Lizzie made herself look. The pine casket was descending, the sun playing against its surface, metal railings guiding it into the ground. A knot of cemetery workers stood nearby, shovels in hand. She gazed past them toward a trio of slender cypress trees cutting sharp against the resolutely blue sky. It was not yet noon but already hot. Out of the corner of her eye, she registered smudges wheeling and darting. Hummingbirds? Possibly. They used to flit around the twisted vines of scarlet bougainvillea out by her father’s pool. She could remember her father pointing to the tiny birds when she and Sarah first moved to L.A. “Hummingbirds don’t hum,” he had said. “Hear that? It’s more of a scratch-scratch. No poetry there.”
Now Lizzie squinted behind the oversized sunglasses that she’d purchased last summer on Canal Street, played with her father’s watch. The Rolex was too big and loose for her wrist, but it was his. She looked again in the direction of the cypresses, but whatever birds had been there were gone. Or maybe they had never been there at all. She heard the rabbi chanting. She grasped her sister’s hand.
This was a mistake. It could not be right. How could that be her father in there? How was that possible?
Lizzie had last spoken to him four days ago. She had left work that Thursday at a decent hour and was negotiating the crush of people on Sixth Avenue when he had called. He was telling her about a few trips he was planning. Next month to Iceland: he was talking about Reykjavík and eating fermented shark and how the first lady was Jewish, Israeli-born. The following spring he wanted to go to Seoul. Lizzie was only half listening, her mind focused on getting on the subway downtown so she wouldn’t be late. (Another online date, another evening for which she was trying—unsuccessfully—to keep her expectations low.) Still she couldn’t help but say, “So many trips. I thought you were concerned about money.”
“No,” he had said. “You think I should be concerned about money.”
She half laughed, half snorted. “I do not,” she had said, but that was the way it had always been between them. She was thirty-seven, and little had changed since she was seventeen.
An hour later, Lizzie thought her date was going fine, but after one round he stuck out his hand and said, “Good luck with everything!” (A banker and former ZBT brother? Just as well.) She went home, poured herself a glass of wine, settled on the IKEA couch that she kept telling herself she had to replace, and chanced on WarGames on TV. She reached for her phone and pecked out a text, all thumbs. “The only move is not to play,” she typed. “Bullshit eighties propaganda. I’m jealous,” Claudia soon responded, and Lizzie laughed, feeling better already.
The first two calls didn’t wake her, but the third did, and Sarah’s voice sounded high-pitched and strange: “There’s been an accident, a car accident.” Lizzie got on the first flight the next morning. She took a cab to JFK well before dawn and landed in L.A. just as the sun was coming up, the dishwatery gray of the sky turning a lurid orange. As she barreled over skeins of freeway to UCLA, she chanted to herself: He’ll be fine, he has to be fine. But he never regained consciousness.
Now the rabbi motioned for the sisters to stand. Angela, on Sarah’s other side, stood too, her arm around Sarah’s shoulders. Lizzie clutched her sister’s hand. She wished she were standing in the shade of those cypresses. She could hear the rush of cars on the nearby freeway, sounding like water. An unspeakable thought intruded: What if the doctors had been wrong? What if for one moment when they unhooked the machines and covered him up, what if he had still been alive?
The rabbi gestured for them to come forward, toward the fresh mound of soil beside the gaping hole. A shovel pierced the dirt, stood upright.
Lizzie remembered little of her mother’s funeral, but she recalled that hill of dirt. She had been thirteen then. Lynn had been sick for about a year (and surely long before that, Lizzie realized after she died). During that year, while her mother got sicker and sicker, Lizzie and her sister continued to go to school and Hebrew school, taking ice-skating and clarinet lessons—pretending, fruitlessly, that everything would be fine. Their grandmother moved in. Joseph stepped up his visits, coming once a month. (She overheard her mother on the phone with her father: “No, no, Joseph, that’s ridiculous. You need to be out there, working. I am fine.”) He took them to the Ground Round and to Friendly’s for Fribbles as he had when he and Lynn first split up and he’d moved into a rental in the city, before his friend convinced him to join his ophthalmological surgical practice out in Los Angeles, before there was the slightest inkling of Lynn’s cancer.
During their mother’s illness, Lizzie was the one heating up cans of Chef Boyardee for herself and Sarah, forging their permission slips, lugging up loads of laundry; she was the one who went to Sarah’s soccer games. (Except for those times that she didn’t, using the money her mother gave her for snacks to play Ms. Pac-Man at the arcade, slamming wrist against joystick and gobbling up those dots and cherries as if her life depended on it.) She always thought her additional domestic duties, emotional and practical, would be temporary. She was twelve years old. Things would change. Never did she think they would change because her mother would die.
Sarah squeezed her hand, and the warm pressure of her palm, the tightness of her fingers, somehow enabled Lizzie to move forward. She took a step, stumbling slightly, but she righted herself when she took hold of the shovel’s metal handle. It was heavier than she thought, but she pressed down and succeeded in flinging down a paltry patch of dirt. The hollow thump of the soil making contact with the lid of the coffin—a pling, really—was a harrowing, haunting sound.
Where was her father?
Afterward, they decamped to an art gallery at Bergamot Station. The long narrow space filled up quickly. The air grew warm. So many people, from so many different parts of her father’s life: med-school classmates and cousins and ex-girlfriends and former patients and neighbors and the caterer who was also the mother of Sarah’s friend from middle school (she and Joseph had probably dated, Lizzie realized with a start). Her father would have loved this. It almost felt like he was here. Max, Joseph’s good friend, offered her a drink. She shook her head. “Coffee,” she said. “Please,” her voice sounding tinny in her ears.
Lizzie thought she spotted Claudia, but as she fought her way through the tangle of hips and elbows, the crowd closed in, tightening. It felt less like a memorial than an art opening. The space was so hot and packed; the loud voices seemed to warble, ricocheting against each other. She stood, uncertain.