In the trailer, Mom had been fully clothed, and Mr. Oakes had been fully naked, and she’d been pretending to milk him. They were laughing and laughing so loud that I heard them from inside and then I could see into the trailer perfectly from my bedroom window. They must have thought no one was home. It was an early release day from school, Mom had probably forgotten.
How could I ever tell Dad or Lizzie about that, how could I put what I’d seen into words? The dictionary said adulteress, infidelity, extramarital. Can you divorce a dead person? Dad still wore his gold wedding band. I didn’t know if telling Dad would make things better or worse for him, and I didn’t want to make things worse.
When Dad wasn’t at work, he was sleeping a lot, sometimes crying in his room. He did try to make dinner a couple of times, but usually he let Lizzie do it. Lizzie was a pretty good cook, and I learned how to use the laundry machine.
“What would I do without you?” Dad said, as I handed him a clean stack of shirts. “My sweet Elvis.”
Dad wouldn’t have thought I was so sweet if he knew the secret I was keeping from him. I wanted to send Mr. Oakes a letter in the mail, to tell him I knew all about him and my mom. I cut up magazines, saving the clippings in an envelope for something like a ransom note. Usually it was just one word, something I’d found in the dictionary. Bovine was my favorite so far.
The same day that Dad came back from the crematorium with the plastic baggie of ashes, Lizzie was brought home in a police cruiser. She had gotten into a fight in the parking lot behind the Coffee Shack, and she had broken her best friend’s jaw in three places. The policeman said that Megan’s family had already declined to press charges, given the circumstances.
“She deserved it,” Lizzie said, after the policeman had gone.
“You broke her jaw,” Dad repeated. “Megan is your friend.”
“Are you wearing lipstick?” Lizzie asked. She reeked of beer.
“Are you drunk, Lizzie?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You were drunk,” Lizzie said. “And now she’s dead.”
Dad was wearing lipstick, Mom’s old favorite shade. “I know this isn’t easy,” he said. “But you’re making it harder. You’re making everything harder.” He started to cry, whimpering as he went up the stairs to bed. He was still clutching our mother’s remains in his hands.
Lizzie went to bed not long after, with ice on her knuckles. I stayed up to watch a marathon of Wildlife Encounters with Dr. Lillian Stone. It was my favorite show; Mom and I used to watch it together. Dr. Lillian went all over the world with her crew filming wildlife; her show was about raising awareness for the conservation of endangered animals and the need for habitat protection.
“I think she’s had some work done,” Mom almost always said at some point during the episode. “She’s turned into such an actress.”
Mom and Dr. Lillian had been best friends once, back in graduate school, but they’d lost touch since. They had worked together on a project that involved sewing human hands onto the backs of rats, trying to get the fingers to move again. The research was supposed to help people who’d lost their hands in industrial accidents, or scuba divers whose arms had been cropped by boat propellers. Dr. Lillian and Mom had gone through hundreds of hands for the research. Mom always said she was very thankful to those who donated their bodies to science, but she couldn’t do it herself; she said that scientists were too discourteous to the remains.
Another episode of Dr. Lillian had just started when Lizzie wandered by in her sleep, and I realized how late it was. I told her to go back to bed, which works with sleepwalkers sometimes. I knew I should go to bed too, but it was an episode I hadn’t seen. I felt really terrible that Mom would never see it, because it was a good one: Lillian was saving animals from an oil spill off the coast of Alaska. She scrubbed a young otter with dish soap. The otter squeaked as Dr. Lillian washed him. I wondered if the otter sensed how much danger he’d been in or if he knew he was being saved.
In the morning, Lizzie was asleep in the stairwell; she had never made it back to her bed. I nudged her with my foot until she woke up. “Elvis,” she said, groggy. “Bring me my bedpan.” It was her favorite line from the one game we’d ever played together, Servant and Master. I was always the servant. I brought her a bowl, and she threw up a little into it.
“You’re grounded,” Dad said, as he handed her a Gatorade, the purple flavor, her favorite. “But first, get dressed, we’re honoring your mother today.”
It was August 11th, Dad’s birthday, and it felt so odd when there was no rabbit cake to celebrate, nothing like a birthday. We had the aluminum mold, but it didn’t seem right to use it, since it still felt like Mom could come home any minute and scold us for touching her things.
What I mean is, Mom felt dead to us, but she didn’t really feel gone. She didn’t even feel gone after we scattered her ashes along the shallows of the Chattahoochee River. We had an argument over which part of the river to sprinkle her in, so we put a spoonful of her ashes every quarter mile, until we decided that the current would carry her everywhere anyway.
3.
I didn’t ask what Lizzie’s fight with Megan Sax was about, but I knew it must have been over something pretty serious when Lizzie asked if she could be homeschooled for the upcoming year. Dad said okay, because it had always been Mom who said no to Lizzie’s bad ideas.
Lizzie’s friends used to come over on a rotating schedule; Mom said only three girls allowed, we weren’t running a brothel. Megan Sax was the only girl always invited. I tried to imagine how Lizzie felt about losing Megan, but I didn’t have a friend to lose, other than Boomer, and he always came running when I called him.
I didn’t know who was going to teach Lizzie. Dad was not a teacher, that had been Mom. She had taught at Magnolia Community College for years, but she didn’t like teaching that much. Mom always said she was supposed to be the world’s-next-great-scientist, but then she’d met Dad at a bar during her final year of graduate school at Auburn. Mom claimed the pregnancy was the reason she’d gotten stuck in Alabama, but once when Dad was tipsy he told me that that was her excuse, that she’d had trouble finding a job after getting her PhD. “Her references weren’t very good,” he slurred.
It had driven Mom crazy that Dr. Lillian had gone on to be famous, when Mom said she knew she was the better scientist. Mom frequently pointed out that Dr. Lillian had never gotten married.
With Mom gone, Dad should have known that he couldn’t homeschool Lizzie. Carpet World was half an hour away in Opelika, and he was almost never home during the daytime. Before Mom’s death, he hadn’t come home for dinner most nights, except in the winter months, December through February—the home decorating off-season. But by the time all of this dawned on Dad, the homeschool textbooks had been ordered and Lizzie had been unenrolled in the sophomore class of Freedom High School. She refused to reconsider.
I knew most of the town would have already heard that Lizzie had pulled out of Freedom High, and about Megan Sax’s broken jaw. Last year, everyone had known when Lizzie’s first-ever boyfriend, a high school senior named Dave, dumped her. She’d left a wasps’ nest in his car, and he’d been stung almost fifty times.
“If he was allergic, he’d be dead,” Mom had fumed.
“But he wasn’t,” Lizzie had huffed. “And I got stung a bunch too, just putting the damn thing in the glove box.”
She’d also left a pile of dog poop on his front seat, but Mom hadn’t mentioned that. With Lizzie, you had to let some things go.
I came home from the first day of school on August 17th to find my sister wearing Mom’s paint-speckled overalls, her hair piled on her head, tendrils falling from her bun like tentacles off a squid. She had baked a chocolate pound cake and cut me off an ink-black slice.
Even when Mom was alive, I was envious of how much Lizzie looked like her, blonde with blue eyes, the same perfect nose and mouth. Mom had been very tall, almost six feet, and the doctor
said Lizzie would be tall someday too. Lizzie could fit into most of Mom’s clothes, and she had borrowed them even before Mom was dead. Mom’s top drawer was overflowing with bras, and Lizzie didn’t have to stuff them to fill them out. Lizzie wore Mom’s shortest dresses too, and the purple cowboy boots that had been her favorites.
Mom didn’t fit in with the other mothers in Freedom; she didn’t wear floral dresses or pastels, no string of pearls on her neck. She wasn’t originally from the South, she liked to remind people, she’d moved here from Philadelphia when she was ten. Dad said she used that as an excuse to stand out, but we stood out in lots of ways already. We didn’t go to church on Sundays, for one. Mom used to say that women in Alabama only went to church in order to show off their outfits, and that most people could learn more about God from going for a walk in nature. Mom called herself a spiritual naturalist, which Dad said wasn’t really a religion. She wore mostly black clothing, paired with red high heels or a zebra-print scarf. She loved lipstick in every shade, including electric orange, which made her lips look like two tropical fish swimming side by side on her face.
I wished I looked more like Mom, but I had Dad’s big chin and black hair and so many dark eyelashes that they clumped together. I had once tried to dye my hair blonde, but Mom caught me as I splashed the first spill of bleach.
Lizzie slid another piece of chocolate cake toward me.
“So who’s your teacher?” she asked, her elbows on the table. Maybe she was interested because the new fifth-grade teacher had been a big town mystery: the usual teacher, Mr. Wagner, had had some sort of breakdown over the summer and wasn’t allowed to be near kids any longer.
“Well, she’s brand-new,” I said. “You never had her.”
Our new teacher had come in that morning right as the bell rang. A pair of sunglasses pushed back her hair, which was divided into tiny braids. She was no taller than a fifth grader, and she looked like a babysitter, but she said she was twenty-six when someone asked. She’d written her name on the whiteboard, first and last, Ms. Cassandra Powell.
Ms. Powell was already my favorite teacher because she was the only teacher I’d ever had who hadn’t had my sister as a student first, a few years before. Those teachers were nervous that I’d be another Lizzie, another troublemaker. But Ms. Powell hadn’t sounded one bit fearful when she called out my name on the roll; she hadn’t snapped her neck up to ask if I was Lizzie Babbitt’s younger sister. Instead, she’d sung a few lines from “Heartbreak Hotel,” snapping her fingers and curling her lip like Elvis the King. She hadn’t sounded at all sad while she was singing either, which meant she hadn’t heard about my mother’s death. I was relieved, because last year when Billy Dickle’s uncle died, the whole class had to have a full three minutes of silence for his loss.
“Is twenty-six too young for Dad?” I asked Lizzie, who was sealing the pound cake in tinfoil to freeze.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Lizzie said, her breath full of familiar acid. “We can’t run out and get a replacement. It’s not like the time the old TV conked out.”
Lizzie was partway right, but I didn’t think Dad should go on mourning Mom forever, especially since Mom had been an adulteress. Still, I wanted to be sure that Dad always loved Mom best. Our new television was so much nicer, I didn’t miss the old one even a little.
For those first weeks of school, all my classmates looked at me side-eyed, nervous that they might catch whatever causes parents to drop dead. They all knew about my mom, even if Ms. Powell still hadn’t heard. Everyone must have felt bad for me, because I always got the best spot during silent reading hour; no one ever tried to contest my space in the beanbag chair. There were perks.
It was coming home that was painful, like picking open a crusty scab. The bus drove right over the Chattahoochee River; I always held my breath over the bridge.
“What are you doing?” Jackie Friskey asked me once. Jackie was our newly elected class president, the nicest girl in school.
“I’m pretending I’m drowning,” I said, after I let out the air in my lungs.
“I heard how your mom died,” Jackie said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, she was supposed to kill herself,” I told Jackie, and she nodded but didn’t answer. She went back to reading The Art of Public Speaking for Fifth Graders, which Ms. Powell had given her for winning the election.
Our house on Watson Hill Road was the second-to-last stop. Our house was white with black shutters, with a covered porch, which Mom had said made it a farmer’s cottage. I loved our house. It had a stained glass window in the front door, and you walked from the mudroom into the living room, which was my favorite room in the house. The living room had bookshelves, the TV, Dad’s leather chair, and the most comfortable couch. The kitchen was next to the living room, painted bright yellow, and copper pans hung above the stove. Mom had a small messy office off the kitchen, which we weren’t supposed to go in, only stand in the doorway if we needed something. On the second floor, my parents had their bedroom, and I had my own bedroom, and Lizzie had hers. We all shared a bathroom, which had a shower over a clawfoot tub.
When I came home, my mom’s Honda was still in the driveway. I wiped my feet on the bristled welcome mat so I wouldn’t track mud on our nice carpets bought from Dad’s store. I dropped my backpack in the front hall to announce my arrival, just like always. Before Lizzie hollered hello from the kitchen, it was easy to forget for a second that Mom was still sprinkled in the river, dissolving like the orange and red flakes we fed to the goldfish at school.
4.
August, September
I had to meet with the Beaver Elementary guidance counselor for twenty minutes every week, school policy in the death of a parent. Her name was Ms. Bernstein and she collected snow globes. My favorite was a giant tarantula that lay half-hidden in snow until you shook it, or held it upside down; then you could see its fangs.
“Most kids like the Snoopy one,” Ms. Bernstein said.
“I like arachnids.” I shrugged. “I like all animals, really.” This was our first meeting.
“How are you feeling?” Ms. Bernstein asked. Her office smelled like tomato soup.
“Like a bee sting.” I turned the snow globe upside down.
“Death is painful.” She nodded.
“The tarantula’s bite,” I said, “is virtually harmless to humans.”
Ms. Bernstein explained that the grieving process takes eighteen months, and she drew a timeline on a piece of paper for me to take home. She drew twenty empty boxes instead of eighteen, since she said she wasn’t sure when I had started the grieving process, whether it was after my mom had gone missing or after she’d been found.
“Do you think it’s suspicious,” I asked during that first meeting, “that Mom died in a drowning accident when she was an excellent swimmer?”
“Denial,” she said. “What you’re experiencing is a stage of grief. You need to work toward accepting your mother’s death.”
Ms. Bernstein said there were normal and abnormal ways of dealing with the death of a loved one. I didn’t know if I was being normal or not. Ms. Bernstein admitted it was a little strange that I was still asking questions about my mother’s cause of death.
I worried I wasn’t normal because I felt sad, but not as sad as I wanted to feel, as sad as I thought someone with a dead mother should feel. I got out of bed every morning, and brushed my teeth, and walked the dog. I ate Fruity Pebbles for breakfast and they tasted fine. I raised my hand first in class whenever Ms. Powell asked a question. So much was the same as before. “Shouldn’t I feel worse?” I asked.
Ms. Bernstein explained that I was experiencing the numbness after loss, and she said it was another expected response, especially for someone so young, someone still learning how to suffer. I asked if that meant that grief would be easier for Lizzie because she was older, and Ms. Bernstein said it was possible but unlikely, based on what she knew about my sister. Ms. Bernstein had been Lizzie’s guidance couns
elor once too, before Lizzie graduated from Beaver Elementary and gone on to Three Rivers Junior High. Ms. Bernstein had tried to get Lizzie placed into an institution for troubled youth, but Mom threatened a lawsuit against the school and Ms. Bernstein quickly changed her mind.
I hung up the grieving chart in my bedroom, tacked it on my bulletin board between an old report card and the glossy photographs of Sumatran tigers that I’d cut out from National Geographic. I would cross off every month as it passed.
When I arrived for our next meeting, Ms. Bernstein was with another student, a third grader. She kept a small desk chair outside her door, which she called the waiting room. There was a bookshelf along the wall too, with titles like Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Kids!, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders, and Learning to Live with Your Demented Child.
The third grader was upset about his parents’ divorce, and Ms. Bernstein could talk about divorce forever. I read through the DSM for Kids! while I waited. It was a list of all the things that could be wrong with a person, the disorders and phobias. There was a whole section on grief, normal and abnormal, uncomplicated and complicated.
“Tell me about normal grief,” I asked, once our meeting started, twenty minutes late. “Does a normal grieving process always take eighteen months?”
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