“Cool,” she might have said, just as she had about Grandma Sandrine’s coffin. “Different.”
“We’ll open it now,” Mr. Daniels says.
The way he says “we” makes me think he’ll need all of us to do it, because it’s going be such a physically impossible task. Like picking up some kind of massive boulder. But all he does is turn his back to us and raise the lid, and there she is.
At first I don’t move an inch. I just look at her from behind my dark glasses, from a few feet away. Mom screams out Isabelle’s name and Dad reaches out and wraps his good arm around her. Uncle Patrick turns away after one glance as Aunt Leslie sobs on his chest.
Alejandra reaches for my hand, but doesn’t quite make it. I am watching my parents on the couch, with their arms around each other. The way they look, it’s hard to imagine they will ever come apart again, not even for a moment, much less for the rest of their lives.
I take a few steps closer to the coffin.
Up close, I can see why Grandma Régine chose it. It’s girly in a way that Isabelle liked to be, but would never openly admit. The inside is lined in pink silk and under her head is a matching pillow. Isabelle looks whole. There’s no sign of any cuts or bruises under the layers of cinnamon-colored stage makeup covering her face.
Everyone says this about the dead, but she does look like she’s sleeping. Even after all this time, and given everything her body’s been through, she still looks like herself. I keep thinking that if I nudge her, she might wake up.
Just like the evening of the crash, she’s dressed in one of her formal orchestra uniforms, a white blouse and pencil skirt. The night of the concert, she also wanted to wear one of her many beaded bracelets, but no jewelry was allowed. Even the non-shiny kind was considered too distracting. She also couldn’t wear anything shiny in her hair. And she’s not wearing anything shiny in the coffin, either. Perhaps to best hide her wounds, what’s left of her braids are bunched up together and pulled close to her face, their edges resting on her shoulders.
I don’t know how she would have felt about the uniform.
“Does this mean I’ll have to play the flute for all of eternity?” she might have said.
She would have liked all the makeup, though.
“Stage mask galore,” she might have said.
But even with all of the makeup, she still looks like me. It’s like looking at me.
After a freshman I didn’t know tried to kill himself last year, I remember sitting through a suicide prevention assembly at school, and one of the things the guest psychologist said was that most people, especially young people, think that when they die, they’ll be able to see everything happening around them as they are lying in their coffin.
The truth is, he said, you’re not going to see those who bully you cry. You’re not going to experience your parents’ remorse. You’re not even going to feel your friends’ pain. You’re never going to know what you look like dead.
Except I do. I know exactly what I look like dead. I look like Isabelle.
ALEJANDRA GOES OUT to her rental car for something, and when she comes back she tells us that there are news trucks outside the funeral home.
The lobby, too, is packed with people who are waiting to get into the chapel for the service.
I walk out with Alejandra while the rest of the family helps Mom and Dad to the chapel’s front row.
I wonder if Tina and Jean Michel are in the lobby. I peek out through a glass door, but don’t see them in the crowd of both church and school friends waiting to get in. I think I see Dr. Aidoo standing in the lobby, in a fancy black suit, but maybe I am hallucinating him.
I don’t have the heart, or energy, to walk through that crowd to find my friends or to make sure that Dr. Aidoo is really there. Besides, just as Dr. Aidoo himself predicted, I am starting to feel a bit nauseated, blurry eyed, and dizzy. I don’t want to fall and hit my head again. I ask Alejandra to take me to my parents.
I am still wearing my sunglasses as I walk to the front of the chapel. Even though Alejandra is holding on to my elbow, I feel like I’m floating towards Isabelle’s beautiful coffin, which is closed and covered with camellias and birds of paradise from my parents’ garden.
Next to the coffin is an easel with a large picture of Isabelle, her most recent school portrait. Under the always-too-bright school photographer’s lights, her face looks a bit too shiny. She’s wearing a faux pearl choker and a black, sequined blouse. Her braids hang right above her collarbone and she’s smiling.
The chapel fills up quickly. Then Pastor Ben gets up to welcome us.
“A sad and incomprehensible day,” he says, while tugging at his white beard.
Where is Lazarus now? I ask myself.
I can no longer disappear. I can no longer sink under. But I don’t like the surface, either. At times, I feel like I’m in the hospital again, fading in and out. I adjust the sunglasses, pulling their dark tint closer to my eyes.
Uncle Patrick gets up and walks to the podium. He talks about the day Isabelle and I were born.
Mom was on bed rest her entire pregnancy. She was supposed to have a scheduled C-section, but a week before the scheduled delivery date, she began having contractions. Panicked, Dad drove her to the hospital.
“They were eager to see the world,” Uncle Patrick says. “They demanded to come out.”
Many things might have gone wrong, he says. We might have become entangled in each other’s umbilical cords. One of us might have gobbled up all the nutrients and starved the other one in the womb. But we loved and supported each other, from day one.
Aunt Leslie gets up and talks about Isabelle’s love of music, her dream of traveling the world and becoming a famous composer. She mentions how Isabelle truly believed in what Nietzsche said, that life without music is a mistake. She talks about Isabelle’s sense of humor, her love of family.
I am feeling foggy again, so I force myself to stop listening. Instead, I look around the chapel.
Nearly everyone in Isabelle’s life is there. Ms. Volcy, the principal, is sitting in the same row as some of the Morrison teachers. Many of Isabelle’s friends from school are there, too, a few of them with their parents.
It’s easy to recognize Isabelle’s friends. When they’re not performing, they’re mostly into fangirl, fanboy wear. They are constantly broadcasting their love for their favorite musicians or bands on their ratty T-shirts. Though not today. Today they’re wearing perfectly pressed sheaths, slacks, or skirts with shirts or blouses in subdued colors.
The news crews, including some of Mom’s regular anchor clients, are in the back row. Their cameras are aimed right at the coffin and at us. Alejandra says that a few of the anchors sent flowers to Mom’s hospital room every day, hoping to land an exclusive interview with her and Dad. My parents decided not to do any interviews.
I look in the back for Tina and Jean Michel, but I don’t see them. I look for Ron Johnson. I don’t see him, either.
Pastor Ben announces a selection from Isabelle’s section of the school orchestra, the three guys and four girls who played the flute with Isabelle.
Isabelle’s friend Lois sobs as she introduces the piece.
Isabelle had too many friends to call anyone her best friend. But if she had a best friend, it was my homeroom classmate, loud, gum-chewing, flute-playing Lois.
“We’re going to play an excerpt from one of Isabelle’s favorite pieces,” Lois says.
Isabelle’s friends play “Infernal Dance” from Stravinsky’s The Firebird. The piece’s ginormous sweep is straining, almost overwhelming them. Their tempo reminds me of the crash: silence, speed, and then SMASH.
It seems odd now, after my being deaf for a while, but what I loved most during Isabelle’s school performances were the silences. There were both planned and unplanned silences between each movement and each piece. This made the music sound even more alive, like the silence was where the melody stopped to catch its breath.
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nbsp; Isabelle’s friends aren’t playing well because Lois, who’s leading them, keeps looking down at the coffin, then at the crowd, and she is crying. Occasionally, she pulls the flute from her lips, swallows hard, then wipes the tears from her eyes. Then a breath’s worth of stillness, a grand pause, or a fermata, that I wish would last forever, but is instead followed by even more sobbing from Lois and a few of the others.
The service pretty much ends after their performance. Dad asks Uncle Patrick to wheel him back to the holding room.
After Dad and Uncle Patrick leave, everyone files out row by row to come greet us. With each person who comes by, I try to figure out the connection to Isabelle.
Everyone on our block is there, including Mrs. Clifton. Isabelle liked to call Mrs. Clifton the “craft queen.” Mrs. Clifton retired from her job as a flight attendant a few years back and stayed home all day watching soap operas and making crafts. She was also the block’s most trusted babysitter.
Mrs. Clifton reaches up and strokes my cheeks, then rearranges a few braids dangling over my ear. This is the first time I think about how horrible my hair must look. I can’t remember brushing it, but when I touch the top of my head, my hair seems nicely parted and feels neat. I probably have Grandma Régine to thank for that.
Mrs. Clifton doesn’t say anything to me, and I appreciate that. I don’t feel like talking. Our mailman, Hilton, stops by. So does Moy, Dad’s commissioner friend. Our housekeeper, Josiane, says hi, too. She’s with her husband.
Our pediatrician, Dr. Rosemay, also stops by. With no offense to Aunt Leslie, Dr. Rosemay is probably the most elegant doctor in the entire world. Even though she has patients ranging from newborns to teenagers, she wears low-cut dresses and long red nails and speaks with a combo French/Creole accent that you could listen to all day long.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” almost everyone—including Dr. Rosemay—says. It’s as if they’ve all been given a script. “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she says.
Dr. Rosemay looks as though she’s fighting the urge to examine me, right then and there. When she holds my wrists, I swear she’s secretly taking my pulse.
I know she wants to see my eyes, so I raise the glasses so she can.
“Dr. Rosemay came to see you a couple of times in the hospital,” Mom says, interrupting our staring contest. “She’s been in touch with Dr. Aidoo and she’ll be taking over most of your care.”
“I don’t remember,” I tell Dr. Rosemay.
“I’m not surprised,” she says.
When Isabelle’s friend Lois comes by, like Dr. Rosemay, she stands with me longer than she does any other member of my family. Everyone else has managed to act as if they couldn’t see it, but Lois can’t help herself.
“You look just like her.” She stops the greeting line completely by blurting out the obvious.
A few people gasp, but she is telling the truth. An uncomfortable truth, but the truth nonetheless. No one will ever forget Isabelle as long as I’m walking around with her body and her face. My sister is dead and I am her ghost.
More kids from school walk by. Some of them I don’t know. Then finally, I see Ron Johnson.
Ron Johnson is wearing a light blue seersucker suit with a striped tie. I recognize his retro tortoiseshell glasses, the ones whose lenses turn even darker than mine in the sun. He looks almost bug-eyed standing there, as if waiting for me to say something to him. I’d seen the same slouched posture in the pictures Isabelle had taken of him.
“Hello,” I say.
“Hello,” he answers.
The first time I heard Ron Johnson’s name, two whales had beached themselves not far from our school, and while jogging one morning, Isabelle’s PE class came across them.
Of all the people on the beach that morning, including the PE teacher, Ron Johnson was the only one who knew what to do. From their color (black and coal grey) and size (between 2,200 and 6,600 pounds), he could tell that they were short-finned pilot whales that had lost their way and wandered into the shallow water, then onto the beach. Ron Johnson told the teacher to call the wildlife center, then ordered everyone, including passersby, to keep away. Even after the rest of the PE class returned to school, Ron and Isabelle stayed behind and watched the wildlife people haul the whales back out to sea.
That night, after the whales returned to sea, Isabelle came home with a glow. The fact that she’d been in the sun all day was part of it, but she also had the excitement of a new love interest.
Ron Johnson was not the type of guy she would have typically liked, but she was drawn to people with special talents. Ron Johnson and the whales were a powerful enough combo to make her miss a mock SAT test that everyone in our year was supposed to take that afternoon.
“You know, Giz,” she told me when she got home that night. “Ron says those kinds of whales stick together no matter what. If one of them had died, they both might have died.”
I was only half listening.
“I’ll take the next SAT practice test,” she said, trying to calm my unspoken concern. “People take these tests all the time, but how many times does anyone get to see what Ron and I have seen?”
“So it’s Ron and I?”
“Would you prefer me and Ron?” she asked and laughed.
Some TV reporters had spent the day on the beach with them, she said. Because she and Ron were skipping classes, they’d avoided the cameras. Now I wished I had hours of video of the two of them, full proof of what I’d suspected, that before she died, my sister had fallen in love.
That night, she showed me dozens of pictures of the whales on her phone. Ron Johnson was in the foreground of some of the pictures. The whales had moved him so much that in almost every other picture, he had his glasses off and was wiping his eyes.
Now, in the chapel, Ron Johnson takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes with his jacket sleeve.
“Can I give you a hug?” he asks.
A few people have hugged me already. Most people are aware that squeezing my body at this moment in time is not a good idea, but some tried without even asking. I wanted to push most of them away. I even thought of joining Dad in the back room, but I don’t want to miss any of my final minutes with Isabelle. I don’t want to leave her sooner than I have to. I also don’t mind if Ron Johnson hugs me.
I open my arms and Ron Johnson leans in. His body feels sandy and damp. His hair smells like seaweed and his face is shiny with shea butter sunscreen. He smells like the beach at dawn. He smells like Isabelle.
Ron Johnson does not squeeze me. He doesn’t even hold me. I hold him, gently, carefully, like he is my sister in her most vulnerable, most wounded, nearly dead state.
“You don’t smell like her,” he whispers.
“You do,” I say.
He is shivering a little when he pulls away. Then he grabs both my hands.
I remember the pictures Isabelle showed me that night, and I say, “Pilot whales.”
Even behind my glasses and his, I can see a spark of recognition in his eyes. He smiles cautiously, like someone who’s just been initiated into a dark and secret club. Then he lets go of my hands and walks away.
I watch him walk away, framed by the stained-glass windows on the chapel walls. I remember how much Isabelle and I both loved those sixteenth-century Mexican cathedrals. I remember how much we loved every cathedral we’d ever been in.
Grandpa Marcus is the head architect in a team that’s building a new cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Last summer he took us to visit the site on a hilltop that could be seen from so many places in the city that the cathedral’s main steeple will be used as a lighthouse.
Isabelle and I were Grandpa Marcus’s last hope of having another architect in the family. We, like Grandpa Marcus, had become so intrigued by cathedrals that during our visits, Grandpa Marcus would take us to see most of the signature cathedrals in Haiti.
“Yes, Guanajuato has some magnificent cathedrals,” Grandpa Marcus would tell us, �
��but I don’t think the Guanajuato saints hear as many urgent prayers as ours do.”
Grandpa Marcus would lecture us for hours while driving from one Haitian town to the next, over belly-churning roads, up and down steep, ragged hills. He was always his own driver and Grandma Régine his navigator.
“A garden can easily become its own kind of cathedral,” he’d say. “Any healing place can be. Any place where people can come out of the sun, and wind, and rain, and just sit down and cry.”
“Grandpère, you’re going to put yourself out of a job talking like that,” Isabelle would tell him.
“There’s no way we can outdo all that nature has already designed so well,” Grandpa Marcus would say.
Dad waits until nearly everyone is gone to come back into the chapel. Mr. Daniels wheels him in. Jean Michel, Tina and Pastor Ben, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall come and sit in the pew behind us. Jean Michel’s parents join them. Jean Michel looks like a perfect combination of his parents. He has his Chinese Jamaican mother’s button nose and his French Canadian father’s large saucer eyes.
Tina reaches over and squeezes my shoulder. I’ve missed her so much that I almost don’t know what to do.
“It’s time for us to take her away,” Mr. Daniels finally tells Mom and Dad.
We could have all sat there for a million years. Instead we watch as the funeral home staff wheel the coffin out towards the crematorium.
Isabelle is going to be cremated and later we’ll decide where to scatter her ashes.
I hear Mom scream. Then Aunt Leslie. I close my eyes so I don’t see the coffin go through the chapel door one final time. I have been saying goodbye to Isabelle ever since our hands were pried apart in Dad’s car.
I always imagined that if our fortunes were read, I would be half of Isabelle’s future. One of our unspoken dreams was to go on a road trip, just the two of us. One day we might have fully become women. We might have had careers, offices, apartments. Even if we lived in different cities, we might have ended up talking to each other on the phone a bunch of times a day. We might have traveled around the world together. We might have kept dreaming each other’s dreams. We might have loved each other even more carefully, more gently.
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