*
The funeral director sat behind his desk, its surface color lost in the gleam of reflected light. Beside a small bouquet of white chrysanthemums, a box of tissues nested under a shiny dark cover, the tissue hoisted like a white sail.
“You have several choices,” he said. “You can bury the ashes, of course. Do you have a plot in any of our cemeteries?”
“No,” Trace said.
“We could help arrange that. Or you could scatter them—or have them scattered. I could help you secure a permit.” He looked up, deferential, waiting.
Laura leaned forward. “We don’t want to scatter them. At least not now. If she’d been an old person… But sixteen?” How could she tell him why they needed Annie’s ashes in one place, even a marker with her name? There was so little to declare she had been here, to insist on her having lived. “But we don’t want to bury them here, either. We’ve lived in Tennessee only two years. We’ve no feeling for this ground as home yet.”
Trace shifted uneasily in his chair, but she continued. “You see, we never expected…” Her eyes filled with tears.
“I understand.” The director’s hand moved forward, sliding the box of tissues toward her a fraction of an inch. She took one and held it to her face.
“We’ve talked about it,” Trace began, “my wife and I, and our sons. I guess we’ve not yet made a decision. Perhaps we can defer it for a while?”
“Yes, some people do that, too.”
Laura appealed to the director again—surely he must be sad, too. Maybe he would share the burden with them? “Could we leave them here, with you?”
“For a day or two only, Mrs. Randall. Our insurance…”
She looked at him, incredulous. “Theft? Does anyone steal ashes?”
“It has happened.”
“It stands to reason they can’t keep them here indefinitely,” Trace said.
Reason? Laura thought. What had reason to do with any of this? Still… “I suppose people would never decide,” she said. In her mind she saw rows of square boxes, like shoe boxes lining the walls of the shoe store in Hadley where every fall her mother took her to buy shoes for school. Row on row. And carpeted aisles, and a brass staircase, and cylinders in vacuum tubes clanging along the ceiling.
“You could leave them here until after the memorial service,” the director was saying, his voice gentle. “Or you could take them with you now.”
Now? Take their daughter’s ashes with them in the car, when it should have been Annie herself sitting beside them? Or leave them here, subject to the vandalous acts of strangers? Already Annie’s ashes had passed through the hands of strangers, handled casually, maybe tossed from truck to truck or into the cargo bin of some airplane—journeys of which they had no knowledge at all. What to do? In a panic, she looked toward Trace. “What do you think? I don’t know what to say.”
He leaned forward, rested a hand lightly on her knee. He turned to the director. “We’ll take them with us,” he said.
The director nodded. “Just a moment, then.” He slid back his chair and went into a back room, and Laura put her hand over Trace’s, grateful.
In a moment, the director came out, carrying a box, six inches square, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a cord.
Laura held out her hands. “I’ll take it.”
He gave her the box. In the upper corner of the mailing label was the name of the crematorium in Colorado.
“The papers are inside the outer wrapping,” he said.
Laura and Trace stood, moved closer together. “Thank you. You have been very kind,” Laura said.
He took their hands. “I have children myself.”
They walked to the car. “You want me to carry it?” Trace asked.
“No.”
He opened the door for her and she got in.
He started the car. Laura clutched the box against her breast, remembering the time when Annie was less than two weeks old and, at her mother’s insistence, she’d taken her to the doctor. “I don’t like the looks of that cord,” Rachel said, eyeing the tiny stump, the circle of dried blood.
Annie was sicker than either of them guessed. “It’s a general infection,” the doctor said sternly, as though she had done something wrong. He gave Annie a shot of penicillin. “She’ll be fine.” He shook his graying head. “We lost these babies before we had antibiotics.”
Walking to the car—shaken, grateful—Laura held the tiny baby so close against her chest that a woman passing by had stopped suddenly, startled, and said, “Oh, look. She’s holding a baby!”
The car slowed. They were approaching home. They had ridden in silence, but now Laura said, “I’ll put the box on the shelf in her room—is that all right?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want the ashes at the service, do you?”
“No.”
There was silence again for a few minutes and then she said, “I wonder what we’ll do with them, eventually.”
At first, he didn’t answer, and she wondered if he had heard her. Then he said, “When the time comes, I think we’ll know.”
The service was to be at 7:30. After the embattled discussion in the car, they had agreed on a few songs, a reading from Scripture. Matt would give a brief meditation. A youth adviser Annie had been fond of would play his dulcimer. Some silence. Prayers. At Matt’s urging, Holy Communion. “I think you’ll find it helpful,” he’d said.
In the afternoon, Laura and Trace set out for church, taking with them mementoes of Annie—a poster, a photograph, a favorite sand candle, the yarn hanging they’d bought for her birthday. In the car, Laura said, “I want to stop at a florist shop and get a flower for her.”
Trace slowed the car. “What?”
“A flower. Just one.” They had discouraged the sending of flowers, though a few bouquets had come—from the neighbors, from Trace’s colleagues, from her Aunt Ella and Uncle Jackson in Massachusetts. “In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to Woodbridge Community Church.”
Annie hadn’t been to church much since Philip had gone to college. Before that, they’d gone together, and to Sunday-evening youth meetings, parties at somebody’s house, weekend retreats. Annie would come home from the retreats radiant and preoccupied. For weeks thereafter, letters would come—plain envelopes with adolescent masculine scrawl or frail pastel tissue with outlined flowers and smiling faces. But not lately. “Church isn’t for me right now,” she’d said. Still, she wouldn’t mind, would she—contributions to the church?
Trace frowned. “I thought we agreed on the memorial fund. We have several bouquets there.”
“I want to have something from us. A single flower.”
“Won’t that look odd—a single flower? If we’re going to do it…”
“Who cares? If that’s what we want.”
He shrugged. “What you want. It’s nothing I would have done.” Still, he turned in at the mall and stopped near a florist shop. “You want me to come with you?”
“Of course.” She was fighting back tears, as much from the emotional cost of this conversation—that they did not see eye-to-eye when they needed each other so terribly—as, at the moment, from her grief for her daughter.
In the shop, the fragrance of flowers overwhelmed them. A young woman approached. “What can I do for you today?”
“We’d like a rose,” Laura said. “An apricot tea rose. Just one.” It was Annie’s favorite rose, one of her favorite colors. Suddenly, she had an image of Annie modeling the prom dress, her slender body turning in a flow of pale apricot chiffon.
The woman reached into the case. “How’s this?” She brought out a tea rose in a clear glass vase. Laura took it. “That’s nice.” She turned the vase slowly—the blossom perfect, golden, tiny veins of crimson running through the petals.
She looked at Trace—his face expressionless, no more involved, it seemed to her, than if he’d been waiting at the grocery store. “What do you think?”
“If that’s what you want.” He pulled out his wallet. “How much is it?”
“Just the one?” the clerk asked. “I have more in the back room.”
“Yes.”
They left the shop and resumed their journey, Laura gripping the flower and vase, wrapped now in green tissue, against her chest, and drove the rest of the way in a tense silence.
As they started to arrange their artifacts on the table at the front of the empty sanctuary—its rows of chairs, its buff walls, its easy access to the street—a small girl in rolled-up faded red pants and a striped T-shirt came in. She stood against the glas s- walled window—a small dark outline of head, stubby braids, and shoulders against the panorama of houses, telephone poles, the adjoining street. “What you doing?”
“There’s going to be a service here, for a girl who died,” Laura said. “We’re fixing the room.”
The child’s eyes widened. She looked at the photograph on the table. “That her picture?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know her, that girl?”
“Yes.”
The child sat down, put her hands in her lap.
A second child peered in at the door. “Evie?”
“I’m here.”
The second child joined her friend. They whispered to each other. They appeared to be waiting.
After a few minutes, Laura said, “The service isn’t going to be until tonight.”
The child named Evie asked, “You gettin’ ready?”
“Yes. We’re fixing the room.”
Evie looked toward the long table. “Ain’t there going to be a body?”
Laura glanced at Trace. He held the candle in his hands, action suspended for the moment, a look of sudden panic in his eyes. “No,” she said, and moved toward her husband.
The girls looked at each other. They shrugged their shoulders.
“Okay,” Evie said. They stood up and walked to the door, closing it quietly behind them.
Laura put her hand on Trace’s arm. “It’s all right,” she said softly. They went on with their work.
* * *
Bart and Paula were in the kitchen, getting supper, when they got home. Approaching the kitchen, Laura went by the door of Annie’s room. Panic seemed to come up from the ground. For a moment, she leaned against the doorway, light-headed, her heart beating erratically, thinking, Maybe I, too, will die. Maybe this will take me away. She went on into the kitchen. Paula looked up. “Oh, Mrs. Randall.” She came and put her arms around Laura.
They ate dinner, their conversation confined to passing food around, to mentioning the generosity of neighbors and friends. Dinner over, they dispersed to change, to clean up the kitchen.
*
Laura and Bart and Ron were still in the kitchen when Trace strode into the room in his dark slacks, tie, and summer jacket.
“Everybody ready? We should be going.”
Laura was hanging up a towel. Her hands stopped in midair. “Why? It’s only quarter to seven. It just takes fifteen minutes to get there.”
“The service is at seven-thirty,” he insisted.
“Don’t you think I know that!” Her voice rose. “Why do we have to be so early?”
“People may want to talk with us. I want to get there.” He began to pace, his step agitated.
Ron and Bart had turned away, were busy with kitchen tasks.
“I can’t go yet!” Laura said. “They can talk to me later!”
Ron Randall cleared his throat. “There are seven of us. We’ll have to go in two cars anyway.”
“Paula and I could go with Dad,” Bart said.
“Go ahead,” she snapped. “I’m not leaving till later.”
“Suit yourself,” Trace said, his jaw tight. He stalked from the room.
*
By the time the second car got to the church—Philip driving, Laura beside him, Doris and Ron in the backseat—people were filling the doorway, moving into the rows of seats. They stepped back to let the family pass, their faces a montage of sympathy and grief. Laura felt hands reach out to touch her, heard voices speak her name. She saw Bart and Paula at one end of a long front row. Just behind them were Howard and Irene and Trace’s brother Theo. Trace was at the back of the church, talking to Matt. With a nod to Laura, Ron moved forward down the aisle, Doris following, then Philip, then Laura. They moved in beside Bart and Paula and sat down. “One more?” Philip whispered, and slid onto the next chair. “A place for Dad.”
“Of course.” Laura moved over, turned to look. He was still engrossed in talk with Matt. Her throat tightened. Was he never going to join them? She turned resolutely forward. A stir beside her and Trace sat down. Their shoulders touched. In a moment, he reached for her hand. His fingers lay stiff on top of hers, but she did not move, and he withdrew his hand and folded his hands together in the wide dark hollow of his lap.
The pianist began to play.
Laura looked down at her lap, the skirt of her best summer dress. She had made the dress two years ago, covered the buttons, made the looped closings at the jacket neck. She had bought the cloth when she and Annie were shopping. “It’s kind of dull, Mom,” Annie had said. Blue print, blue on blue. Her colors, not Annie’s. A wave of regret surged close. Should she have worn something else—maybe the yellow dress Annie liked? With the wide coral belt? Would Annie mind that she had chosen this?
She looked up at Annie’s picture—the eyes slightly averted, a smile playing around her lips. Darling! she murmured and tightened her hold on her white linen handkerchief.
Matt walked up the aisle. Passing the end of the row, he stopped to put a hand on Laura’s shoulder, moved on.
The congregation stood to sing. “When the darkness appears and the night draws near,” they sang. Laura had thought of this hymn when her father was so ill, and now they were singing it for Annie. “Hear my cry, hear my call / Hold my hand lest I fall…” Her thoughts flew back to Annie in the emergency room. Was there someone there for you, to hold your hand? What is it like, the crossing over?
They sat down. Matt began to talk. Laura scarcely listened.
She remembered Annie walking toward her through the trees one of those mornings in Colorado. She had been startled—Annie had borrowed her terry-cloth swim robe without asking, and Laura had noticed the robe before she recognized its wearer, thinking, A robe just like mine! But it was Annie!
She heard Matt say, “What are we to make of the death of Anne Randall? Is there some answer to the question it puts to us?” He picked up the Bible and read, “‘The Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.’” She thought, That’s all very well, but tell me something that makes sense to me, and she listened, watching him, and time moved without passage, a frame at a time, without attachment or continuity, only this instant of her hand on her best summer dress, only Philip’s brown loafer against the rung of the chair next to hers and Trace’s shoulder touching her own—they leaned ever so slightly together—only Annie’s candle burning on the table by her picture and above it the yarn sculpture called the Eye of God.
The friend they had asked to sing pulled his chair forward, laid a dulcimer across his knees. “I live one day at a time / I dream one...dream...at a time,” he sang, his voice light and clear. “You ask how long I plan to stay / It never crossed my mind….” He finished the song and his voice lifted into the first notes of “Amazing Grace,” and the people began to hum and then to sing. “…And grace my fears relieved,” they sang.
Matt was holding the loaf of bread. “It is my body, given for you.” They passed the loaf from hand to hand, passed the chalice. “For you.” Trace handed her the bread. “For you, Laura.” He handed her the chalice. “Yes,” she said, and dipped the bread, put it in her mouth—its taste a sweet intruder on her tongue. “Yes,” she said again, and felt her heart lift. For this moment anyway, in this room, they were gathered close. They were held in love. They were safe.
“Will you stand?” Matt was saying.
They joined hands around the room. “Shalom,” they sang. “I’ll see you again. Shalom, shalom.” It was over.
Laura and Trace turned to each other. They embraced. They looked at one another in astonishment, for how could it be, even yet, that they should go to a service to mark the death of their child? People came forward to greet them—hugs, words of sympathy, tears—then moved on, as in a rhythm of slow dancers, past the picture of the girl, past the candle and the chalice and the single apricot rose veined with red, narrowing into green stem, resting in a blown-glass vase, the water not halfway up the glass.
They went home. Already a small crowd of family and friends waited. They went in and ate food and drank tea and punch. They spoke of the service, of how fortunate that the weather was pleasant. They stood close to one another, loathe to have this gathering over. If they could be together, they could live. For this hour at least, they had evaded despair. “Another cookie?” “Another glass of punch?” “Yes, please. I’d love some.”
The phone rang. Trace answered it, whispered to Laura, “It’s your mother and Lillian.”
She lifted the phone. “Hi.”
Lillian said, “How are you, dear? Mother’s on the other phone.”
“Darling,” Rachel said. “We’ve thought of you all day long. And of Annie. Such a wonderful child. Such a wonderful daughter. How did the service go?”
Laura steadied herself. “It went well, Mother. We’re doing okay, considering everything. How are you?”
“About the same,” Rachel said. “I wish I were there with you. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“We don’t have a choice,” she said, and swallowed hard.
There was silence. “No, I suppose not,” Rachel said. Another several seconds of silence. “Well,” she said, “we’ll talk again soon.”
“Yes. Thanks for calling. Give our love to everyone there.” “Love you, dear. Good-bye.”
“Bye, Laura,” Lillian slipped in. They hung up.
Slowly, Laura replaced the phone on its hook, then buried her face in her hands. Oh, if I could bring it to you and put my head in your lap and you could make it all right.
Returning to the living room, she heard Paula saying to a neighbor, “I’m Paula, Bart’s friend. We’re going to be finding an apartment in Woodbridge.”
Such Good People Page 13