A thought occurs to me.
“Is she here?” I ask the man. His nose is shiny. “Right now?”
He nods carefully. “Yes. And we need to discuss that. If you’d like the option of a burial casket, or a service—a funeral—then we would need to start preparing the body now. And, of course, that has a cost, too.”
My mother, well, her body, is here. She has a birthmark on her hip in the shape of a crescent moon and once she told me, “It’s my superhero mark.” When I asked her what her superpowers were, she said, “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” And then she chased me, and tickled me, and held me.
I’ll never see her crescent moon superhero mark again.
It seems wrong to put her in a box and shove her underground and walk away. She made jams and jellies and grew irises and sunflowers and told me about periods and breasts and bras and how to properly wash my face and she brushed my hair and let me watch inappropriately sexy movies, because, she said, “Make love, not war, and the world will be an infinitely better place.”
Thinking of all that makes my body swell with pain, and to keep it in, I actually hold my breath. The balding man meets my eyes. He must know that I’m about to cry.
He must see this all the time.
His voice is very gentle. “Cremation, too, is a very accessible way to honor our…your loved one. The remains go home with you, and you may decide later how to honor your person. In this situation, cremation may be our best path.”
Rhonda explains, “Like scattering ashes, you know? This roadie friend of ours. He got cancer. His wife made pots. She put his ashes into a glaze and now he’s a pot holding a rhododendron.”
LaLa nods. “My friend Speedy died when I was fifteen. She was a real tough punk rocker chick. She was riding trains. Fell and got crushed. We hopped a train and scattered her ashes all along her favorite line.”
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.” The balding man crosses himself, which makes Rhonda frown. She likes to say she’s a firm believer in the Church of Nothing. That used to make me smile, but it doesn’t anymore. Not now.
“I can see June being okay with that.” She clears her throat. “And that’s…doable.”
I’m not stupid. I understand that “doable” means money. Now that my mother is dead, she’s a price tag, which she wouldn’t have liked, but I don’t have much of a choice about that.
It’s a funny word, rhododendron, and it ping-pongs in my head. I say it out loud, and everyone frowns at me, so I stare at my lap and fret some lace on the dress. I’m starting to get the wet cement feeling again, from having swallowed down my tears.
Before all this happened, I never knew trying not to cry would be actually, physically painful, but it is. My bones strain with the effort to keep all my tears in, because the last thing I want to do right now is cry in this stupid funeral home in front of this pink-faced man. In fact, the thing I most want to do, besides go home-home, is go back to that crappy, uncomfortable bunk bed in LaLa’s house and stare at the ceiling and be left alone.
As everyone stares at me, waiting for me to decide, I begin to wonder what happens to bodies when people die, before they get put in silky caskets, and then into the ground, or in furnaces. Do they just…sit in a refrigerator? Is that where my mother is at this very moment? Being gently chilled inside a wall somewhere, like a packet of ham or wedges of honeydew?
Is it padlocked, like Georgia’s fridge? The thought of a giant refrigerator filled with dead people, people we love, rips through me, and I laugh even though I don’t mean to, because it scares me shitless, and everyone stares at me some more.
“She’s overwhelmed,” murmurs LaLa.
The photographs of cremation containers—urns—in the binder blur in front of me. There are plain vases, and elaborate vases, and fancy boxes for the ashes. There are so many.
Images of my mom, and fire, make me close my eyes tight. LaLa puts her hand on mine.
I close my eyes. I just want this to be over.
I snap my eyes open and point to the first box I see on the page, a white one, with a swirly red-and-green dragon on it. It’s the cheapest one on the page.
“That one,” I say.
Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, except for me.
“Can we go now?” I whisper. “Can we please just go?”
* * *
• • •
The funeral home was in Sierra Vista, about fifteen minutes from Mesa Luna, but a good thirty from where LaLa lives. On our way home, before we pick up the kids at school, LaLa stops at a café. It’s cool inside. The walls are the color of mud. LaLa puts her purse, a big colorful bag, on the table. “I’m going to order us something simple. You haven’t eaten in almost two days, Tiger. You need some protein.”
The tabletop is cold under my hands. My skin is so dry I imagine it cracking and flaking off, bit by bit, until I’m just bone and gristle, and a great wind comes, and blows the rest of me away, until I’m nothing, not even a speck of a person.
That doesn’t sound so bad. Disappearing. Not feeling.
The girl-bug in the jar flutters, nods her head. She taps her fingers on the glass. Yes, she seems to say. What a good idea.
Tears flood my eyes. I’m exhausted, and I can’t hold back anymore. Hush, hush, baby. Coconut shampoo, her soft hair against my face. A bad dream.
My mom, burned to bits, stuffed in a small box. It’s all a horror.
I don’t want anyone in the café to notice me, but I’m powerless to stop it. So I do a kind of thing where I hunch my shoulders and lean forward and tip my face to the table. It’s a complicated kind of breathing, but I manage not to make a sound or sob. My tears splash on the table.
“Oh God.” LaLa sets two soup bowls down, finds a soft cloth in her bag, and wipes my face. “It’s okay,” she says gently. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No,” I choke out. “It isn’t.”
I meet her eyes. She doesn’t try to correct me, or give me some crappy saying, and in that instant I understand. LaLa knows, but she doesn’t want to say it out loud.
My life is going to be shit from now on. In ways I never could have imagined.
* * *
• • •
When we pick up the little boy and the girl, Sarah, they argue in the backseat. Sarah calls the boy Leonard. Leonard, stop poking me. Leonard, stop picking your boogers.
Leonard says, You stop.
LaLa looks at them both in the rearview mirror. “Guys, turn it down. Tiger’s had a rough day.”
I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t care. I really don’t.”
Truthfully? They can be as noisy as they want. Fine with me. Their noise just fills up all the empty space around me. Areas my sadness can leak.
When we get back to LaLa’s, I walk straight into the house and down the hall, Leonard calling after me, “Where are you going? Where’s she going, LaLa? And when is she gonna take off that weird dress?”
LaLa shushes him. From the top bunk, I hear the sounds of television, and clinking pots and pans as she starts dinner.
I text Cake, but she doesn’t answer. Then I remember, Oh, she’s at band practice. She’s at school, still. There’s school, and life, and that’s where everyone is. They are going on, and I’m just stopped, a girl-bug in the dirt, upended and pathetic.
I roll over, press my body against the cool wall. I’d like to become this wall, burrow in it, let the termites get me, ravage me from the inside out.
HERE ARE THE THINGS you think about when your mother dies:
That her skin was very soft. That you think you can feel it, still, when you close your eyes super hard.
That you’re afraid one day you’ll wake up and try to remember what her skin felt like, her cheek on yours when you were sick, and you suddenly won’t be able to. It will be gone, poof
, kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk, just like those blueberries in the pail after Sal ate them. That made your mom laugh, that Sal’s mom kept picking the berries without knowing Sal was eating them all.
You’re afraid the woman in the television show you’re watching right now, crying as her daughter tries on wedding gowns, will never be your mother, and you will never be that girl standing in that gown for her in a ritzy shop, or any shop, for that matter, your face glowing. That’s all done for, now.
If you ever get married, or go to prom, or graduate college, all that stuff that’s supposed to make a life? There will be an empty chair where your mom was supposed to be.
Taking photos, wiping away tears, fixing the hem on your dress. Admiring your diploma.
If you ever have a baby, who will tell you all the secrets about fussiness and teething and walking and all that weird and scary stuff?
That if you have kids, they might wonder why they don’t have a grandma, just like you used to, before you realized how sad it made your mom, so you stopped asking.
These are the thoughts that make you suddenly jump off the couch, startling Sarah, who loves this show about picking wedding dresses, and you run to the toilet, where you heave everything you really haven’t eaten in four days, gross yellow sticky stuff, until your stomach is sore and your jaw aches. You knew you never should have gotten out of the bunk bed.
LaLa holds your hair, just like your mother did when you were sick, but she isn’t the same, she can’t be the same, nothing will ever be the same, because wherever you go? There will always be this emptiness inside you and beside you, where your mom is supposed to be, and only you will know the emptiness. Other people won’t be able to see it. They’ll see you, moving around the world, just like before. You’ll look alive on the outside but be dead on the inside, flicking your wings and watching everyone through the jar.
In the narrow top bunk, in the dress your mother bought for you because she thought you’d look beautiful in it, you hold the pillow over your mouth and sob and wish you could just die, too, because this emptiness is too heavy.
You’re only sixteen, and you wish you’d known how to prepare for the sheer weight of it.
4 days, 10 hours
LALA WANTS ME TO wash the dress, but I tell her no. LaLa wants me to at least take a shower, and I say all right, but I don’t really wash myself. I just go through the motions of turning on the water, stripping off my dress and underwear and bra, and standing there until I’m soaked. Then I get out. I don’t even brush my hair.
Today is the last day I will see my mother. It’s called a viewing, and people will come, and we’ll eat cold foods laid out on a table, and people will pay their respects to her, and then they’ll take my mom…away. This is what LaLa has told me.
She asks if I want her to do my hair. “Just some brushing,” she says lightly. “Maybe pull it back at the sides? I have some cool pins.”
My mom was forever petting my hair, braiding it, brushing it. That’s a mother thing to do, so I tell LaLa no.
“I can’t go with you today,” she says. “I’d have to take the littles, and I don’t think you want crazy kids running around.” LaLa looks sad as she tells me this.
She wants me to eat, so I nibble two crackers with peanut butter and two slices of apple, chewing slowly, while Sarah and Leonard eye me over bowls of Cheerios.
“Your dress smells,” Leonard says pointedly.
“So what?” I answer. “It doesn’t matter.”
LaLa stands at the stove, sipping a cup of tea. It’s a pretty cup, with lacy designs. She has a lot of pretty cups, I’ve noticed, and pretty, delicate things, like ivory-colored doilies over the back of the rumpled couch and stained-glass unicorns that hang down in the window, catching the sunlight. Sarah likes watching the colorful reflections of the unicorns against the far wall in the living room. LaLa’s house has colors and softness. Georgia’s was gray and hard and dark.
Sometimes when Leonard gets too antsy, LaLa makes him sit “crisscross applesauce” on the floor and watch the sand in an hourglass drift down. She says it calms him, and it does.
Karen the social worker is coming to take me to the viewing.
I check my phone. It’s been 6,360 minutes since my mother died.
I type: How many minutes is 50 years?
If I live fifty more years without my mother, I will be sixty-six, an old lady, and I’ll have lived 26,280,000 minutes without her, each one more damn lonely and horrendous than the last.
Cake texts, You can do this. You can be brave.
No, I can’t.
I can’t.
I run to the bathroom. Throw up the crackers and apple.
* * *
• • •
Karen and l have been sitting in her car in the parking lot of the funeral home for ten minutes. I know this because I’ve been watching the time on the dash over the front seat as she scrolls and texts on her phone.
I rest a hand on my chest. How is it physically possible for a heart to be beating so fast and a person doesn’t die? I feel like I’m going to split open any minute.
Karen slides her phone into her purse. “It’s time now, Tiger. We should go in. It’ll be okay. Your friends are there. Your mom’s friends, too.”
“I wish everyone would stop saying it will be okay. It won’t.” I wedge the heels of my hands against my eyes, but it isn’t any use. I cry.
Karen hands me a tissue. “It’ll be like this for a long time, Tiger. You just have to keep keeping on, I guess.”
My voice comes out sharp and ugly. “That sounds like song lyrics. That sounds stupid.” I sniffle into the wet tissue and throw it on the floor of her car.
* * *
• • •
When I walk into the funeral home, Cake flies into me, hugging me so hard my ribs hurt. I miss her so much there’s an awful ache inside me, but there’s just too much ache for my mom, too, and it’s drowning everything else out.
She leads me into another room, one with a lot of people. Karen pats my shoulder and goes to sit on a chair by the wall.
Cake whispers, “Are they mean to you where you are?”
I shake my head. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”
She leans down close. She’s a good six inches taller than me. Her eyes are worried. “It does matter,” she says.
Cake’s wearing a black lacy dress with a black scarf around her neck and red barrettes in her hair. I feel a flash of anger. Does she think this is a party?
All around us, the room has gone quiet.
Everyone is staring at me. There are so many people; I don’t even know all of them. They start walking up to me. “Paying their respects,” Cake whispers.
Mr. Timmins, who runs Ted’s Threads, holds his old felt hat in his hands and looks very sad. My mom liked to walk around his shop on hot days because it was air-conditioned, touching things like vintage velvet purses and rusty signs advertising soda pop.
He says, “I am very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a lovely, lovely woman.”
Isabella who owns the Stop N Shop, who let my mom run a tab when things were hard, in exchange for some jams and jellies, is the next to appear in front of me. She touches my cheek. “Mija,” she sighs. “Mi palomita. To lose your mama.”
I can’t help it. I say, “I’m sorry I’m crying so much,” and she pulls me against her.
They keep coming, these adults with sad eyes and soft hugs, people I didn’t realize even knew my mother.
Cake’s mom, Rhonda, is crying, and so is Cake’s dad, and even her uncle Connor, though I don’t know why. Did he even really know my mom? He was usually hiding in his room when she’d come to pick me up at Cake’s. I think he thought she was pretty. His eyes are glassy. He must be stoned.
Maybe I should start getting stoned, now that ther
e’s no one to care.
There are even some kids from school here, like Kelsey Cameron and Mae-Lynn Carpenter. Kelsey hugs me and says she’s sorry. She smells like vanilla. She’ll probably make some posts about me on Instagram later. #sad #poorkidnomom #orphangirl
Mae-Lynn is wearing a black dress with white buttons and a Peter Pan collar. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything other than a shirt and pants.
We’ve never even talked before, so I can’t figure out why she’s here, but she is.
She tugs at the edges of her hair. They’re ragged with split ends. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
She won’t meet my eyes.
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
She leans over and gives me the lightest hug I’ve ever felt, like she’s a small bird or something, just barely putting her arms on me. Just before she pulls away, she whispers in my ear, “Welcome to the Big Suck. It’s going to be really bad.”
Before I can ask what she means, she’s gone, melting into a thicket of people by the food table.
Cake says, “What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Weird.” The Big Suck.
I’m starting to get really, really tired. The wet cement feeling. A thousand bricks on my chest.
A seemingly endless line of humans is waiting to kiss me, shake my hand, hug me, give me teary eyes. “I can’t take this,” I mumble to Cake, but she doesn’t hear.
Randy Gonzalez from the horse farm puts his hand on my shoulder, which doesn’t make me uncomfortable, just weird-feeling. My mom always called him “stately,” and I think now I understand what she meant. He holds himself very still, like he’s thinking deeply about things. He smells like all the old men around Mesa Luna, like aftershave and Three Flowers pomade.
“My deepest condolences, Grace. Come to the ranch sometime, and visit the horses, will you? They miss your mother. She came all the time, you know.”
How to Make Friends with the Dark Page 10