Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  Liam wailed, ‘Don’t put away the candy! I want the candy!’ and started to bawl.

  T.J. scooped him up, said, ‘Hey, you can play with my badge,’ and carried him outside. The rest of us stood taking a last teary-eyed look at LeeVon as Nick lifted the coffin lid so that he could fit it in place and fasten the hasps.

  Absently, almost unconsciously, like a mother checking on a child, I glanced up at LeeVon’s portrait on the wall to see how he was doing.

  His painted, tearful eyes met mine – no, far more: they looked at me and into me, trying to tell me something. And I gasped, because again I felt a nearly tangible connection between us, as if one of us had thrown a lifeline.

  Rescue …

  So that he could save my measly career?

  Really?

  Such bullshit, and I yawped, ‘Wait!’ to stop Nick before he could close the casket. Dear earth-water airy deity of us all, I had almost blown it. LeeVon was the child, I was the mother. It wasn’t his job to save me, my pride, my pitiful ego; it was my job to save him.

  Turning so abruptly I almost stumbled, I reached up, lifted LeeVon’s portrait down from the wall, took it gently in both hands like an offering, and laid it in the casket, face up, on top of his chest.

  There were murmurs, and someone started to say, ‘Beverly, you don’t have to—’

  I stopped hearing; I only gazed, and I gasped, because I saw that the tears were gone from those eyes I had painted. And I wasn’t the only one gasping, because all the colorful, waxy airplanes, tractors, firecrackers, pickup trucks, watermelons, speedboats, frogs, ice-cream yellow dogs and everything else LeeVon had crayoned around himself – all of those bright wax pictures peeled their filmy selves off the wall and lilted through the air; they flitted over to him like the most delicate of lacewings or falling leaves, wafting down to settle on him. Some landed as random and lovely as butterflies on his skull, softening its harsh bones into … transcendence.

  LeeVon. LeeVon!

  No more tears.

  I stood gazing, so transfixed I could scarcely move or breathe, but I urgently needed to speak, because I thought I had heard a scream. ‘Bonnie Jo, don’t you dare run away.’

  ‘I’m right here.’ Her voice sounded as choked as mine.

  ‘Ooooh, pretty,’ breathed one of the little girls.

  ‘He done it,’ whispered Sukie. ‘Looks like he gone and done it.’

  And I, of all people, said, ‘Amen.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  After that, the burial felt like no big deal, just comfortable, as if we were tucking LeeVon into bed. The only one of us who couldn’t quite deal was Nick Crickens. He loaded the coffin and the flowers into his pickup in a rush and was already leaving the potter’s field by the time the rest of us got there.

  We circled around silently, watched the county maintenance men lower the coffin into the grave with a hoist. Then they stood back, waiting.

  I stepped forward, took a handful of earth and tossed it down on to the coffin. People say that makes the saddest sound, but I felt as if I’d thrown a coin into a wishing well. I blurted, ‘Please be at peace, LeeVon.’

  Bonnie Jo went next, and then Sukie and the kids. Silently, she watched the maintenance men lower the coffin into the grave with a hoist, watched as each of the women and children in turn took a handful of earth and tossed it down on to the coffin as if throwing a coin into a wishing well, and their wishes were ‘Peace, LeeVon’ and ‘Love always, LeeVon’ and ‘Bye, LeeVon!’ But no one wanted to leave. We all waited as the county workers filled the grave and mounded the earth over it. Then we arranged the flowers on top of it, so many flowers that they completely blanketed it like a colorful quilt, a puffy comforter made of blossoms.

  T.J. found herself hanging around by the graveside even though Marcia hugged everyone and left. The kids zoomed away and ran circles around the graveyard. But Beverly, Sukie and Bonnie walked up to T.J. as if they thought she was hanging around for a reason.

  ‘I have no agenda,’ she told them. ‘More than anything, I’m just remembering my Nana.’

  Bonnie Jo asked, ‘Could you please forget what you know about my brother and my mother?’

  T.J. hesitated. She was a cop.

  A homicide detective. It was her job to close cold cases.

  And closing one this cold would sure look good on her stats.

  But …

  But she hesitated only for a heartbeat. ‘No worries,’ T.J. said. ‘You didn’t give me a statement.’ The time spent on the case had not been wasted, not when it had brought her here to this place, these people. ‘Anyhow, your mother is unfit to be interrogated.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Bonnie Jo agreed.

  Sukie asked, ‘You won’t be bothering me none?’

  ‘Nope. This case is going nowhere.’

  Beverly said nothing at all, just gave T.J. a massive hug.

  I invited the Ferees back to my house afterward, for cookies and coffee and strudel cake and peach cobbler. And I was glad to have their company. The moment I walked inside, I felt as if I had stepped into an echo chamber of what was gone, an absence extending far beyond the house.

  Listening to a silence I’d never noticed before, I stopped just inside the kitchen door. Bonnie Jo and Sukie stood there with me, but the kids darted between our legs and ran on in to where they knew cookies and cake awaited them at the table right next to the studio.

  ‘Hey!’ Chloe exclaimed, her voice carrying to us clearly although we could not see her, ‘there ain’t no handprints on the wall no more!’

  ‘They all gone!’ called Emma.

  I gasped, inhaling the implications, then hurried in to see for myself. I blinked almost as if I were viewing a catastrophe. The walls of my studio stood as virginally beige as when I had first seen them, the ceiling was equally pristine eggshell white, and not only were the handprints gone – all of LeeVon’s art had vanished also. His angry flaming bathtubs, his stormy soaked beds, his broken, weeping, fiery hearts – all gone except that, oddly, the blank sheets of paper remained behind, good as new.

  Behind me, Bonnie Jo and Sukie stood staring, like me, at what wasn’t there. I turned to them, babbling, ‘Paint doesn’t just come off walls without leaving a mess. Paint doesn’t just lift itself out of the fibers of paper. It’s impossible. It’s transcendence.’

  Bonnie Jo nodded slowly. ‘He really done it.’

  Sukie said, ‘He’s all the way gone.’

  ‘He’s not hurting anymore,’ I said. ‘He’s totally at peace now. I’m so – so proud of him, and—’ And I meant to say I was happy for him, which I was. Very. Yet what I actually said was ‘I miss him.’ Silly tears escaped from my eyes.

  Bonnie Jo hugged me, and Sukie, both of them. I hugged back, wiped the tears away, and said, ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Damn straight,’ said Bonnie Jo, and Sukie said, ‘Beverly, don’t you never even think of being lonely. You call me or come see the brats any time, night or day, you hear me? My grandkids are your grandkids too, from here on out.’

  Cassie picked up her phone to hear her sister demand without even a hi-how-are-you, ‘Did you hear from Mom?’

  ‘Hello to you, too, Berthe. How’s the pedagogy going?’

  ‘Fine, and how are the gluten-free boysenberry muffins? Did you hear from her?’

  ‘About ten minutes ago. She sounded completely normal—’

  ‘Normal? She told me the crayon drawings flew off the wall and joined the picture in the casket!’

  ‘Yeah, what a bummer,’ Cassie said with feeling. ‘I really wanted to exhibit that portrait for her.’

  Maurie all but screamed, ‘Sis, are you purposely being obtuse? I’m worried about Mom! This whole thing sounds insane!’

  ‘It is insane, but Mom’s not. Listen, Maurie’ – her saying ‘Maurie’ instead of ‘Berthe’ conveyed her compassion – ‘Mom sounds totally sure of herself, in control, satisfied she has handled whatever this weirdness was all about. And it’s
over. Her ghost is gone. And I’ve never heard her sound more …’ Cassie hesitated, trying to come up with the right word: not just calm, serene, tranquil, but something with a quiet joy in it that went above and beyond most people’s experience.

  Maurie didn’t wait for the transcendent word Cassie was seeking. ‘Yes, she’s completely cogent and coherent,’ Maurie admitted. ‘I’m the one who’s freaking out.’

  ‘Noooo. Really?’

  ‘Oh, give me a break.’ In her crabby way, Maurie sounded better. ‘Did Mom tell you about the tree?’

  ‘Yes, she—’

  ‘Never mind,’ Maurie interrupted; she was indeed freaking out. ‘I don’t want to talk about it; I’m out of here. Take care of yourself, sis. Bye.’

  Cassie smiled at the phone and put it away. It would take Berthe a few days to assimilate Mom’s news; so what was new? Relatively speaking, things were copacetic. Alone but far from lonely in her matronly fieldstone house-cum-cafe, Cassie reclined to the max in her venerable La-Z-Boy, closed her eyes and replayed Mom’s phone call once more in her mind.

  Mom was going to do a portrait of Chloe next, then one of Emma, and Liam when he was a bit older. Whether the artwork would come to the cafe, stay with Mom or go to the children’s grandmother was irrelevant to Cassie. Mom had found herself a life.

  Mom was going to buy Harold and the Purple Crayon to read aloud to the children, and Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, and all the best books for kids to fall in love with. And she was going to play Chutes and Ladders with them on rainy days and plant a garden with them on sunny ones, and they were going to spray each other with the water hose and get soaking wet and climb trees.

  Editing that thought, Cassie removed her mother from The Tree and placed the children in it instead, with Mom watching them climb.

  Mom had told Cassie about The Capital-T Tree with such awe in her voice that Cassie wondered whether Mom was beginning to believe in miracles or deity or something of the sort after all. The Tree had appeared in Mom’s backyard on the day of LeeVon’s farewell, a magnolia that looked as if it could have been there for fifty years or so, standing where the ‘duck pond’ had been – no trace of bricks or excavation remained – spreading its glossy leaves in the slanting late-day light. On the day of the funeral, Mom had walked out there and discovered it after everybody else was gone, around sunset. She had stood a long time looking up at it – a big, buxom magnolia in full bloom – noticing that its pearlescent white blossoms did not nestle the way most other blossoms did. Mom had said the flowers perched on the branches, big and bold, looking like cream-colored birds in sunset’s aureate light. Looking like milk-white doves, ready to fly away.