We left the pair of men shoveling dirt over Ida, sealing her inside of Evergreen Hills for all eternity. Mom took my hand and led me onto the winding footpath.
“I think it’s over here,” she said, pointing to a row of headstones about twenty feet away. We stepped off of the path and into the grass. The muddy ground yielded and sucked at the soles of my shoes. Mom pulled a square of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it.
“Right there,” she said, striding over to the row abutting a low, verdant hedge. Mom walked ahead, looking down at the names. I stood back. I didn’t want to stumble onto Dad’s grave—I wanted to walk up to it knowing what it was. The gravestones in that row were nearly identical: white marble and low, the size of briefcases. Mom stopped in front of the eighth one over. She bent her head and crossed her arms. Her Burberry raincoat pulled tight across her back. I let Mom take a minute—I wasn’t going to ask her what she was thinking, because I knew she’d never tell me. But I’d lived alongside her long enough to understand—she didn’t love and miss him, but she felt guilty. She felt guilty about me, and now, she felt guilty about Ida. A cruel flicker unfurled in my chest as I realized a great way to hurt Mom’s feelings would be to bring up how she couldn’t even get a spot for Ida next to Michael.
And Mom, like always—like her brain could always go where my brain went—turned and spoke to me.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get them closer to each other,” she said, shaking her head. “There was just no room. Nobody was thinking ahead when Michael died, I guess.”
I felt a swell of anger—certainly she wasn’t thinking ahead. I tried to push it back. I wanted to be neutral meeting my dad for the first time. It seemed disrespectful, and too late, to bring any of these other twisted feelings I had to the foot of his grave. I took a deep breath and then another one and put my hand on my chest. I felt my body and my mind settling down.
I clasped my hands in front, with the decorum of a choir singer, and walked over to Mom. I looked down at the worn, white marble, at the words there: MICHAEL BOUCHARD MAY 29 1970—DEC 11 1998. A lacey spray of flowers umbrellaed the text. Michael Bouchard. Van Bouchard, I thought. I thought about the ordinary life I could have had with Ida, if she’d taken me in as a baby. I thought about all of the faces I’d swallowed down in Sedona in front of that booming stone god, and I wondered if one of them had been Michael Bouchard. I wondered if all of them had been Michael Bouchard, different faces for all of the different things he would have said to me, different faces for all of the ways he would have looked at me.
If I hadn’t known it before, I surely knew it now—we were all imperfect weirdos: Mom, Ida, Michael Bouchard. All of us, even—especially—me. But I was still here, and I could make something from all of it. The band was a beginning, an opening into a world where I could understand and explain all of these entrances, exists, and absences.
I looked down at Michael Bouchard, and then across at Mom. This is what you have to work with, I told myself. It was a lot. It was so much—a continuum from raw darkness to soaring crystal arrows. Even a month ago, the thought would have terrified me. It didn’t, though, not anymore. I had my own place to go, and my own things to do. I could figure it out.
About the Author
NATALKA BURIAN received an MA at Columbia University and completed workshops at Sackett Street and Catapult Books. She is the co-owner of the bar Ramona in Brooklyn. This is her first novel.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-5072-0075-9
ISBN 978-1-5072-0076-6 (ebook)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
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