Hallowed (32 page)

“I’m little but I’m strong,” Jeffrey boasts. He never was one for being modest. “I’m Mr.

Amazing!”

“How’d you do that?” Younger Clara seems as puzzled as the carny as she accepts the giant black-and-white bear. I still have that bear. It’s on the top shelf of my closet. I named him Mr. Amazing. Until now I’d forgotten why.

“Want to see me do it again?” Jeffrey asks.

“That’s okay, buddy,” Mom says gently. “We should give the other people a chance.

Besides, we don’t want to show off.”

The camera tilts as she hugs him, up into the blue, cloudless sky. For a moment the noise of the boardwalk lulls, and you can hear the crash of the surf, the cries of the seagulls. Then the screen goes blank. Happy time over.

I turn to look at Mom. Her eyes are closed and her breath is deep and even. Fast asleep.

I pull the blankets up over her. I kiss her, lightly, on the cheek, breathe in her smell of rose and vanilla.
I was her happiest time,
I think. And it seems, after all that she’s lived, all that she’s experienced in a hundred and twenty years on earth, being her happiest time is a huge honor.

“I love you, Mom,” I whisper, and even in sleep she hears me.

I know,
she answers in my head.
I love you too.

Later Dad carries her out to the back porch to see the stars. It’s a warm night, crickets chirping their hearts out, light breeze blowing. Spring is about to give way into summer.

Watching my parents together, the way they seem to speak to each other without words, the way his touch seems to strengthen her, it is undeniable that their love is a powerful, transcendent thing.

This love will survive her death. But was it worth it? I can’t help but wonder. Was it worth all the hardship she mentioned, the suffering of their separation, the pain of having him for such a short time and then having to let him go?

Watching them, I think it must be. When he kisses her lightly on the lips, brushes a tendril of hair out of her face, adjusts the shawl around her shoulders, she gazes up at him with nothing but pure love in her midnight eyes. She’s happy.

You will be happy, she told me.

You will shine.

Mom asks to speak with Jeffrey. He comes out on the porch with her and they have a long talk. I watch them from the living room. Jeffrey is slumped in the Adirondack chair next to Mom’s, his hands folded in his lap, looking down. I can’t hear what they’re saying, and anyway it’s none of my business, but I think maybe it’s the same thing she told me earlier. My purpose, she said, is you.

Jeffrey keeps nodding, and then he kneels in front of her, leans in stiffly to hug her, and I turn away from the window. I’m startled to see Dad standing by the fireplace, a glass of red wine in his hand. His eyes are filled with knowledge.

“Now’s the time for you to be brave, Clara,” he says. “Very soon.” I nod silently. Then I go to Dad and step into the circle of his joy, and try to let it fill me, push aside the sudden ache that’s growing in my chest.

Chapter 19

The D-Word

I wake up before dawn with this strange feeling, something like déjà vu. I sit up with a gasp, then tear out of bed and down the stairs and burst into Mom’s room as Carolyn is coming out. She nods at me. “Today,” she says.

Now we’re all assembled in there: Jeffrey, whose anger has deserted him for the moment, sitting in a kitchen chair by her bed, leaning forward onto his knees. His eyes never leaving her face. Billy stands in the corner and doesn’t say a word, but whenever Mom looks at her, she smiles. Carolyn flits in and out to take her pulse and try in vain to get her to drink something.

Dad sits at the foot of the bed, passing the time cracking angel jokes.

“Do you know why angels can fly?” he asks us. We all kind of shake our heads. “Because we take ourselves so lightly.”

Killer, I know. But it’s comforting, him being there. He’s only been hanging around with us for a little more than a week, but already I feel used to him, his silent joy, his steadiness, his weird sense of humor that fits just perfectly with Mom’s.

And then there’s me. I’m holding her hand. Waiting. All of us waiting, like we are a wheel and Mom is the center of it, the hub. We rotate around her.

“Such serious faces,” she whispers. “Geez, is someone dying?” But then she stops talking altogether. It takes too much effort. She sleeps, and we watch the rise and fall of her chest. I have to pee in the worst way, but I’m afraid to leave the room.

What if she goes while I’m not there? What if I miss it?

I cross my legs and I wait. I examine her hand in mine. She’s wearing her wedding ring again, a simple slender silver band. She and I have the same hands, I realize. I’ve never noticed that before. Hers are frail now, light as the hollow bones of a bird’s, but the resemblance to mine is there. We have the same long nail beds. The same spacing of our knuckles, lengths of our fingers, the same vein that crosses the back of our left hand.

All I have to do to find my mother is to look at my hands.

Then she takes a deep, shuddering breath and opens her eyes, and I forget about having to pee.

She looks at Dad. He reaches for her free hand, the one I’m not squeezing on to for dear life, and he kisses her wrist.

She looks around without moving her head, just her wide blue eyes, but I can’t tell if she really sees any of us anymore. Her lips move.

“Beautiful,” I think she says.

Then I’m distracted for a minute because Dad disappears. Right in front of our eyes, he simply vanishes. One second he’s sitting on the bed, holding Mom’s hand, and the next, gone.

It takes me a moment to realize that Mom’s gone too. It’s so quiet, I should have known.

We’re all holding our breath. Mom’s lying back on the pillows with her eyes closed again. But she’s not there. Her chest isn’t moving. Her heart has stopped beating. Her body is here, but she’s gone.

“Amen,” Billy says.

Jeffrey jumps up. The noise of his chair clattering back against the wall seems unbearably loud. His face looks like a mask to me, stretched at the lips, eyebrows drawn low over his red-rimmed eyes. A single tear makes its way down his cheek, hovers on his chin. Furiously he dashes it away and flees the room.

I hear the front door bang as he goes. His truck roars to life, then peels on down the driveway, scattering gravel.

Something floats its way up from my chest, not a sound but a terrible choking ache that makes me think my heart will explode.

“Billy . . . ,” I call desperately.

She’s here. Her hand comes down on my shoulder.

“Just breathe, Clara. Breathe.”

I focus on getting the air to move in and out of my lungs. I don’t know how long we stay in this position, Billy with her fingers dug into the flesh of my shoulder, hurting me but a hurt that feels good, reminds me that I, unlike my mother, still inhabit my body.

Seconds tick by. Minutes. Possibly hours. It occurs to me that Mom’s hand is being warmed by mine. If I take it away, it will get cold. Then I’ll never hold her hand again.

Outside the sky goes gray. A light drizzle of rain falls against the house. It feels appropriate for it to rain at a time like this. It feels right.

I glance up at Billy.

“Is this you?” I tip my head toward the window.

She smiles this odd, hurt twist of her lips. “Yep. I know it’s a silly human perspective, but I can’t help it.”

“I don’t want to let her go.” It’s one of those sentences I know I will hear echoing around in my head forever, along with the sound of my own ragged, broken voice.

“I know, kid,” Billy says with her own bit of a rasp. “But you’re not really holding her now. You know that’s not her anymore.”

After the initial quiet the phone starts ringing every few minutes, and then the doorbell, and people start pouring in. At first I feel compelled to greet them, like it’s my duty as the only member of my family who actually stuck around for this, as Mom’s child, to let them in and thank them personally for their abundance of sympathy and food. They should warn you about the food. When this kind of thing happens, when someone you love dies, people bring food. So here’s the contents of the Gardner refrigerator: one giant lasagna, three separate and equally disgusting macaroni salads, two fruit salads, one cherry pie, two apple pies and an apple crisp, one bucket of cold fried chicken, one mystery casserole, one spinach-cranberry-and-walnut salad that comes with an unopened bottle of blue cheese dressing, and a meat loaf. The shelves of our poor refrigerator sag under the weight of it all.

Here’s another thing they don’t tell you beforehand: people will bring enough food to feed an orphanage in China, but you won’t be hungry.

It starts to feel like every person who shows up is chipping away a piece of me when they say, “I’m so sorry, Clara. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to call.”

“She’s suddenly very supportive, isn’t she?” mutters Billy after Julia—yep, that angel-blood who kept asking all the biting questions at the last congregational meeting—leaves one of those macaroni salads and her deepest condolences.

“Yeah, I was tempted to tell her that Samjeeza’s hiding out there in the woods.” Billy’s dark eyes widen. “Is he?”

I shake my head. “No. When Dad banishes someone, I think they stay banished. I just wanted to freak her out a bit.”

“Right. Well, you should have told her. Then we could have seen just how fast she can fly.”

We smile together. It’s the closest we can come at the moment to joking around. The ache is still here inside me, like an open, raging hole in the middle of my chest. I catch myself touching that spot, right in the center of my sternum, like one of these times I’ll actually be able to put my fist in there.

Billy looks at me. “Why don’t you go upstairs? You don’t have to be here for these people. I’ll take care of it.”

“Okay.” Except that I can’t think what I’m going to do with myself upstairs.

When I get to my room I find Christian sitting on the eaves. This might appear strange to visitors, it occurs to me, but I decide I don’t care. The ache is becoming an ugly hollowness that is in some ways worse than the original ache. But at least I can’t feel Christian’s emotions on the other side of the window. Or his memory of our kiss.

When did you get here?
I send to him.

Earlier. Around nine.

I don’t feel my own surprise. My mother died at a few minutes to ten.

I told you I’d be here,
he says.
You can ignore me, though. Whatever you want.

I want to take a nap.

Okay. I’ll be here.

I lie down on top of the covers, not bothering to slip under the sheets. I turn my face to the wall. Christian’s not looking at me now, but still.

I should cry, I think. I haven’t cried yet. Why haven’t I cried yet? I’ve been crying for months now at every little thing, boo-hoo-hoo, poor me, but today, on the day that my mother actually dies, nothing. Not one tear.

Jeffrey cried. Billy wept using the entire sky. But not me. With me there’s just the ache.

I close my eyes. When I open them again I see that two hours have passed, although I don’t feel like I’ve slept. The sun is lower in the sky.

Christian’s still on the roof.

I get the sudden urge to call him, to ask him to come in and lay down with me. Just like before, the night I found out about the hundred-and-twenty-years rule. Except this time, I wouldn’t want him to touch me or anything. Or talk. But maybe if he got close to me I could feel something. Maybe I could cry and the ache would go away.

He turns his head, meets my eyes. He can hear me.

But I don’t ask him in.

It’s late afternoon when suddenly Christian stands up without a word, and flies away.

Then there’s a light knock at my door, and Tucker sticks his head in.

“Hey.”

I shoot out of bed, hurl myself into his arms. He hugs me close, presses my head into his chest, says something I don’t hear into my hair.

Why can’t I cry?

He pulls back. “I came as soon as I found out.”

I would have called Tucker right after it happened, of course, but he was at school, and I didn’t have the energy to have him pulled out, find him a ride, all that. “Does everyone at school know?”

“Pretty much. Are you all right?”

I don’t know how to answer this. “I was sleeping.”

I disentangle myself from his arms and go over to the bed and sit down. It’s hard to look at him while he’s staring so intently right into my face, trying to meet my eyes. I pick at the stitching on the quilt.

Tucker seems to be at a loss for something to say. He glances around my room. “I’ve never been in here before,” he says. “It’s nice. It fits you.” He clears his throat. “Wendy’s downstairs. We brought you a chocolate cream pie my mom wanted to send over. And a roast chicken and some green-bean thing.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“It’s a good pie. Do you want me to get Wendy?”

“Not yet.” I dare to look at him. “Could you just . . . hold me, for a while?” He looks relieved. Finally, something he can do. He drops onto the bed behind me and I stretch out and we spoon, his hand resting on my hip.

I don’t feel anything. I don’t think anything. I just breathe. In and out. In and out.

Tucker strokes my hair. There’s something so tender about the gesture. It might as well have been him whispering
I love you
.

I love you too,
I send to him, even though he won’t hear it.

But I don’t feel love. I say it because I know it to be true, but I don’t feel it. I’m too numb for that. I don’t deserve his love, I think. Even now, that moment with Christian in the cemetery is like a dark cloud in my mind.

Three days pass. That’s something you don’t expect, either. You think, death, then funeral, then graveside and all that, then done. But between the death and the funeral there’s a million small events nobody ever thinks about. Writing obituaries. Choosing flowers. Picking out what my mom will wear as she lies in the casket, and what clothes I will wear to her funeral, which for me is a no-brainer: black dress, Mom’s sensible pumps, her silver charm bracelet. I even tell Jeffrey which tie he should wear, the striped silver one, but when I say that he gives me this cold look, and tells me he’s going to wear a black tie.