by Amy Meyerson
* * *
My schedule was wide open for the next two and a half months, so I booked a flight for Monday, home in time to make Billy’s funeral. I had to go. Not just because I wanted to find the next clue. It was the right thing to do. I’d loved him as a child. I would go to his funeral. I would honor what we once were to each other.
Jay lay across our bed, watching as I packed the bulk of my summer clothes.
“Do you have to bring so much?”
I zipped my suitcase and hopped onto the bed beside him. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were going to miss me.”
“Of course I’m going to miss you.” He rolled me over and lay on top of me, his face so close to mine I could see stubble erupting along his jawbone.
“It’ll just be a couple of days.” I hadn’t bought a return ticket, but I hadn’t spent more than five consecutive days in LA since I’d left for college. If I was right and Billy had left me another clue, it wouldn’t take more than a few days to uncover the secrets he wanted to tell me.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come to the funeral with you?”
“You’ve got camp next week.”
“It’s only soccer.”
“Only soccer? Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?” I was still getting used to the way that word felt in my mouth.
He ran his hand through my hair in the way I didn’t like, unfurling my curls. “You don’t have to go alone.”
“It’s just a few days,” I said, shaking my hair free of his touch.
Jay insisted on driving me to the airport even though he had to get a zip car and it would have been cheaper to call a cab. He pulled up to the terminal and walked around to the trunk to get my bag.
“Call me when you land?” He placed my rolling suitcase on the curb. I expected him to tell me to hurry back, but he said, “Take the time you need. You’ll regret it if you rush back and aren’t there for your family.”
“Who knew you were such a sentimentalist?” Jay turned away, clearly hurt. I was tempted to tease him again for being too sensitive. Instead, I kissed him intently, giving him something else to return to in the days we were apart.
* * *
On the flight across country, I tried to decide what I should tell Mom about The Tempest and the clue Billy had sent. When I’d told her I was coming home for the funeral, she’d asked, Why would you want to go to that? with such disbelief, such utter bafflement, I didn’t know how to respond.
You aren’t planning to go to Billy’s funeral? I asked her.
Why would I be?
Because he’s your only brother, I thought. I’ll go alone, then, I said.
Whatever, she said with the cool indifference of one of my students.
How was I supposed to tell her that Billy had reached out to me when she hadn’t even forgiven him enough to honor his death, to memorialize the closeness they once had? And what was worse, whatever he wanted to tell me was something Mom didn’t want me to know. I just hoped I’d know what to say to her when I saw her in person.
Dad was waiting at baggage claim with a printed sign that read Teacher Miranda. It was what all the teachers in my Quaker school were called. Teacher Anne. Teacher Tom. Teacher Jay. Jay. I texted to tell him I had landed. He blew me an emoji kiss. While I hated how easy and generic emojis were, I liked that Jay was willing to be corny on my account.
Dad was a reluctant hugger. I knew not to take it personally. Mom was the only person he was comfortable offering physical affection to. I would find them slow dancing in the kitchen as Mom sang an old folk song, or him absentmindedly rubbing her feet as they watched a Nora Ephron movie. To most people, he offered his hand. At least he hugged me, even if there always was that stilted discomfort.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked as Dad released me from the sideways embrace. Every time I came home, Dad’s hair had grown more salt than pepper, his olive skin more leathered, his blue eyes grayer. It made me want to clutch his hand and beg him to stop getting old.
“She went to bed early. Said she’ll see you in the morning.” Mom never missed an opportunity to meet me at the airport. She always pushed her way through the crowd of limo drivers and multigenerational families waiting in baggage claim, so her face was the first I saw.
“How’s she doing?”
Dad took my bag and wheeled it toward the exit. “You know your mom. She’s putting on a brave face, but this is hard on her, harder than she would have guessed.”
Outside the arrivals terminal, the air was thick with exhaust and cigarette smoke. Cars lunged at each other as they tried to weave in and out of rings of unmoving traffic. Only a few palm trees in the distance hinted that we were in Los Angeles, not some neglected airport of the developing world.
Dad pulled out of short-term parking into the outer circle of traffic. “How’d Stanton’s words go over this year?”
I ended every school year the same way, on Lincoln’s deathbed. Moments after the president died, his friend and secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, commemorated the loss, Now he belongs to the ages. Or was it, Now he belongs to the angels? I’d pose to my students. While Lincoln’s doctor had heard Stanton say “ages,” the secretary at the scene had heard “angels.” So which quote was right—did Stanton fate Lincoln to history or the afterlife? The students would evaluate each option, debating Stanton’s true words. In the end, it was a trick question.
“Stanton’s words remain an enigma,” I said to Dad. We have to allow for competing experiences of historical events, I told my students. Then we can decide how to interpret the past, what makes sense to us today. “I think a few of them understood. I hope so, anyway.”
“You can only do your best. It’s up to them to commit to caring about the past.” Dad’s car screeched to a halt as the Flyaway bus darted in front of us.
“Do you remember when Billy showed up that time, in the middle of the night?”
“Of course.” Dad’s attention was focused on the bus, squeezing into an impossibly small space between two cars ahead.
“I’m sure Mom must have told me, but I can’t remember what they fought about.”
“I don’t know.” Dad honked at an SUV that crossed in front of us. “Come on!”
“You don’t know what happened?”
“All I know is Billy showed up drunk and told your mom he never wanted to talk to her again.” He wove around traffic, onto Sepulveda where the road opened up. “Then he bought you that stupid dog.”
“Billy wasn’t drunk.” I thought back to his flushed face, his glassy eyes. “Was he?”
Dad turned onto Ocean Park Boulevard where the air grew cooler and saltier as we neared the ocean. I rolled down the window and inhaled deeply. Every time I returned to LA, the city felt a little more my parents’ home, somewhere I’d been an extended visitor, never a resident. I couldn’t tell Mom this. She was waiting for the time when, like her, I would move back to Southern California, but it was never going to happen. I didn’t want to teach the children of movie stars and musicians. Directors. TV executives. I didn’t want to teach American history in a state that hadn’t been part of the union until the Compromise of 1850. I wasn’t an Angelino, a Californian at heart. The salt in my nostrils was the closest I came to feeling homesick.
“Look,” Dad said when we were stopped at a light. “I don’t want to ruin your memory of Billy. There were sides of him you were too young to see.”
“What do you mean ‘sides’?”
“Nothing. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Don’t do that. What sides?”
Dad turned off Ocean Park into our neighborhood. I took in the familiar scene of our quiet street, knowing the colors of all the houses we passed, even if they all appeared charcoal in the evening’s pale light. Los Angeles never got dark, no matter how late at night, not completely.
“I get that Billy’s death is bringing up a lot of questions. I just don’t feel comfortable speaking on behalf of your mother.”
“I’m not asking you to speak for her.”
“It’s her past,” he said.
“It’s our past,” I corrected. Pebbles crackled under the tires as Dad pulled into the driveway. The house was dark, save the porch light, moths swarming in its glow.
“It’s up to your mom what she wants to tell you.” He hopped out of the car to fetch my bag from the trunk. I watched him in the rearview mirror until the lid of the trunk turned the mirror black and I couldn’t see him anymore. Just before it did, I saw an expression sweep across his face, something I hadn’t seen before, something that looked a lot like fear.
CHAPTER FOUR
The following morning, Mom was already in the kitchen when I wandered downstairs in search of coffee. Blueberry muffins cooled on the island that divided the kitchen from the dining and living rooms. I knew the fridge was also stocked with foods she remembered me liking as a teenager. Cool Whip and strawberries, bologna, chocolate milk—foods, if you could call them that, I hadn’t eaten in years.
“Where are the other twenty guests?”
“Miranda.” Mom dropped her oven mitts and rushed to me. It was only 7:00 a.m., but she was already dressed in black pants and a coral blouse, her curls set to frame her face, her eyes bright with mascara and brown eye shadow.
“I’m so sorry, Mom.” As conflicted of a hugger as Dad was, Mom was the opposite. She always hugged me like if it was up to her she’d never let me go.
“I’m okay,” she said, like she wanted it to be true.
“Is there anything I can do?”
She pointed to the table. “Sit.”
Mom served me a muffin and a cup of coffee like she was my waitress. She sat across from me, watching as I broke the muffin in two. Steam rose from its center.
“It’s good to have you home.” She reached across the table to brush a matted curl from my forehead.
“Thought any more about coming to the funeral with me today?” I asked casually as I picked at my muffin. “It might offer you some closure.”
“I got closure years ago.” She stood and headed to the sink, where she began scrubbing the muffin pan.
I finished eating and brought my empty plate to the sink. I stood beside her in the too-close way she liked. “I worry you might regret it, if you don’t go.”
She turned off the faucet and put her cold, wet hand on my cheek. “How’d I end up with such a sweet daughter?” She returned her attention to the mixer in the sink, “Really, honey, I’m fine.”
* * *
Forrest Lawn was a half hour drive from my parents’ house, so I gave myself forty-five minutes to get there, just in case. My parents loaned me their car and waved goodbye from the driveway.
I rolled down the window before I left. “You’re sure I can’t convince you to come?”
“Miranda, go,” Dad said, too forcefully.
“We’ll see you when you get back,” Mom added.
I watched her as I reversed out of the driveway, waiting for a crack in her facade that would reveal the pain she’d covered with foundation and blush. She shooed me on as though I was dressed up for prom rather than her only brother’s funeral.
When I arrived at Forrest Lawn, the cemetery’s wrought-iron gate looked like it belonged on the east coast, harboring an exclusive country club. Despite leaving early, I was late. Twenty-two minutes late to be exact, late even by LA standards, where everything started ten minutes after it was supposed to on account of the pesky traffic.
“The Silver funeral?” I asked the guard. He pointed up Cathedral Drive toward a hill in the far corner of the property, away from the famous names that lined the more prominently located gravestones.
A crowd of forty people was gathered around the open grave. They were younger, hipper and more diverse than I would have expected, dressed in black jeans and T-shirts, tight dark jersey dresses. I tugged at the collar of my knee-length black dress, feeling acutely conservative and undeniably east coast.
I stood behind the row of people that lined the grave, searching for someone I recognized. I didn’t know whom I expected to be there. My grandparents had died before I was born or old enough to remember them. Mom and Billy didn’t have other siblings. Their uncles had died on the beaches of Normandy and in the Pacific. No cousins or extended family to speak of. No lifelong friends that had been stand-ins for family. Still, I scanned those young faces hoping for someone familiar, perhaps an old girlfriend of Billy’s that I’d forgotten about or Lee the manager or one of the pretty girls who had worked at the café in Prospero Books, now in her forties. Only a few faces looked older than my own. A plump woman in her sixties with plastic-framed glasses and a wiry man with a white goatee and bifocals. The only other person who stood out was a man in a pinstripe suit who, like me, hadn’t gotten the memo on funeral casual.
The crowd shifted as a guy in a hooded sweatshirt and faded black pants walked toward the microphone behind the grave. He swept a mop of hair away from his face, his eyes downcast as he dug into his back pocket to retrieve a sheet of notebook paper.
“This is a Dylan Thomas poem that Billy liked.” He cleared his throat before reading “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” As he read about fighting the dying light, I studied Billy’s tombstone. The dark granite listed his name, Billy Silver, his birth in 1949, his death three days ago. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the life and soul of history must remain forever unknown. Only the facts—the eternal facts, he called them—were passed down to subsequent generations. These were the external facts of Billy’s life, stripped of any details that made him someone to remember. Why wasn’t he buried with my grandparents in the Westside? Why did he choose to be buried here, between the equally anonymous gravestones of Evelyn Weston and Richard Cullen, in what appeared to be the singles’ corner of Forrest Lawn, wallflowers even in death?
Billy’s friend finished reading the Thomas poem and stared solemnly at the crowd. His gaze circled the rows of people, until it stopped on me. His eyes were clear and so unnaturally blue they caught my breath. They were stunning but cold, making me feel like even more of an interloper than I already did. What was I doing here? I’d told myself I’d come home out of duty and decency and grief. Really, it was because of the card my uncle had sent, the prospect of another one of his scavenger hunts. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t deserve to be beside these sad, beautiful people, commemorating someone I’d practically forgotten.
“You want one?” The girl beside me held a plastic cup in my direction. She was younger than I was, Latina, her sinewy arms covered in ink drawings and Spanish calligraphy. “There’s whiskey or whiskey. I’d recommend the whiskey.” I took the cup and watched as she poured liberally into it.
The older man with the goatee walked behind the microphone, holding his red solo cup toward the crowd. He shut his eyes, and began singing, “Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.”
The plump woman in her sixties arrived at the goateed man’s side, and threw a freckled arm around his shoulders, swaying his body with hers as she joined in the old hymn. When they finished singing, the man angled his glass toward the open grave, then the sky, before bringing the cup to his lips.
“‘To the nights we’ll never remember with friends we’ll never forget,’ as Billy used to say,” the girl said, angling her cup toward mine. “You from the neighborhood?”
“What neighborhood?”
“Silver Lake. I haven’t seen you around.”
“No, I’m Billy’s niece.” It sounded like a foreign word—niece—all accented and blunt. Still, I was Billy’s niece. He’d sent me a sign before he died. He’d been thinking of me. We remained something to each other. “How did you know my uncle?” I asked, emboldened by the fact
that I was family and these people weren’t.
“I work at Prospero.”
“Prospero Books,” I said longingly. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said the name aloud and it still hit me with the amazement it had when I was a kid, the sorcery of Prospero, the magic of his books.
The whiskey changed the mood, and everyone started chatting energetically. Laughter carried across the open terrain. The man in the pinstripe suit announced, “If you’d like to continue the reverie, we’ll be convening at Prospero Books.”
“It was nice to meet you.” I waited for her to add, I’ll see you at the store, but she nodded and made her way toward the wild-haired man who had read the Dylan Thomas poem. She whispered to him and they turned to look at me, an inscrutable expression on their faces, or maybe it wasn’t inscrutable; maybe I didn’t want to decipher the hard truth of their stare.
I sipped my whiskey even after there was nothing left in the cup, watching everyone walk toward the mass of cars collected on the side of the road.
“You wouldn’t happen to be Miranda?” The man in the pinstripe suit approached me, his hand extended. He was older than he’d appeared at a distance, his sandy hair lightened with peroxide in place of youth. “I was hoping to see you here. I’m Elijah Greenberg, Billy’s lawyer.”
I was about to ask him how he knew I’d be here. Billy must have told him about me. He must have known about The Tempest, the quest that lay ahead.
“I’m so sorry about Billy.” He escorted me toward the two cars left on the side of the road. “Are you coming to the celebration?”
“The celebration?”
“Of Billy’s life. Strange way to put it, I know. That’s how Billy wanted it. ‘I don’t want any of this sad business,’” he said in a deep voice that I assumed was supposed to be Billy’s. “‘That shouldn’t be your last memory of me.’”