After two days in my room, I try to remember how to sit up so I can go downstairs and demand my parents take me to the hospital. I will insist a surgeon open my chest, because I’m certain he will discover that my heart looks nothing like the vibrant, shiny, pulsating core we were shown in biology class. Instead they will find crumbles of coal, or maybe just an empty cavity where my heart used to be. When I come out of surgery, the doctors will explain that we can register for a donor but that the prognosis is bleak, because the waiting list of people with a broken heart is endless and I have just stepped in at the end of the line.
The morning of the third day, it is my father who comes into my room. I smell his aftershave first, then feel his weight sitting at the end of my bed, but I remain completely still, as if I have just been caught in one of the games of freeze tag we used to play at the cottage in the summer, waiting until someone passes underneath my legs to free me again. Barry was the only one who could manage to sneak around and put me back into play before our parents would tell us to come in for the night.
“Pres. Are you awake?” my father asks. “Honey, I know you’re awake. It’s time. Today it’s time. Your mother picked out some clothes for you. The shower is free. We set clean towels out on the counter, a fresh bar of the lavender soap you like. Make sure you dry your hair all the way. The temperature is dropping, and your mother doesn’t want you catching a cold.”
He talks as if I am going to get ready for a piano recital.
“Your mother thought it would be nice for you to do one of the readings at the service. We’ve made a photocopy of the section. It’s very brief, easy. Nothing to get worked up about. It’s just a piece of paper.” He sighs and adds quietly, “I’m sure your uncle will appreciate it.”
I answer with silence.
“Presley. It’s time to go.”
It’s not a request anymore. His declaration becomes gospel, just like when he determined Thanksgiving dinner would be served with or without Betsi.
I open one eye but avoid making direct contact with my father’s. My clock radio tells me it is 8:32A.M .
“Did it snow?” I ask, my voice small and hoarse.
“Yes,” he tells me. “It snowed a lot, Presley. It’s been snowing for days.”
I stay in the shower until the hot water becomes lukewarm against the back of my neck, then turn the water off and heat myself with the steam that has collected in the bathroom as the water disappears. I wrap my freshly washed hair in a thick baby-blue towel, tying the belt of my winter robe around my waist until it is snug and tight. My outfit for the day waits for me on the back of the bathroom door—my black wool skirt and matching cardigan wrapped in plastic fresh from the dry cleaner; a pair of stockings draped over one shoulder; a strand of my mother’s pearls wound around the neck of the hanger.
I rub away the steam to uncover a clear spot on the mirror, studying the lack of color in my face, the circles engraved under my eyes. Like my clothes, other necessities have been laid out next to the sink—deodorant, comb, gel, hair dryer, a compact of blush, a tube of sheer maroon lipstick. It’s the one item in the group that is not mine: the tube is too expensive, the department-store kind in a gold and red case. It’s not my mother’s either; she never strays from the rose or coral family. This color is much too dramatic for her tastes.
I pop the cap off the tube and twirl it up. The tip is sharp, angled, curved just slightly at the end. It’s the only clue I need.
Betsi has returned.
I find her behind our garage, sitting on an overturned bucket in the snow, smoking a cigarette and pulling the collar of her black leather coat closer to her neck. There are mascara smears underneath her eyes. Her hair is pulled back fiercely, knotted in a small tight bun at the nape of her neck. She doesn’t see me at first, and I watch her whispering something to herself that I can’t make out.
“Hi.” It might be the first time I’ve spoken to her since she moved out.
“Oh, Presley!” She exhales, her tossed cigarette sizzling in the snow. Her embrace nearly knocks me over like a linebacker, her arms circling and imprisoning mine before I can decide whether or not I want to raise them. If she remembers anything about our last interaction, she doesn’t let on.
“I just can’t believe it, I can’t even think straight, it’s all happening so quickly, the accident, the funeral—”
“You’re tan,” I blurt out.
“What?” she says, releasing me.
I step back and take a harder look. “You’re tan,” I repeat. “Your face.”
“Oh. Well, it’s probably from Vegas. I don’t even know. Where is everyone else? Are we going?” she rambles, tapping out another cigarette from her pack.
“Almost,” I say. I repeat what I was told in the kitchen. “Dad is warming up the car. Mom is making plans where to meet with Aunt Helen, and then we’re supposed to go.”
“Will you sit with me, Pres?” Betsi pleads, her frantic eyes dashing around my face as if it’s a racetrack and she can’t find the finish line. She slips the cigarette into her mouth, but it’s backward and she’s about to light the wrong end. “Please? I really need you. Everyone else has been walking around like, like, I don’t know, just notsaying anything, and I can’t stand it.” Betsi realizes her mistake and drops the wasted cigarette on the ground. “See? I can’t even smoke right. I just don’t know if I can make it through this day without you. I can’t even imagine walking into the funeral home.”
Her bloodshot eyes finally lock with mine.
“I…haven’t seen him yet,” she whispers. “The body.”
“We should go wait in the car,” I say, turning and walking away from her words.
“Yes, we should,” she repeats, scampering next to me, slipping one of her leather-gloved hands into my own, as if I am the mother and she is the child being walked to her first day of school.
Betsi sits in the backseat between me and Peter, who is dressed in a blue blazer usually reserved for weddings and baptisms, with a navy-and-kelly-green tie clipped to the collar of his pressed shirt. He’s holding an old issue ofNewsweek —it’s our father’s subscription—and for once I wonder if his reading materials are simply a prop.
Betsi leans more toward my side, so I press myself as close to the door as possible, resting my head against the window, the glass like a sheet of ice next to my cheek. Betsi’s gloves are in her lap, and she fidgets with a blue rhinestone ring on her right hand, twisting it around her slim finger and rubbing the top of the stone. I sneak a look at her face and see she is moving her lips again, repeating something with only the faintest sound escaping. The car radio is silent, so she is not singing along with any music the rest of us can hear.
“What day is it?” I ask, watching my father in the rearview mirror as he drives and tries to keep his eyes on the road.
“It’s Monday, Presley. You know that,” my mother answers. Even though I am the one who just emerged from the cocoon of my room this morning, it is my mother who seems to have transformed over the past few days. Her normal layer of worry has been covered by a sheet of calm. She seems out of place, like a Christmas tree that’s been left in the living room well past the New Year. “We’re almost there,” she adds, as if I am impatient and eager to reach our final destination.
When my father turns the corner, we are still three blocks from the funeral home, but there is already a stream of cars coming from both directions and pulling into the parking lot. Clusters of people are hovering outside on the shoveled sidewalks, and I start to recognize faces from school.
“There are so many people.” Betsi breaks her silent mantra to mutter exactly what I am thinking.
“Barry has a lot of friends,” my mother says. “He’s very popular.”
“He was.” It’s Peter talking.
“What’s that?” my mother asks, flipping down the visor mirror to double-check that every hair is in place, her lipstick fresh.
“He was. He was very popular,” Peter q
uietly corrects her.
Betsi and I stare at him. My mother continues fixing herself, mumbling, “Hmm,” which I guess is supposed to qualify as some sort of response. My father parallel-parks on the street and remains silent.
“Why don’t you all head in? I’ll be right behind you,” he says. “Betsi, can I talk to you for a minute?”
The sun hides behind fat puffy clouds, refusing to come out and melt the snow packed around us. My mother ushers Peter and me toward the funeral home. I turn to look over my shoulder, expecting to find my father yelling at Betsi, but I see her nod and pull out another cigarette, which she lights correctly this time—and then hands to my father. He takes a long drag, holding the smoke in his lungs for a moment and then letting it disappear into the winter air. He starts to take another drag and sees me watching him. I turn away and keep up with my mother’s strides, brisk and even, as if we are marching into the battle of our lives.
The inside of the funeral home looks like a school assembly but smells like a combination of canned air freshener and rubbing alcohol. It seems like nearly everyone from the senior class is here, and most of the faculty. Word must have spread quickly over the past few days, even with the holiday break. Outside of the room where the service will be held, there are clusters of junior and senior girls weeping softly and anchoring themselves in each other’s arms. I see Liz, the girl who stopped Barry in the hallway on the first day of school, and overhear her lie to her friends, “We were so close. He was going to ask me to prom.” I pass behind her and make my way toward Hannah, Jill, and Karen, who are waiting in what seems like a receiving line. Karen embraces me first, hard but quick, followed by Jill, who has wads of tissue crumpled in the palm of each hand.
Hannah hugs me last and longest.
“I thought you weren’t coming back until tonight,” I say.
“My parents flew me out yesterday on standby,” she tells me. “We called—all of us—but your mom said you were…unavailable.”
“We’re so sorry,” Jill offers. “I can’t believe he’s gone, everyone worshipped him so much.” Karen nudges her with an elbow, but Jill’s pause button is out of order. “It’s just so awful, the drowning, all of it—”
“Jill,” Hannah says cautiously while Karen tries to plunge daggers from her eyes into Jill’s throat to make her stop talking.
Jill swallows her sentence but adds, “I just meant I hope he didn’t suffer.”
“Presley!” Betsi’s voice storms into the conversation followed by the rest of her. “There you are. Oh, girls, it was so nice of you to come.” She wraps her arm around mine, marking me as her territory. I notice that her coat is closed but off by one button. “Pres, shouldn’t we go in now?”
“I think I want to stay out here with my friends for a little longer,” I say.
“But you promised you’d walk in with me and stay by me.” Betsi’s voice is almost a whine, and it briefly feels like we are having an argument over who can sit at whose lunch table.
“It’s okay, Pres,” Hannah says, trying to diffuse the scene Betsi is creating. “We’ll find you later.”
“I’ll walk in with you too, Pres.” I don’t need to turn around to identify the voice. I feel Jack place his hands on my shoulders, and I let them guide me out of Betsi’s grasp and into the next room. Betsi and the girls fall into formation and follow.
My mother is near the front, pointing out an arrangement of lilies and lilacs to my aunt Helen. “Breathtaking,” I hear her say. “Aren’t they?”
Peter lingers near her, obviously trying to decide where to sit. The rest of the cousins have already filled in the second row. My father and Uncle Tim are planted in the front. My father holds his shoulders stiff and rigid, while Uncle Tim’s shoulders are beginning to cave until Dad places his arm around them as an anchor.
And then there is Barry. When I first see him lying in an open casket in his pressed suit, it looks like he’s sleeping, as if I could walk up to him and poke him in the ribs until he’s forced to giggle and say, “Good one, Pres. You got me.”
“‘Behold,’” I announce to the room. “‘I tell you a mystery.’”
I have been assigned to read a passage from Corinthians that was photocopied and handed to me on a single piece of paper. I smooth down the corners of the sheet and continue. “‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.’”
The words begin to blur in front of me. I shake my vision clear. “‘We will all be changed,’” I repeat, “‘in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.’”
My legs wobble behind the podium as I race through the rest. “…‘Where, O death, is your victory?’” I fold the paper back into a rectangle, looking up for the first time at the faces that have been staring at me. The only eyes in the room not on me are Barry’s, still closed. I wait for him to wake up, slowly stretching as he rises and yawns, asking, “Are you finished yet?”
Barry was always known as the napper in our family. It didn’t matter if he was on a plane or at fireworks on the Fourth of July. Most of the time his naps would come without warning—one minute he would be wide awake, participating in the conversations around him, and then within a matter of seconds he would be fast asleep, a bemused expression on his face as if he was already dreaming of a joke he might tell us later in the day.
I remember watching him sleep years ago, during Betsi’s twenty-first birthday party in May. Mom offered our house for the party, and Betsi invited a bunch of old friends from high school. We set up a tent out back and the grill to barbecue packs of hot dogs and hamburger patties seasoned with Lipton’s onion soup mix. My father had agreed to man the grill, but when Betsi’s friends started showing up, they concentrated mostly on drinking all of the beer stashed in giant blue coolers around the backyard, even the cans packed in ice at the very bottom. The family members invited to the party segregated themselves toward one end of the yard, watching Betsi’s friends reenact moments from their senior spirit week and prom, as if they had happened the day before.
Betsi had, of course, chosen Elvis as the sound track for her party, but when her old high school boyfriend Patrick showed up, she started pulling out tapes of a band named Chicago, then one called Boston, and I wondered if all the bands her friends liked in high school were named after cities. The more cans that disappeared, the louder the crowd became, singing along with the songs and even slow-dancing in our backyard. Mom was swaying a little bit too, holding Peter, who wasn’t old enough to walk yet. Dad had grilled way too much food, and the burgers and hot dogs lined the racks, shriveling into unrecognizable forms. I started to head toward Betsi’s group because they were clearly the most fun, but my father told me to stay away from the smoke and to go ask Barry if he wanted something to eat.
Barry had stationed himself in our new hammock, anchored between two elm trees in the farthest corner of the yard. The noise from the party was inescapable, but Barry was fast asleep, swinging back and forth slightly, as if he were in his own outdoor cradle. I quietly pulled one of the folding lawn chairs closer, settling in and positioning my paper plate carefully over my lap to catch any mustard from my hot dog so it wouldn’t stain my white party dress. I chewed on my soggy bun and listened to Chicago sing about taking away the biggest part of me, watching Barry’s chest rise and fall, and wondered if he was dreaming about his own first slow dance, just a few years away.
“There is nothing harder.”
These are the first words I hear when I fade back into the room where everything is taking place. It’s Uncle Tim’s turn at the podium. He’s armed with a speech he prepared himself, and this is how he begins.
“There is nothing harder,” he tries again, “than losing a child.”
After one complete sentence, his words evaporate and his face crumples. My father glides up to his side and eases Uncle Tim back into his seat. My mother offers him a travel-size tissue pa
ck from her purse but continues dabbing her own eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. Peter sits next to her, reading the pamphlet printed with our hymns and responses. Betsi is next, and she is trying to sit on her hands to make them stop shaking. Jack and I round out the end of the row. I let him hold two of my fingers but not the entire hand.
My father replaces Uncle Tim at the podium and says, “We want to thank everyone for coming today and giving our family such tremendous love and support. You are all invited to join us at our house following this service.” He gives out our address in case there are some who don’t know.
I pray that most of them decide not to show.
“I’m going to call the school in the morning and tell them you won’t be in,” my mother says to me as she hangs up the skirt and sweater that I left wadded on my bedroom floor.
“Why?”
“It’s okay to take a few extra days for yourself. Your teachers will understand.”
“I don’t need to,” I say, reaching over to set my alarm clock.
“It’s probably a good idea.”
“I don’twant to,” I explain.
“Well. Why don’t you sleep on it and decide in the morning.”
My mother kisses me good night on my forehead. After she closes the door, I turn off the light on my nightstand, and in the darkness, I let my tears fall for the first time. They saturate my pillowcase as my fingertips graze the cover ofTender Is the Night tucked secretly underneath. If I can fall asleep into the pages, I think maybe I might find him there, still waiting for me.
Chapter9
Let It Snow, Let It Snow,
Let It Snow
The high school hallwaysare wallpapered with posters announcing the upcoming winter formal. I walk from class to class like the Ghost of Christmas Past under the glitter and tinsel and Magic Marker sketches of mistletoe. It has been two weeks since Barry’s funeral, and the way other students react to me varies between someone nominated for prom court to an outcast with the plague. Senior girls I’ve never spoken to stop me in the hallway to tell me “I love your skirt.” It’s their version of “I’m sorry.” I’ve found three notes in my locker in the past week from boys in the sophomore class, telling me they will take me to the dance. Not asking me but telling me, as if they are bound by honor or obligation. Then there are the people I thought I counted as friends, like Karen, who refuse to look me in the eye, afraid of catching the disease known as grief.
The Girl I Wanted to Be: A Novel Page 12
