by Lis Mitchell
“Dawes,” I correct. “I’m not a Karner.”
“Kept your name, did you?” Dr. Blake says dubiously. I don’t bother to correct this misapprehension, although I consider waiting until old Dr. Waterhouse can return. Dr. Waterhouse knows not to ask about the state of Dash and me.
“Ms. Dawes, I need you to be honest with me. We don’t judge, you know. We’re just here to help. But it’s going to be hard for me to help you if you won’t be honest with me. We need your history unvarnished. You don’t need to edit for us.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say. I really don’t. Dr. Waterhouse has all my history. “My charts are right there, but I don’t think I’ve left anything out.”
Dr. Blake looks at me kindly. “You said you’d experienced no new symptoms of note, but you failed to mention the hallucinations.”
“The hallucinations?” I repeat, baffled. “What hallucinations?”
“I realize this must be very difficult for you. It’s hard to admit when—“
“What hallucinations are you talking about?”
He looks sheepish. “I overheard you talking with your daughter about her grandmother’s death. I know it must have been traumatic for you. I need to ask what medications you are on. We might need to adjust their dosages.”
Realization sinks in. He had overheard Lily and me talk about Gray-Granna turning into butterflies, and he had assumed that I couldn’t have seen that, I must’ve been hallucinating. Lily, of course, was only a child. Prone to flights of fancy, or maybe she’d been humoring me. That’s what he’d think.
“You seem to have misheard the context,” I explain stiffly. “I assure you I’m not hallucinating.”
A frown tugs at the corners of his mouth, but he pushes it back to cheerfully assure me that I may not think I’ve been hallucinating but…
“There are no buts. I’ve been perfectly lucid. You misunderstood.” I stand up to indicate that this visit is over.
His eyes narrow. He isn’t done examining me, although I’m done being examined. Dr. Waterhouse would know, I think resentfully. Dr. Waterhouse has been the family physician his whole life. He writes the death certificates for the family. He’s never once asked to see the bodies. He knows, I expect, what he’d find … or not find.
I push past Dr. Blake and collect Lily from the waiting room. She pockets a pamphlet on iron deficiency when she thinks I’m not looking.
* * *
Dash and I argue that evening. I tell him we need to tell Lily.
“Do you know what I found between One Fish Two Fish and Hop on Pop?” I ask him. “‘The Ten Warning Signs of Heart Disease Women Most Ignore.’ She knows something is wrong. Just not what.”
Dash runs his hands through his hair. “I don’t want to tell her anything until I know what I can tell her to expect. You’ve got to make a decision, Viv.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “I made a decision. You just refuse to accept it.”
“That was not a decision,” Dash says. “That was you blindly accepting tradition, embracing the status quo.”
“Whose status quo?” I ask. “Your family’s ways are…”
“They’re a gift,” Dash says.
“You think they’re better than what regular folks do.”
“Aren’t they?” By now, his hands have raked his hair up in tufts. “Nobody dies to be forgotten. Nobody gets pumped full of chemicals and dumped into a cement tomb in the ground. Nobody dies in hideous pain.”
“But they still die,” I point out. “I’m still going to die too. I’ll still be gone.”
Dash blinks hard against this statement. “Not if you become family.”
Here is the Gordian knot that rubs between us when we hold each other. I am not a Karner. I love Dash, he loves me, we have a daughter binding us together. We are family but not. I’m on the outside. By choice, I remind myself.
“I won’t.” Can’t. Shouldn’t. What are the words that will explain this to him? I have no idea.
He flinches. “Fine. I’ll let you explain it to Lily. It’s your choice after all.”
“Why do you always pretend like it’s Lily I’ll be hurting most? Why not just say that you want it for you, and acknowledge it’s for your own selfish reasons?”
Dash exhales long and slow before making a reply. “I thought I had. That wasn’t good enough. And Lily isn’t good enough either.” He turns on his heel and walks out of the room, leaving me to wonder why I’ve held my ground on this for so long.
* * *
We hold a memorial service for Gray-Granna two weeks after her death. Two weeks gives the Karner cousins time to all wend their way back to the family estate. Two weeks for Janet to stage-manage the expectations of the town. Litchfield is small, and it’s not every day a Karner dies. They showed up in force for Opa’s service, and that seems to have only sharpened their curiosity. Dr. Waterhouse is discreet, but it’s obvious that rumors still leak out.
The pastor delivers the same sermon for Gray-Granna that he did for Opa. Something about Jesus coming forth on the third day, returning to Mary in the garden. He does not add, “As a wheelbarrow.” No, that’s Lily, sotto voce. She looks up at me and adds softly, “Or a watering can.”
After the service, people come to the house one or two at a time, bearing cold, foil-wrapped pans. I take the pans, and Dash leads them away into the sitting room to offer condolences to Janet and Carl and a small cortege of Karner cousins. After each terminal visitor departs, Janet wonders aloud what each of them would turn into, if they weren’t terminal, poor things. (Does Janet conveniently forget that she’d be terminal too, but for Carl?)
“She’s too solid,” says Janet, offering analysis on the latest visitor. “Inanimate for sure. Wood possibly. She’d make a lovely wardrobe. Or a desk. Very practical.”
I blink. You’d think after nearly a decade of life with Dash, I’d be used to Janet. In a way, I’m relieved that she still has the power to startle me. It means I’m not growing like her.
I eye her over the top of Lily’s head and Dash’s shoulders. She is not a bad person. She loves Carl, loves Dash, loves Lily. Tolerates me. She wants me in the family because it will please Dash. Another Karner to catalog and care for.
If you are Janet, the only thing that matters is how you die.
Funny thing, that’s what matters most to me as well.
The parade of visitors eventually swells to claustrophobic proportions. The smell of white waxy flowers chokes the air and everyone speaks in that soft voice common to funerals. As if they’d rather not breathe in the mortality that still lingers. Janet reigns over this panoply of grief like a queen. She is in her element, inclining her head just so as each curious townsperson trundles through. I grudgingly admit that she fields their inanities far better than I ever could.
Back in the kitchen, surrounded by casseroles, I spend my time plotting my escape. And Lily’s. Is it possible? I need out, even if Dash can’t see it. I can’t handle it much longer. If I only have a few years left to me, then I don’t want to spend them living in Litchfield. All I want is to die in my own manner, to be held by my love, and to set my daughter free to live a life instead of shackled to the family heritage.
But I might settle for being free and away from Janet.
Dash sidles into the kitchen. “Hiding, Viv?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but produces a small snifter and pours himself some brandy.
“As much as you are,” I say.
He smiles wryly to admit the truth of that. “I hate this part of things. Everybody pretending that they knew Gray-Granna to speak to. Everybody wearing black when they’re only curious.”
“It’s exactly like my grandmother’s funeral,” I say. “Terminal folks face the same social hazards in grief, I guess.”
“It smells in there,” Dash mutters. He tosses back the brandy and makes a face. “This tastes like funeral flowers.”
“Let’s go outside,” I suggest. “Get some air.”
He hesitates.
I take the brandy glass from his hand, put it down on the counter, give it a pat. “Janet and Carl are holding down the fort. Your cousin Sandra is fielding the funeral meats for a moment.”
As if to prove this point, Sandra backs into the kitchen, bearing a Tupperware dish and a bouquet of irises. She pops the seal on the Tupperware and says, “Mmmmmm, ambrosia salad. My favorite. The pastor’s wife makes it special. It’s my favorite thing about a passage.”
Dash nods solemnly. “Go ahead and start without us. I won’t tell anyone.”
Sandra licks her lips in anticipation. “Well, maybe just a nibble. After I find a vase for these beauties. Georgie, do you think?”
Cousin Georgie is a cut glass decanter with art nouveau swirls. The irises match perfectly. Sandra bears off Georgie and the flowers to be shown to Janet.
“Let’s go,” I say again to Dash.
We collect Lily from the front stairs where she has been watching grown-ups say grown-up things. She informs me that too many people are touching her, ruffling her curls, patting her head. Lily hates to be touched by strangers.
“They keep telling me to not be sad, Mom,” she says. “Am I supposed to be sad?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” I tell her, softly. Conspiratorially.
Dash looks at us. “I’m sad.”
We look at him.
“Well, I am,” he says, stuffing his fists into his pockets. He kicks the gravel in the driveway and it flies up in a satisfying spray. He kicks it again. Harder. The tiny patter of falling pebbles sounds like the first drops of rain before a sudden downpour. “I’m. Sad.”
“I know,” I say to him, taking his hand. “Butterflies aren’t the same.”
His fingers tighten on mine and we start walking down the gravel, all three of us kicking it up together. Kicking because it feels really good to kick something. And then we run out of gravel where the drive empties onto the paved road leading to and from Litchfield. I hold my breath.
Dash breathes deep and repeats his heresy. “I’m sad.” But this time he’s not saying it for Gray-Granna. He’s saying it because he’s never been allowed to be sad before. Because being a Karner means being happy at passage.
Lily pats his hand. “It’s okay, Dad.”
We step onto the asphalt together and start walking westward. I decide that it’s time to tell my daughter how I intend to die.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Lis Mitchell
Art copyright © 2019 by Mary Haasdyk