She said, “That would be disrespectful. This is a memorial, Nan, a mem-o-rial.”
The wind, violent. Every planter crashed off the lanai. I went outside to pick up the pieces, and really so I could spend ten minutes away from her. The wind whipped my hair. Mud on my feet. I cut my finger on one of the pieces and felt more awake. The blood on his head. His teal shirt. His family. How Ana had told him to name the horse Mom.
She’d turned the volume up so high that it drowned out the pounding rain. “Look what I found on TV!” she yelled. “It’s the cancer documentary! About the women who go to the hair salon to feel beautiful before they die! Come watch with me!”
“I’m cleaning!”
I looked at the screen. The woman being interviewed was crying. She was bald, but not completely bald like Ana. On the top and on the sides of her head were clumps of baby fine hair. Then Ana turned the volume up even more. So loud that the blasting sound of this woman crying erased all the thoughts in my brain.
“Can you turn that down, please!”
Ana pretended not to hear me.
“Ana!”
“Come watch with me, Nan!” She patted the cushion beside her.
I walked around the couch and stood in front of her, the trash bag of broken pieces in my hand. “Turn it down, please!”
Her toes twinkled happily on the coffee table. “Fine, Mom,” she said.
The woman on the TV behind me said, “I can’t believe this is happening to me. You never think it’s going to be you.”
“Ana,” I said, “what happened to the horse?”
Ana laughed. “You look like a swamp monster, Nan.”
I waited.
She sighed. “The horse wasn’t in the barn.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God!”
“Ugh, stop saying that,” she said. “You’re killing me!”
I looked at her. She looked at me. There was nothing in her dark eyes. Who was this woman on my couch, and how did she get here? I wanted to go back in time.
“I love you, Nan,” she said. She blinked several times. “Don’t you love me?”
I couldn’t look at her anymore. “I have to take a shower,” I said.
I took the trash bag back outside. Why had I brought it in? Because I thought I deserved to carry heavy loads. No, Nancy, you just weren’t thinking. You just weren’t thinking! I opened the door and tossed the bag out, and as I walked past her on the couch, she repeated what I had just said in a wee voice: “I have to take a shower.”
I screamed it. “Oh my God!”
?
Jed and Cam were drenched. “A tree fell,” Cam said.
“So we couldn’t drive up,” Jed finished.
“I know,” I called from the kitchen, “I called the tree service but they—”
“Hi, booooys,” Ana cut me off. She was still on the couch in her robe. My robe. She had recorded that depressing documentary about fighting breast cancer with hairstyling, and now she was watching it again. Over the course of the day, she had put on a pair of Chuck’s socks and the big white beach hat with the pink bow.
“Nice hat,” Jed said, flicking the brim.
“I know you love it, Jedi,” she said.
“Wait right there,” I said to the boys, who were dripping water and mud all over my floor. I brought them dish towels to wipe themselves off. As if the floors mattered right now. But I knew it was best to act normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“What are we cooking?” Jed asked.
“Frozen Costco pizza, it’s already in the oven,” I said. “I couldn’t go grocery shopping because of the tree, so this is all we got.” This was a lie. There were plenty of things we could have cooked together, but I wanted dinner to be over as soon as possible.
Cam shrugged. “Cool.”
The boys sat on the couch with Ana while I did everything. Only ten minutes until the pizza would be done. I set the table haphazardly. I ripped paper towels in half instead of looking for the napkins. I didn’t light any candles.
I heard Jed boasting to Ana, “Yeah, we put some Rice Krispies in this morning,” and Ana said, “I love it, Jedi.”
Every time she spoke, I cringed.
I took the pizza out five minutes early. Done enough.
“Dinner!” I shouted.
Back in San Diego, every time I shouted “Dinner!” Chuck would shout “Dinner!” right after me like an echo. Had we ever done that in this house? Why had I forgotten about it until now?
Chuck and Brenda. I couldn’t go there right now. Keep it together, Nancy. Keep it together for your children.
The three of them shuffled to the table. Ana held the crook of Jed’s arm. They sat. “Wait, we need candles,” Ana said, and scooted her chair in, which meant she did not plan on getting up to light these candles herself. She looked at me. I looked away. My eyes fell on the dead branch she had hung on our wall. “Jedi, will you do it?” she requested.
“Totally,” he obliged. He whipped a lighter from his pocket—don’t say anything, Nancy, don’t say anything—and expertly lit the candles. Silently I sighed.
The boys, without being asked, held out their hands. Ana smiled. “We are here,” she said, “at the dinner table. This is the biggest storm in the last ten years. I learned that on TV today. Monsoon rains, they said. Let these monsoon rains wash over you and through you. Let them wash away your sins. We have nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, except for this moment, right now, right here.”
“Thank you, Ana.” I gave her a tight smile.
“Wait, I wasn’t done yet,” she whined.
I tightened my smile while trying to hold Jed and Cam’s hands gently.
“We all make decisions,” she boomed. “No one decides for us. We are in control. We decide to play water polo, we decide to eat pizza, we decide when to step out in the rain. We decide to be happy. We decide to give up. We decide.” She inhaled and exhaled with force. “We decide, we decide, we decide. There is no one to blame for your life but you.”
A long pause. A very long pause. I rolled my lips together to stop myself from speaking, and then Jed said, “Dayum!” He squeezed my hand. He looked so rejuvenated by her.
I ate half a slice of undercooked pizza and asked the boys how they were doing. Fine, they said, fine. I asked them to please do their homework. They swore it was already done. Then I excused myself. “My stomach hurts, I’m going to lie down.”
“Your stomach hurts?” Ana said.
“It does,” I said, not bothering to feign any symptoms.
She was searing a hole through my head with her eyes. I didn’t look at her. I washed my plate. I went to the bedroom. I flopped onto the bed. Ten minutes later, I flushed the pills before I had any more time to think.
I turned off the lights and tried to sleep. The teal shirt, the blood, the flashlight rolling, rolling. How he had landed like that, so peacefully. A bad man, she had said. He deserved it, she had said.
The smell of marijuana wafted in. I didn’t get up to scold them. It seemed unimportant now. The windows shook in their frames, the rain would not stop pounding. There were no more planters on the lanai to be broken.
When my mother died, my brother had said the same thing. She deserved it. And then he had said, “This isn’t our fault.”
Sky
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