part of town, the never-ending street with boarded-up houses and bricked-up windows, imagine my horror when the most perfect black car’s tires bumped as if I had run over a small animal, then bumped again, as if the small animal had attached itself to the wheel, and then the entire car bounced up and down like a tiny sailboat in the middle of a hurricane, causing me to become nauseous, then the car itself sagged to the side.
I pulled over and got out of the car; it was clear that I had a flat tire on the worst possible day, at the most crucial moment, a true disaster. It was with great anxiety that I went back into the car and fished around the glove compartment for the car manual and tried to locate the directions for attaching the spare. I called my adoptive father and his phone rang. I called my adoptive mother and no one answered. I didn’t have any relatives’ or neighbors’ numbers or I would have called them. Then, after fifteen minutes of attempting to remove the jack, I gave up. I realized the funeral must have started without me, without the posters, without the flowers. I felt worse than when I fell into the ditch, and almost as bad as when I received the phone call from Uncle Geoff. Devastated, I sat on the side of the street and stared at the flat tire. Sunshine streamed into the black car. The flowers wilted inside. The cake frosting melted and congealed. The posters became flattish and faded.9
43
If someone asked me to describe myself, I would say I was the adoptive sister who missed her adoptive brother’s funeral. I, Sister Reliability, the most reliable one of them all, never showed up, I failed to make an appearance. People asked, Where is his sister? My adoptive parents were too busy greeting people to check their phones. My adoptive father assumed I decided not to go, and he told my adoptive mother not to worry about it. It was a terrible assumption. Of course everyone thought I was a hideous monster for not attending.
She thinks she’s too good for his funeral, I heard them say. Perhaps they interpreted my absence as disapproval of suicide, who can say?