“I’ll help you tell her.”
“She wasn’t that close to my mom, but this is her first death.”
“What about that goldfish?”
“She was four, and I bought a replacement and dropped it into the bowl before she got home from school.”
“Can’t do that with Adela. She was one of a kind.”
“She was.”
“Whoever made her broke the mold.”
“Probably smashed it to smithereens,” I said. “And stomped on the pieces.”
“That’s my girl! See you in ten, Zin Zin.”
When Avery rushed into the house, her cheeks rosy from the cold, she didn’t even take off her coat before she plopped down into Kirsten’s lap.
“You weigh ten tons and are rupturing my internal organs,” said Kirsten, “but, God, you’re gorgeous.”
“All of your organs?” said Avery.
“Every last one. Except my spleen. That seems to be intact.”
Avery bounced. Kirsten yelped.
“Whoop, there it went,” she said.
Avery laughed, stood up, then flopped down onto the rug so the dogs could climb on her. Dobbsey and Walt were so small that when they were overjoyed, their bodies became one big wag.
“Seriously,” said Kirsten to me. “What do people do who have ugly kids?”
“Hate them,” I said.
“Of course they do! What if Tex and I have ugly kids?”
Kirsten called her boyfriend Tex because he was the most New England person ever to be born. Sailing. Squash. Harvard. Nantucket red pants. A library with a ladder. His real name was Adams Frost. I adored him.
“You’ll hate them,” I said.
“Have a baby,” said Avery, pointing her finger at Kirsten. “ASAP. I need something to play with.”
“Well, in that case,” said Kirsten.
There was Avery, still in her down jacket, aglow and sprawled on our rug with easy, face-to-the-sky joy, like a little girl making snow angels, more relaxed than I’d seen her since Harris got fired, and I sat drinking in the sight, wanting the moment to last forever, while all the while I was about to drop death into the room like a bomb. When she was four, riding in her booster seat in the back of the car, she’d spotted a raccoon dead on the shoulder of the road and asked why it was there and if it was okay, and immediately, I said, “He’s just taking a nap” (“A nice little nap. On the road. In a pool of his own blood,” Kirsten would quip later, when I told her about it), and Harris shot me a reproving look. When we talked about it that night, I argued that she was too young, that even if she weren’t too young, a girl who fought off sleep like a demon, who believed, at 3:00 a.m., that there were snakes coiled up in her dresser drawers and scary “ladies made of bones” in her closet, did not need to add death to her night-panic repertoire. The snakes and ladies might be gone, but Avery was still that child grappling with wild fears in the middle of the night.
“Avery, sweetheart,” I said, gently.
She sat up fast, causing the dogs to slide off onto the floor. All three of them looked at me with wide quizzical, worried brown eyes.
“Is it Dad again?” she asked, and for the first time that day, I wanted to cry.
After I told her, Avery cried. Not hard. No sobbing. But she cried the way she did sometimes in the car when we went on our insomnia drives. Tears running down her cheeks, but no sound at all. Over in minutes, like a summer rainfall.
“You know what’s weird?” she said, afterward, wiping her eyes. “I’m crying because I’m sad that I’m not sadder.”
“Don’t be, baby,” I said. “This is truly a case of whatever you feel is the right thing to feel.”
I was sure about this for Avery. For myself, my feelings or lack of feelings? Not so sure.
Avery sat next to me on the living room sofa, both dogs in her lap, their faces turned toward hers, tipped upward like pansies facing the sun. Kirsten sat, cross-legged, on the floor at our feet.
“Your grandmother was just not that good at being a person,” I said.
“How did she turn out that way?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know her parents that well, but from what I remember, they seemed nice. A little formal. Her dad seemed to always be reading something, even at Christmastime. A newspaper or a book. My mom had a younger sister who died at the age of maybe ten or eleven. Leukemia, I think. The only reason I know is that there was a photo of the two of them together at my grandparents’ house, and I asked about it once. Her name was Frances, and they called her Franzy.”
“Franzy,” said Avery, thoughtfully. “That seems like a nickname for someone in a happy house, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I thought the same thing.”
“I never knew that,” said Kirsten. “About the sister.”
“She told me the one time I asked and then never mentioned it again,” I said.
“Do you think that’s why she is the way she is?” said Avery. “Was, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Growing up, I wanted to believe that was why, but she had so many chances to change over the years, so many reasons to be different. Trevor, for instance, and me.”
“Honestly,” said Kirsten, “and I realize I’m biased here because Adela never liked me, not even for five minutes by accident, but for a long time, I thought she was just probably born that way, missing a chip.”
“You thought?” said Avery. “What changed your mind?”
Kirsten’s eyes met mine.
“You,” I said to my daughter. “She loved you.”
“Oh,” said Avery. Her eyes began to well again.
“No, don’t feel bad that you didn’t know it or didn’t love her back,” I said, quickly. “I didn’t realize it myself for a long time. When you were born, she didn’t act interested in you. She came by after I’d brought you home from the hospital, and she didn’t even ask to hold you. She just looked you over appraisingly, as if you were a piece of furniture she was thinking of purchasing, and said, ‘Well, she got the Sartin ears, thank God. Harris’s ears are a travesty.’ I was furious.”
“She had a point about Harris’s ears,” said Kirsten.
I shot her a warning look, but Avery laughed.
“One day, when you were about six, our babysitter canceled, and I had to leave you with Adela,” I said. “When I went to pick you up, my mother was sitting at one end of the dining room table, working, and you were sitting at the other end cutting out snowflakes, totally absorbed. I used to love to cut out snowflakes.”
“Did she teach you?” said Avery. “And then she taught me?”
I looked at her, startled. “You know, I don’t know. Maybe. We might have learned in school, but it’s possible she taught us. She liked activities that kept children busy.”
“Mom,” said Avery, reprovingly. “Maybe she taught us because she thought we would like doing it.”
I nodded. “You never know. Anyway, months later, I was getting something out of the front hall table in her house, keys or something, and I found a box inside it with three snowflakes in it. You’d written your name on the backs of each one. And that’s when I knew she loved you.”
“Three snowflakes?” said Avery. “That’s it?”
“She kept them,” I said. “She never kept anything Trev or I made. And you know what else?”
“What?”
“They were awful. All raggedy and asymmetrical.”
“Mom, I was six.”
“True, but they were some seriously ugly snowflakes. And my mother hates—hated—ugly things. She disdained imperfection, and she kept your snowflakes.” I laughed. “I’m sure she chose the three best ones, but they were still some bad, bad snowflakes.”
“Keeping three bad snowflakes would not qualify as most people’s most loving act,” said Kirsten. “But Adela wasn’t most people.”
“Not even close,” I said.
“Not even a little bit,” said Kirsten.
> “Still, she kept them. And she gave you that suitcase full of books,” I said to Avery. “What are they, by the way?”
An odd look crossed Avery’s face. Guarded, maybe even guilty. “I don’t—”
“It’s okay if you haven’t opened it yet,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay,” said Avery.
After a while, she said, “She’s just not here anymore. A person can just suddenly—boom—stop being.”
“It’s strange to think about her being gone,” I said. “She took up so much space in the world.”
Avery tilted her head and rested it on my shoulder for a few seconds. “Are you okay, Mom?”
I fitted my hand to the curve of her face. Was I okay? I felt a bodily tiredness, as if I’d spent a couple of days raking leaves (a task I loved, actually), and the fact that my mother had ended her own life existed beyond me for now, ungraspable. I hadn’t spoken aloud or even really thought the word suicide, yet. I could sense it waiting for me, a sibilant, slippery presence, part coo, part wail, in the back of my mind. But I was here in my house. Kirsten, Avery, and my little dogs were here. And my love for them was vast and unreserved and elemental.
“Yes, sweetheart. Thank you for asking.”
She stood up. “I think I’ll go upstairs now.”
“Sure. Go do your thing.”
She turned to leave and then turned back.
“Thank you for telling me about the snowflakes,” she said. “It made me feel much sadder and less sad that I wasn’t more sad.”
And then, to cheer me up, in case I needed it, my precious, funny girl grinned her cheekiest grin at me, the one that bunches up her nose and makes her eyes turn into crescents.
This is how mothers and daughters are supposed to be, I thought, this is right and just and good. Maybe that was where grief would lie: not in my mother’s leave-taking, but in all that she had missed out on while she was here.
“Oh, sure,” I told her, shrugging. “That’s what I’m here for.”
Proof that a person can get used to anything is that there were whole weeks when I didn’t miss my brother, Trevor, and there were phone calls between us during which the sound of his voice did not make me immediately want to fall on the ground crying and making wild bargains with God to get him back into my life.
Most of the time, though, he was my phantom limb, the pauses between my breaths when I couldn’t sleep, the blur caught in my peripheral vision, the voice that came winging at me out of nowhere. I would be in the middle of something—cooking or planting bulbs or watching one of Avery’s games—and it would hit me like a punch in the stomach that Trevor and I weren’t close anymore and that I would give anything to go back and undo what had come between us.
In the middle of my senior year of high school, Trevor and my mother had had a fight to end all fights, and he had gone away, carried on two waves of rage—hers and his—and had never, in any true way, come home again. And right around the time he left, I—cut loose and falling through my own pitch-black, screeching tunnel of depression—pulled away at the exact moment when I should have moved toward, until the space between us got too big to bridge.
He’d gotten married (I’d gone to the wedding; Adela had not), and he and Iris had twin boys, Sam and Paxton. They were almost eight years old and I didn’t even know them. I’d visited them two months after they were born, and I’d been in their presence a few times since, but I didn’t know them. It did not seem to lie within the realm of the possible, not knowing Trev’s sons; my up-until-age-eighteen self would’ve unleashed scorn and fury on anyone who’d suggested such a thing could happen. And yet.
I asked Kirsten to stay while I called him. And right before I did, she gave voice to my own fragile, newborn hope, one I didn’t even realize I had before she said it: “Maybe with your mother gone, you and Trevor can find each other again.”
“We’ve seen each other eight times in the past twenty years, never for more than two or three hours at a time, and we’ve never had a real conversation. If it weren’t for Iris, he probably wouldn’t see me at all,” I said.
“And Avery,” said Kirsten. “If it weren’t for Avery.”
“It’s true. They text sometimes, nothing serious, just goofiness and teasing, but it’s something.”
“Ask him to come,” said Kirsten. “I bet it will be different without Adela around.”
“I won’t ask him to come. I don’t want to put him on the spot. If he wants to be here, he will.”
Kirsten said, “Oh, Ginny, just ask him.”
“No.”
I asked him.
I didn’t just ask him.
I said, “Trev, I know it’s been so long since we were close, and it’s probably mostly my fault, but I miss you. I wish you would come.”
Idiot. Idiot, idiot, idiot.
To be fair to my idiotic self, I didn’t lead with that plaintive and pathetic plea. I called and he answered the phone, and I recounted, calmly, clearly, like a news anchor, the events of the day.
Trevor laughed a barbed and bitter laugh and said, cheerfully, “In control till the end, the old despot.”
“Yup,” I said.
“Let me guess. She planned her own funeral down to the seventeen nauseating, praise-singing eulogies and the exact number of petals on the white lilies.”
And there it was: you can hate your mother and leave her and not speak to her for the last twenty years of her life, but you will still, in spite of yourself, remember her favorite flower. What a terrible bind we are in, kids with difficult parents.
I didn’t say any of this to Trevor. I said, “I think they always have six petals.”
“Yeah, well, if Adela Beale wanted five, someone would probably figure out how to grow them that way.”
“Mutant lilies! Now!”
“Exactly.”
“I assumed that, too: the big, fancy funeral. Flags at half-staff all over town. But no. She didn’t want people to get together and discuss her without her there to edit what they said. No funeral, and she’s getting cremated. But she wrote her own obituary.”
“I don’t want my name in it.”
“Who’s trying to control the narrative now?”
I meant it to come out teasingly, but Trevor snapped, “Still on her side, I see. Team Adela forever.”
After so long, to be still talking about sides. Don’t stoop to defend yourself, Ginny. Don’t take the damn bait. Move on like he didn’t say it.
“No,” I said. “I can see how you might think it, but that’s never been true. Ever.”
Silence, during which I silently called myself an idiot and decided—decided decisively—to say goodbye and get the hell off the phone immediately.
“Do you think you’ll come?” I said.
I said it, then banged myself in the forehead with my fist.
“And what? Sit around eating casseroles and reminiscing about how much she hated me?”
“Oh God, do you think the neighbors will bring casseroles? Because that would make Adela insane,” I said.
“White trash food,” said Trevor, in a precise imitation of our mother’s voice.
“Tuna noodle with cream of mushroom soup! Please, God, let someone bring that.”
“With crumbled saltines on top!”
And then my brother, Trevor, laughed. Not the acidic, sneering laugh from the beginning of our conversation, but a true, short-blast Trev laugh that jarred something loose inside of me, a shiny, sharp-edged thing. Love, I guess it was.
“Trev, I know it’s been so long since we were close, and it’s probably mostly my fault, but I miss you. I wish you would come.”
“Gin,” said Trevor.
It wasn’t “Zin,” but it was close enough. I felt like someone had handed me a diamond.
Then, nothing. Then, “Listen, I have to go. Thanks for giving me the news.”
“Tell me about your mom,” I said to Daniel.
It was the kind of winte
r morning when every leaf is furred with frost. The grass of the dog park crunched underfoot, and the sun floated, a fuzzy white puffball, in the slate sky. The morning felt like a black-and-white photograph colorized here and there: my red gloves; my dogs’ jackets, one orange, one yellow; a woman’s bright blue knit hat in the distance. In the muffled light, Daniel’s eyebrows were two black slashes in a pale face; his eyes shone moonstone gray.
“You want to talk about my mom?” said Daniel.
“All I’ve done lately is talk about my mom to people. I mean, most of the time, it’s because they ask. In the grocery store, in my neighborhood, at her lawyer’s office, at Avery’s school. But you and Mag have had to hear all the stuff I didn’t say to those people, all those thrilling mother-daughter dysfunction stories. No wonder Mag didn’t come today.”
“Oh yeah,” said Daniel. “As soon as you walk away, Mag and I are like ‘Can you believe her? Still talking about her mom after four whole days?’”
“So you decided to take shifts,” I said, nodding. “Good thinking.”
He smiled at me. Daniel’s smile involved rampant eye twinkling and several sets of parentheses around his mouth. I’d seen it lots of times before, but for some reason, this time, the sight dazzled me. His smile swept through that gray morning like a lighthouse beam.
“Exactly. Which means I’ll have all tomorrow to recover,” he said. “So fire away.”
“Seriously, I’m sick of the sound of my own voice,” I said. “Especially when it’s talking about my own life.”
“Well, hold on to your hat, then. Because Mary Nash York is a fascinating human being.”
“Her maiden name is Nash?”
“Her maiden name is Briggs. Mary Nash is her two-name first name. It’s a southern thing.”
“I like it.”
“I’ll tell her. She’ll like it that you like it.”
“So you grew up in the South?” I said.
When I asked this, Daniel’s face turned a shade more serious. He opened his mouth to speak and then hesitated.
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