1 Straight to Hell (7 page)

“Well, it’s gone now.  Your aura, I mean.”

“Bummer.  I’ll be sure to order a new one in the morning.”  I took two tablets and swallowed them down with a glass of water.

“No, you don’t understand.”  His broad face was troubled.  “I mean it’s
gone
.  Gone as in, there isn’t one period.  Because everyone, every single person on the planet, has an aura. Every single
living
person that is.  Lilith, without an aura, you’re basically dead.”

Suddenly, the water was like a fist in my throat, choking me.  I coughed, bending over double, the water bursting out of my mouth and even my nose, burning my sinuses.  Dead?!  I might have not believed him, but the fact that he’d been so right the previous day in his warnings made me quake.  His pronouncement about my aura now, well, that meant that all of it – Miss Spry, the office, the story about Sarah Goodswain – was all true.

“I told you she wouldn’t believe you,” Jas said.  “She’s not spiritual, Tommy.  She’s not a believer.”

Not a believer?  After what I’d experienced, I knew I couldn’t be anything but.  Though I wished with all my heart that I wasn’t.

In case you’ve never had to host one, funerals are exhausting, let me tell you.  In fact, planning a funeral is much like planning a wedding.  You invite people, you find a minister to conduct the service, you buy flowers and a new dress, and you even come up with food.  But unless the bride is up against a nine-month deadline, wedding planning is very open-ended.  Funerals, however, must be held in only a few days to prevent the guest of honor from rotting away.

I’m being glib, I know.  Death is a serious matter, and so is grief.  But since I, myself, had died only a couple of days before my mother’s funeral, I’d already confronted my fears about the afterlife.  Also, I began to realize that my mother’s death would be very much like her life: the visit would be short, and she would be surrounded by people who were disappointed to find out that I was her daughter.

This was evident on the night of the viewing.  As I stood in that awful, little room, my head was swimming.  And it wasn’t only from the cloying smell of lilies and roses.  I was, quite suddenly, too tired.  I’d been greeting people for nearly two hours.  A parade of men and women whom I’d never met before passed by me to give their respects.  All of them said one of the following two things: You’re nothing like your mother – or –  Carrie sure knew how to party.

The second sentiment was quite enthusiastically expressed by a dumpy, gray-haired man in wire-framed, rose-tinted glasses and a tie-dye t-shirt so old and full of holes that it might have been a survivor of Woodstock.  He smelled of pot and pressed my hand so tightly I felt my knuckles rub together.  “God, I’m really gonna miss her.  She was something, you know?  One in a million.”

I held my breath and mumbled, “Yes, yes.  That’s true.”

He cocked his head.  “And you don’t look anything like her.”

I smiled tightly.  “So I’ve heard.”

The truth was that even Carrie didn’t look much like herself that evening.  For one thing, she lay perfectly still, something I’d never seen her do before.  And for another, she was dressed in the prim, plum-colored dress and sensible pumps that Jas and I had picked out for her and not the gypsy skirt and ruffled blouse she normally wore.  Her frizzy, waist-length gray hair had been plaited into a single braid that draped over her shoulder, and there were only two, silver bangles on her wrist, not the seventy or so she typically wore and that clattered every time she moved her arm.  She looked good.  She looked normal.  But she did not look like my mother.

When the dumpy man in the rose-tinted glasses finally shambled off to join a tall woman with a beehive hairdo and a silver lamé evening gown, Jasmine slunk over.  She’d come for moral support, but had been sitting in one of the plush chairs all evening, texting her friends.  Her eyes were wide.  “Was that really who I thought it was?”

I rubbed my temples.  “Who did you think it was?”

“That guy from that band.  You know, the one that used to play back in the sixties.”

“I’m sure he was.”  I had no idea what Jas was talking about, but I’ve found that most of the time it’s just better to agree with her than try to make sense of what she says.

She leaned a little closer.  “Do you think that guy might be your dad?”

Leave it to Jasmine to make a bad situation worse.  Truthfully, I hadn’t even thought that my sperm-donor might show up.  For the record, I have no idea who my biological father is.  Nor, I’m pretty sure, did my mother.  On the few occasions I’d asked her, she’d scratched her head and said, “Well, there are so many possibilities.”

As a child, I’d imagined my real dad as a poet or artist or musician.  A man who was dying to make a connection with me if only he knew where I was.  I admit that this is very disloyal to Simon who was the best father a girl could have.  But in my defense, this was around the time Simon got remarried and Jasmine was born.  Also, there was the normal, childhood curiosity of my classmates who wondered why my dad was Chinese and I wasn’t.  Sometimes I would patiently correct them, explaining that my father was in fact Japanese, and that he had adopted me (which was a partial truth – he never adopted me since Carrie was never around long enough to finalize the paperwork).  Other times, in fact most other times, I simply threw a punch to get them to shut up.

But as I aged, I grew to hate my sperm donor, realizing that if he’d really wanted to get a hold of me, he would have by now.  Suddenly, every bad thing about myself (lank hair, crooked teeth, an inability to read a map) was his fault.  But after years of idolization followed by years of hatred, I simply stopped caring altogether.

Jasmine began to scan the room, carefully assessing every man she saw.  “Maybe that guy,” she said, pointing to a squat man whose unfortunate selection of a turtleneck sweater made his large head and thin neck look like a light bulb.  “Or that one.”  She indicated a lanky fellow in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.

“Give it up,” I begged.  “I can’t deal with it tonight, okay?”

“But aren’t you the least little bit curious?”

“No, not really.”  Which was a lie because now I, too, was looking over each of the male visitors.  Please God, not that one, I begged of a man in a hooded parka who appeared to be stuffing his pockets with tissues.  Used tissues.

“I’ll find out.  Don’t you worry,” Jasmine said, then floated off before I could tell her to stop.

Ariel had refused to come to the visitation and had stayed home with Tommy, but Grace had solemnly asked to go along despite the fact she’d only met my mother a half a dozen times.  For the past two hours, she’d been lingering by the casket, alternately reading the cards on the flower arrangements and peering fearfully at her grandmother’s body.  I caught her eye, held out my hand to her, and she rushed over.  She hugged me tightly.  “Grandma Carrie sure knew a lot of weird people,” she whispered.  We both looked over at a pair of men who were dressed in biker’s leathers and had bandanas tied around their heads.  They had matching eye patches and enormous, mutton-chop sideburns.

“Yes,” I wearily agreed.  “She sure did.”

When my father came through the door, I’d never been so glad to see someone in my whole life.  Even if he was accompanied by his current wife and Jas’s mother, Evelyn.  I don’t exactly hate her, but on the other hand, I’ve never forgiven her for marrying my father and bringing Jasmine into the picture.

Evelyn, as always, looked perfectly groomed, like she’d stepped out of the salon and then dressed in clothes that had just come off a drycleaner’s hanger.  I, on the other hand, was wilting like an uprooted weed on a hot summer day.  My dress was as limp as the used tissue in my hand, and there were great, spreading circles of dampness under my arms.  I hadn’t looked at my makeup in the mirror since arriving at the funeral home.  I was too afraid.

Grace gave her grandpa an enthusiastic hug, and shyly greeted Evelyn who smiled thinly and nodded.  Evelyn is not a bad grandmother; she’s just a distant one.  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she told me.

“Thanks, Evelyn.”  There was something about this whole funeral thing that made me extremely vulnerable, like a freshly-healed cut under a Band-Aid.  So Evelyn’s greeting, as perfunctory as it was, made me weep.

She hugged me, something she very rarely does, and whispered, “You’re a very good daughter.”

The unexpected compliment made me cry harder, and Simon offered me a fresh tissue and Grace hugged my waist until I was able to regain control.

“There are a lot of people here,” my dad said, impressed.

“They’re all Carrie’s friends.”  If I sounded bitter, it’s because I was.  Even though I’d called every person I knew, none of my old friends and neighbors had stopped by.  Never mind that Ted and I had lived in the same house for ten years, or that I’d been on every single committee at Grace’s former school.  And all those parties I used to attend?  Yeah, no one from that circle, either.  Not so much as a single flower arrangement or condolence card.  It was as if, once the divorce was finalized and the fire forced me out of the house, I’d moved to another continent instead of only another zip code.

Simon, knowing full well what I was thinking, whispered, “Screw them.  They’re not good enough for you.”

Have I mentioned how much I love my dad?

“We thought we’d take the girls out for a bite to eat,” Evelyn said.

Immediately, Jas’s selective hearing kicked in, and she came over.  “Can you drop me off at the movies?  And I need some cash.”

Evelyn’s lips tightened slightly.  I knew she hated how childishly her grownup daughter behaved.  It was one of the many reasons she’d ousted Jasmine from the house in the first place. Simon, however, was already pulling out his wallet.

“Can we go to Chuck E. Cheese or MacDonald’s,” Grace asked.  “Or that place that has the double fudge sundaes with the sparklers on top?”  Evelyn winced, but she nodded in agreement.  Like I said, she’d not a bad grandma.

After they left, my cell phone vibrated.  It was a text from Ted, my ex.  “Whatcha doin?”

His callousness made my insides shrivel.  I texted back, “I’m the funeral home.  My mother died.  Remember?”  It was all I could do to keep myself from adding: a$$hole.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a man watching me.  He stood near the display of family pictures that Jasmine and I had affixed to a large piece of cardboard.  With his v-necked sweater and leather loafers, he looked more like one of Simon’s friends than my mother’s.  He had one of those chiseled chins that looked like it had been ordered from the cover of a men’s magazine, and thick, dark hair that begged to be tousled.

My cell buzzed again.  Annoyed, I dragged my eyes from the visitor to my ex’s message.  “Oh, sorry.  I forgot about that.”

The guy in the v-necked sweater was approaching, and I realized I was holding my breath, wondering if he’d stop by to say something.  I didn’t remember him coming in, which wasn’t surprising since everything over the past few days had been a blur. 

Once more, my cell vibrated in my pocket.  I was tempted to ignore it, but if I did, Ted would have continued to text me until I answered.  His message read: “i would have come but got a med emergency.”

Medical emergency, my ass.  Like I said before, Ted’s an orthodontist, so unless a kid’s rubber band snapped hard enough to put out an eye, I doubted there was much of a crisis.  I only had time to send him another text (“Ok.  See you later.”) before Mr. V-neck sweater was standing in front of me.  I had to tilt my head up to meet his gaze.  Oh, there was such sadness in his eyes!  But I had a feeling it wasn’t related to the funeral.  It seemed come from a deep world-weariness or the weight of a secret that was too much to bear.

I wanted to speak, but couldn’t.  I’m ashamed to admit it, but this guy rocked me like I was a teenager all over again.  My knees were watery, my cheeks hot, and I had that delicious, warm, tingling feeling between my legs.  I wondered if it was okay to put the moves on a guy I’d just met at my mother’s funeral, but then I figured that if my mother had been in my place, she certainly would have done it.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that she would have leapfrogged over my casket to get at him.