The Beginning of After

by Jennifer Castle

All I could think was, Mrs. Dill smells a little like cranberry bread.

  Suzie Sirico showed up shortly after midnight. I hadn’t asked for her. I didn’t even know who she was. Lieutenant Davis said she was a grief counselor who sometimes worked with the police department. I tilted my head in Meg’s lap and looked at the woman sideways. She was short, with large features.

  “Hi, Laurel,” she said slowly. “I’m Suzie.”

  Mrs. Dill got up from the floor. “Can I get you some coffee?” she offered.

  “That would be wonderful, thanks.”

  They passed each other right then, switching positions like some careful team maneuver. Suzie squatted on the floor so we were at eye level.

  “I know we’ve never met,” said Suzie, pressing her lips together with seriousness, “but I’m hoping you’ll let me help you with whatever you need right now.”

  “There is something you can help me with right now,” I told her. “The cats are probably at the back door. Can you let them in?”

  Suzie Sirico cocked her head to one side and raised an eyebrow. Probably making a note on a mental pad. I didn’t care.

  “I’ll do it,” said Meg, and a second later she was gone into the kitchen.

  If this woman touches me, I thought, I will barf right here on the white couch.

  “Laurel, you’re clearly in shock, and that’s normal,” said Suzie, reaching for my hand but trying to balance in that squat position at the same time. “We don’t need to talk. I’m really just here to meet you and let you know that I’ll be available to you, for any reason, over the next days and weeks as you deal with what has happened to your family.”

  My family.

  The word hit me in the chest, a real punch that knocked the wind out of my lungs. I looked at Suzie Sirico the way, in a movie, someone looks at the person who just stabbed them, that moment of surprise before the pain kicks in and the blood starts gushing.

  I heard the back door open, then close. Elliot and Selina came running into the room, their tails pointing straight up into the air, ready to get warm and dry and curled up for the night.

  I made a noise like a whimper, but loud. It felt like it came not from me but something half-human, crouched at the base of my spine.

  I was in bed when Nana got there, sometime before dawn. Mrs. Dill had given me two of the pills she always had on hand for her panic attacks. The medication was having fun with me, making me believe one thing was real, then another. In my mind, I was talking to someone at the Athens Theater ticket counter, begging them to let me in even though the movie had already started. “But everyone I know is in there!” I was yelling.

  I felt my grandmother put her hand on my head, smoothing my eyebrow with her thumb. “I’m here, Laurel,” she was saying.

  Now the popcorn machine behind the ticket counter smelled like Chanel No. 5.

  The hallway outside my bedroom door was buzzing slightly with echoed voices from the living room. Somebody blew their nose.

  Back inside my head, I wasn’t trying to get into the movie anymore. I’d given up and moved on, wandering down the street toward a supermarket, suddenly starving.

  Chapter Three

  Pretty much everyone came to the funeral, which was held on a day so beautiful, normally everyone would be walking around saying cliché stuff like, “Spring has sprung!” The air smelled fresh and sweet, and the slight breeze was the kind that tickles a little.

  Our whole neighborhood showed up. Relatives I hadn’t seen in years, and my parents’ friends from college, and people from my dad’s office. Toby’s friends and his whole soccer team came with their parents, and all his teachers. Two of them had been my teachers too, just a few years back. Some kids from school who I was friendly with and their families, plus dozens of people I either didn’t know or couldn’t remember the names of. It was standing room only in the funeral home.

  Nana and I sat up front, where almost nobody could see us, and she held my hand tight while people spoke. I knew I was supposed to listen and nod and cry like everyone else, but I was busy composing a letter in my head:

  Dear Mom and Dad and Toby,

  There are a lot of people here. That’s good, right? Doesn’t everyone always wonder who would show up to their funeral? So now you know. If you’re watching. I’d like to think you’re watching, but just in case you’re not, here are the highlights:

  Dad’s college friends Tom and Lena reading a poem they wrote together.

  Toby’s music teacher, Ms. McAndrew, singing “Amazing Grace.” Did somebody not tell her this was a Jewish funeral? But it did sound pretty.

  Mom, your friend Tanya reading an Emily Dickinson poem. Was that really your favorite one like she said?

  It was cool of the rabbi to do the service, since we never bothered to join the synagogue—I guess when there’s only one rabbi in town, that’s how it goes. He talked about community kindness and mitzvahs. I wish I could be more specific, because apparently what he said made a lot of people cry, but when he was speaking I was watching two squirrels in a tree outside the window.

  Nana cried out loud twice. I had to give her some Kleenex because she used up her handkerchief. I didn’t have anything black, so I borrowed one of your dresses, Mom. It was a little big in the bust, but otherwise I think it looked nice.

  Love,

  Laurel

  At the burial, Nana sprinkled dirt into the graves with her hands shaking, walking gingerly around them like a garden she’d just planted. The rabbi offered me the shovel, but I shook my head no.

  That was when I saw David.

  He was hanging back, hovering near some stranger’s headstone, wearing a black blazer over a black T-shirt and black jeans. People kept turning around to look at him and whisper. Almost gawking, like some rock star had made an appearance at my family’s funeral. But he didn’t look back at them. He just watched the three caskets intently and ignored anyone who was alive.

  Earlier, I’d heard someone say that they were leaving the tent up and just moving it down the hill a bit, because Mrs. Kaufman’s funeral was the next day.

  When it was time for us to stand up and leave, I glanced back to where I’d seen David, but he was gone.

  Mr. Kaufman was in a coma. He was in ICU, and the hospital was making a very special exception by letting David stay there in an empty room.

  That’s what I heard at the reception back at the house. I was planted in a chair in the den, a great spot for hearing snippets of conversation as they floated by me. Megan sat next to me, eating a sesame bagel, not talking but occasionally rubbing my back.

  Some people came to me. They’d lean in to talk closer to my ear or squat down so they were looking up at my face. At times I felt like a queen on her throne, and at others like a four-year-old kid. I knew they were just trying to be nice, the neighbors and friends and classmates and all the rest. They were just doing what they thought they were supposed to, which was exactly what I was doing too.

  I was in the bathroom when I heard Mrs. Dill and the Dills’ next-door neighbor, Mrs. Franco, talking in low tones on the other side of the door.

  “Do they know anything more about what happened?” asked Mrs. Franco.

  “I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Dill. “They might be putting out a call for witnesses, to see if other drivers may have seen something.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  A pause. I sat still on the toilet, leaning in.

  “Probably Gabe,” whispered Mrs. Dill. “I bet he had a little too much to drink at dinner. Don’t you remember the Christmas party last year?”

  “I remember,” said Mrs. Franco sadly. “Betsy had to force him to let her drive them home.”

  I thought of Mr. Kaufman on his cell phone that night, with his drink in his hands. And then I thought of wrapping my fingers around his throat and squeezing hard, which was not something I wanted to be thinking in the bathroom at my family’s funeral with a house full of people on the other side of the doo
r. I wiped the image away, out of my head with a mental eraser.

  I waited three minutes and then peeked my head out of the bathroom. Mrs. Franco and Mrs. Dill were gone, and the coast was clear.

  My grandmother, June Meisner, had class. Everyone said so. She wore crisp linen skirt-suits and well-made pumps and never left the house without makeup. She got her hair done twice a week at Marcella’s Salon and kept it dyed dark brown. Nana volunteered at a local nursing home filled with what she called her “old ladies,” even though many of them were younger than she was.

  I guess it was because she had so much class that she made me get back into my mother’s black dress and go to Mrs. Kaufman’s funeral the next day.

  Nana looked so small in the big, boxy driver’s seat of our Volvo station wagon, her hands correctly positioned at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, her nails perfectly manicured. As we drove to the cemetery she turned to look at me, her eyes still red from the crying she did at night when she thought I couldn’t hear her.

  “I thank God every hour that you weren’t in that car.”

  I pressed my nose to the window, not able to look back. “Nana, don’t.”

  “You know me. I like to count the blessings I have.”

  “If you need to thank something, thank all the French homework Mrs. Messing gave us.” I looked at my grandmother now, to let her know I wasn’t just being a smart-ass.

  “What if you’d gone with them and I’d lost all of you?”

  “I’m not having this conversation.”

  She and my mom were experts at this tactic: Bring up serious stuff when driving in the car, so the child you are mortifying with your particular conversation has nowhere to go, no bedroom to retreat into; they were stuck.

  I didn’t want to tell her the truth, something that sat red-hot in the pit of my stomach and weighed me down, heavier each day. If I’d gone with them, if I had maybe finished my homework earlier or just blown it off to do in the morning, it would have been one more person to try to squeeze into the Kaufmans’ SUV. Maybe my dad would have insisted on taking separate cars. Maybe I’d be driving with my parents and Toby right now, to bury Mrs. Kaufman. One funeral, one person, the way everyone’s used to doing it.

  I couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t think about it. If I did, I felt that fireball again, dragging me that much farther into the ground. It seemed like the only way to keep breathing was to focus on the here and now, moment by moment, keeping my mind frozen cold to anything else.

  Mrs. Kaufman didn’t have quite the same turnout my family had, and those who went both days were looking a little more haggard at having to do the whole thing over again. I found myself glad that they’d done my family first, while people were still fresh to their grief. Even the rabbi seemed weary. It made me happy, for a second, and not ashamed about it. Our funeral was better.

  David wore the emo-goth outfit I’d seen the day before, and this time I noticed his black army boots. He was surrounded by relatives. His grandparents were staying at the house, I heard from one whisper. They were encouraging him to come back from the hospital and sleep in his own bed, but David wouldn’t do it.

  I watched him as the rabbi gave the cue, and David stood up to throw the first bit of dirt on his mother’s grave. As he did this, someone in the crowd burst out with a sharp sob. David looked up for a moment, the shovel in his hands, to see where it had come from. It was the first time that day I’d seen his face full-on, unshrouded by his shaggy hair now combed back, his bright eyes moving. He kept scanning the guests as the rabbi started talking again and an uncle put an arm around his shoulders.

  Those eyes landed on me, flickering with some kind of new energy and purpose. David raised his head a little more now, really registering me with an acknowledgment. I looked back, held his gaze for a few moments, but that was all.

  It felt like enough.

  Chapter Four

  Nana was letting me sleep in the mornings, but not too late. She’d wake me by sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Laurel, sweetie, it’s already ten o’clock,” she said on the Monday after the accident. It had not yet been a week.

  Nana and I didn’t talk about how long she’d be staying; we both knew it was for good. I’d listened to her on the phone with lawyers and bank people, dealing with the wills and becoming my legal guardian and other things that had to matter now. She did it without complaining. After all, she was the only one left who could. Her husband, my grandfather, had had a heart attack when I was still a baby, and my mother’s parents died before I was five. Both my mom and dad were only children, so there were no aunts, uncles, or first cousins. But Nana had always been there for as long as I could remember, and now, of course, she was here in our guest room.

  If it was ten, that meant third period at school, which meant Meg was in journalism class. I would have been in history. They were giving me an indefinite amount of time off, and nobody had even said anything about bringing me homework assignments.

  That was the expected thing, the thing the school automatically had to do. I knew that. But the thought of my classmates having a normal day without me just made me feel deeply, despairingly lonely.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked Nana, who was now flicking cat hair off my comforter. I needed her to tell me what came next, because staying in bed wasn’t cutting it. All I could do in bed, when I wasn’t struggling to get back to sleep after some screwed-up dream, was watch Toby’s movie collection on his portable DVD player. He liked action and martial arts movies from all eras, and most of them were awful, but they were great at helping me not to cry.

  I was sure that once I started to cry, I would never stop. I mean, how could I ever stop?

  “I’d like you to come in and eat some breakfast. I don’t think you’ve had a decent meal all week.”

  It was true. Seder had been the last time I’d eaten a solid, balanced amount of food at a normal time. I always thought it was totally soap-opera for people to lose their appetite after something huge, but now I understood why. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t even imagine wanting to eat. It was that the emptiness combined with the little nag of hunger seemed like a duty.

  “What about you?” I asked Nana. “Will you eat with me?”

  “My stomach’s still a little upset, but I’ll have some matzoh and ginger ale.”

  In the kitchen, I sat down at the table, and she served me up a plate of pancakes, turkey bacon, and eggs.

  “What about Passover?” I asked, eyeing the pancakes.

  “I think we get excused this year,” she said wryly.

  I picked up one of the pancakes, slightly warm in my hands, and started to eat it like a big, limp cookie. It was something Toby and I loved to do, and it drove Nana crazy. But this time she just smiled and pushed the newspaper toward me. “Here,” she said. “I know how you like to keep up with the headlines.”

  It was the New York Times, not our local paper, the Herald Gazette. Because every day the Herald Gazette was publishing a new article about the accident and how the police were looking for someone, anyone, who might have seen what happened. Nana had stopped the Gazette delivery service two days earlier.

  Now she sat down across from me with her ginger ale and matzoh, but didn’t eat. “Laurel,” she said. “Suzie Sirico called this morning. She’s the grief counselor you met the other night, remember? She wanted to know how we were.”

  I looked up from the paper. “How did she get our number?”

  “I gave it to her.”

  “You told her I was fine, right? That we were both fine?”

  Nana broke off a piece of matzoh and nibbled. “She thinks the two of you should talk.”

  “You met her. She’s creepy.”

  “She’s a professional who can help you.”

  “Do I look like I need help?”

  Nana actually did look at me, up and down my face, across and back. She knew better than to answer.

  �
��Next time she calls,” I said, “please just tell her not to.”

  Nana stood up, put what was left of her matzoh back in the box, and quietly left the room.

  I turned back to the paper and started reading an article about trouble in Latin America, and there it was in the first paragraph: demagogue. It was one of my SAT words. It meant “rabble-rousing leader,” and my study trick image popped into my head. On the steps of our school, a straggly bearded guy wearing a T-shirt that said DEM on it was speaking to a crowd of students, working them into a frenzy.

  It had been more than a month since I was in the Ds, but there was demagogue, crystal clear. The tests were in five days. I walked to my room and found my SAT vocabulary book on the desk where I’d left it, bookmarked, untouched since the night of the seder. I picked it up carefully; I’d had only two more pages to go on the list of a thousand words my dad had challenged me to memorize. He wanted me to go to an Ivy League school, preferably Yale, like he did. I wanted it too, because I’d visited Yale during one of his reunions and thought it was cool, but I didn’t tell him that. I needed him to think he was convincing me.

  “I’ll pay you a dollar for every point you score over seven hundred on Critical Reading,” he’d said. “It’s not a bribe; it’s motivation. Just a little something, because I know you can do it.”

  I put the book back down and went to find the phone.

  “Are you absolutely sure you want to do that?”

  Mr. Churchwell, my school guidance counselor, sounded happy to hear from me.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m ready. I don’t want you to take me off the list.”

  “I have no doubt that you’re ready, Laurel. But your frame of mind . . . well, we just want you to be able to perform at your ability. There’s another test date in June.”

  “I need to take it at the same time my friends are.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking. I need to take it because if it weren’t for all that time studying for this test, my parents and Toby might be alive right now. I would have gone with them that night and we would have taken our own car.