Cassie and I were lying on the couch, toe to toe, propped up on pillows doing our homework as we had been each day for the nearly two months since the funeral. And each day, I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to keep coming, to keep pretending that we were friends. But a larger part of me was too afraid of what would happen to me if she stopped.
We both ignored the doorbell the first time. For sure, I was never going to answer it. Not if they rang it a thousand times. Not even if it was more flowers or another kindly casserole dropped off by a neighbor. Because there was also a chance it was another reporter. I don’t know what it was: the cruel irony of my mom getting the Pulitzer nomination posthumously, the fact that she had survived so much danger in the field only to die a mile from her home. Or that she was so beautiful. But the reporters kept coming no matter how many times or how many ways we told them to go away.
Cassie knew this, too. And by the time the person rang the bell a third time, she couldn’t take it anymore. The people with the casseroles were never that insistent.
“I’ll get rid of them,” she said, pushing herself up off the couch. A minute later, I heard the front door creak open, a beat of silence, followed by Cassie’s quiet voice: “What the hell?” Then her stomping outside and down the front steps: “Hey! Come here, you fucking asshole!”
Reluctantly, I forced myself up to investigate. Our front door was hanging wide open when I got out there, and Cassie was nowhere in sight. I stepped into the open doorway, my eyes watering from the March cold blasting in. Finally, I spotted Cassie out in the street, standing in front of a dark-gray sedan in her cropped sweater, short skirt, and bright argyle tights. Her barely-still-curly brown hair was lifted in an arc around her head in the strong wind, making her look like a pissed-off Medusa. She had one hand on the hood of the car, the other high in the air. It took me a minute to realize what she had gripped in her fist: a plastic baby doll. We’d gotten a half dozen in all, but not a single one since my mom’s accident.
“But she’s dead,” I whispered in the empty foyer. “You got what you wanted.”
Cassie was shaking the baby over her head now.
“Get out of the car, you asshole!” she shouted. “You think you can fucking do this to them still?”
I’d almost forgotten about the babies altogether. And all I wanted was for my mom to appear next to me. To shrug and shake her head: you cannot control the world. I wanted that so bad it felt like my heart was going to burst. Actually, I wished it would. As depressed as I’d been, I hadn’t actually thought about killing myself, not seriously, anyway. But did I want to die? Every single second.
Whoever was in the car—I figured it was a he, but I couldn’t see from where I was—must have said something super messed-up then. Because Cassie went crazy.
“Get out here! You piece of shit!” she screamed, climbing up on the hood of his car and slamming the baby down.
And I was glad. I wanted her to smash his windshield. To reach in and grab him by the throat. Because it felt like that guy in the car—who was just some idiot who hated what he thought my mom’s pictures said—was responsible for my mom being dead. And watching Cassie out there, waving that baby around like a lunatic, I felt this tiny flutter of hope. Like someday all the sadness flooding my insides might be lit up like that—into an unstoppable blaze.
My dad drove up while Cassie was still on the hood. He screeched to a stop and jumped out, looking for a second like he might beat the crap out of that baby-dropper. God did I want him to. But he didn’t even look in the driver’s direction. Instead, he calmly talked Cassie down. As soon as she was off the car, the driver sped away. And my dad tossed the doll to the curb, where it sat until somebody—the garbageman, a neighbor, a passerby—must have picked it up and carried it away.
“What did that guy say?” I asked Cassie later when we were back inside on the couch.
“Your dad’s right, it doesn’t matter,” she said, waving me off. “He was a nut ball.”
“It matters.” I stared at her hard.
“Okay,” she said finally. “He said, ‘Beware false prophets.’” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know how your mom dealt with those people. But trust me, that particular turtle-ish guy isn’t going to be coming back. When I got up on his car, I think he might have peed himself.”
And I knew Cassie and my dad were right. That man—whoever he was—didn’t matter. None of the people who hated my mom and her pictures did. Maybe I should have even been grateful. Because, in a way, them still hating her kept her alive.