by Ava Finch
RayAnne sits and takes Gran’s hand. Now it’s only a matter of being here, waiting for the sun, waiting with Gran, who is alive but slowly growing less so. Dr. Phillips had warned about the possible rasping or gurgling, but even wending toward death, Gran—never one to demand attention, except in the kitchen—is quiet. RayAnne has been told the actual going will probably be a mere matter of a lack of oxygen, the heart slowing, and then eventually stopping. A mere matter. She presses Gran’s hand to her cheek.
Night is just letting go its grip. It’s not a dramatic or particularly pretty sunrise, more of a shimmy. No sunbursts over the horizon to light the scene; the sky simply grows lighter by degrees as Dot’s pulse grows more faint.
She counts the satin-covered buttons on Dot’s bed jacket several times, then ties and reties the little ribbons at the neck, unable to settle, because if she actually stops fidgeting long enough for Gran to die, then she will.
RayAnne edges onto the bed, stretching out next to her grandmother’s side, instinctively needing to absorb the last of her warmth. With her face near Dot’s neck, she closes her eyes, taking in the scent. Very gently she lays her palm over the quilted satin covering Dot’s breastbone, feeling the shallowest of heartbeats. After a few minutes she is straining to feel anything, pressing her hand more firmly, but the rhythm of Dot’s heart has faded from quiet to imperceptible. Like the end of a song.
For several minutes, RayAnne is stock still, fingers twined in Dot’s pearls, tears darkening the satin of the bed jacket.
How many times in thirty-four years had Gran dried her tears, hoisted her into her lap, rocked her, sung to her, scolded her, laughed with her, given in to her, colluded with her? Made a thousand other gestures, whispered a thousand comforts.
She can barely form the word and force it past her lips, but she must comply. Gran had asked only one thing of her: Say good-bye now, RayAnne.
“Good-bye, Gran.” When she was small and it was time to leave, she would press against the car window or doorway to wait for the inevitable kiss to be blown from Gran’s hand.
“Good-bye, Granny Gran.”
There is nothing to do but ease away from the bed and set her feet to the solid terrace. Before turning away, she takes in the details of the scene as if studying a photograph, committing it to memory. The morning light is kind. Gran’s features have settled lightly and smoothly across the bones of her jaw and forehead. As trite as the saying is, RayAnne cannot help thinking it. Her grandmother does look, for all the world, at peace.
Dr. Phillips rises at her approach and tucks a clipboard under his arm. He’ll be recording the time of death. They do that in films, and this moment is no more real than a film. As they pass one another at the door, she can only return his nod and register the weight of his hand on her back.
She watches until he reaches the bed. He looks intently at Dot’s face and touches her cheek with the back of his curled fingers. Straightening, he eases a pen from his breast pocket. RayAnne shuts the door before his thumb can click his pen and begin writing.
EIGHTEEN
There are details to be seen to, but she does not stay. Outside the hospital’s front doors, the sky is now bright. Still, it’s too early for cabs, so RayAnne walks to the main road and turns south, making her way across a few thoroughfares in the sparse traffic. Closer to the ocean are blocks of houses and apartment buildings. Closer yet are the beachfront homes and estates, most of them fenced or surrounded by stucco walls. Unable to find any public access to the beach, she trespasses through an open gate, blind to the gardener who pauses in his raking to watch her cut across the grass and walk the length of a wall covered in bougainvillea then across the lawn to the beach.
A haze welds the sky to ocean so there is no horizon, just a vast expanse. Once she is within a few strides of the water, she lets go, lets the sobs come in waves.
It takes two hours to walk the one-mile stretch of beach to Dune Cottage Village. Later, when she’s clear-headed enough to reconstruct the morning, she will muse that Gran’s dying hadn’t been horrible, as she had expected—the actual event had felt quite natural; the reality made much more sense than the concept. The horribleness had come in the void, the emptiness that kept stopping her in her tracks, when she had to regroup her suddenly clumsy limbs and force them to move forward.
Ky is sitting on the cottage stoop, red-eyed, mindlessly sweeping the flagstone between his spread knees with a stalk of pampas grass. His carry-on bag leans against the door. When he sees RayAnne, he stands, his arms useless at his sides. “Sis?”
“She’s gone, Ky.” RayAnne digs for the key.
“I know. I’ve just come from the hospital. I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Ray.” His face crumples and he reaches blindly. “I’m really sorry.”
She numbly submits to a hug. Once inside, she goes directly to Dot’s bedroom and locks the door behind her. Opening the closet to the wedding trousseau, she drops to her knees, crawling in under the swaying hems to lie on the carpet amid the shoes. Sliding the door shut, she closes herself in, leaving just enough light to make out the patterns and shapes of the dresses above. She reaches up to touch the different fabrics: silk, seersucker, jersey. She gathers the sandals to hang on to, weaving her fingers into the straps. The dry leather of Dot’s huaraches creaks in her grasp.
It’s nearly evening before RayAnne emerges from Dot’s room. She’d been hearing noises all day, surfacing now and then from her dreamless sleep in the closet to register distant sounds of Trinket barking, the radio droning, and Big Rick’s voice, less booming than usual.
And the phone ringing, again and again.
Her father sits at the dining room table, his eyes red behind his Ben Franklin reading glasses, Trinket whimpering in his lap. A folder from the stack on the credenza is opened before him. As RayAnne nears, he closes it and she can clearly read the label, lettered with Dot’s schoolgirl script My Funeral!—a little doodle of a daisy anchoring the exclamation point.
Ky’s sprawled at the table, his hand arranging and realigning a spill of salt along the wood grain with his index finger. Seeing her, he raises his head from the crook of his arm.
She leans over the table and glares at her father. “Where the hell have you been?”
He’s unshaven; tear tracks have dried down through his five-o’clock shadow. “Jesus, Ray. We’re here now, aren’t we?”
“We? Ky has an excuse, Dad, a blizzard. What’s yours?”
She understands this is the moment they are all supposed to be hugging and crying but damned if she’s giving the time of day. She wants answers.
Ky reaches for her. “Ray . . .”
She roughly shakes his hand off. “No. I want to hear this. What’s your story, Dad? Just where were you that you couldn’t be bothered to answer your fucking phone for two days? While I was at the hospital dealing . . . alone, while I watched Gran die?”
Big Rick blinks, his anger revving. “This isn’t the time to climb down my throat—”
Ky sweeps the salt from the table with his arm, clearly shaken. “Cut it out. Both of you.”
RayAnne controls her voice. “Just tell me where you were. What bar were you in, who was the bimbo this time?”
“I was in treatment.”
“Treatment.” Her jaw stalls open. She looks at Ky and back to Big Rick. “Treatment. How many times does that make, five?”
She doesn’t wait for the answer but wheels into the kitchen through the swinging doors. Twenty seconds later she backs out with a quart of Jameson and three lowball glasses. She lines them up and pours. “Interesting that you should bring up alcohol, because I was just thinking I could use a drink myself.”
When Ky stands, she whacks the back of his chair. “Sit down.”
He sighs and drops.
RayAnne pushes the nearly full glass to within one inch of Big Rick’s hand.
“Cheers, everyone.” She holds up her whiskey and looks to her father. “Skoal? Bottoms up? Down the hatch? Hair of the dog?”
“It’s not funny, Ray.”
“Right, I forgot. To Dot!” She tips her glass skyward before taking a heavy swig. It sears going down and stings her eyes, but she takes another before setting the glass down hard. Looking from her brother to her father, she says, “What, nobody thirsty?”
Ky stands. “Listen. I know you’ve been through a lot.” He gets up and aims himself at the patio door, taking up his glass. “But when you’re done being such a twat, you can find me on the beach, okay, Ray? I’d really like to know what’s happened the last few days.”
After the door is shut, Big Rick slides the full glass of whiskey to the middle of the table, next to the bottle.
“I’ve been at Hawthornden.” He stands and scoops up Trinket, who for once is not yipping or snarling. “I know how much you loved your grandmother.” He steps away toward the hall, heading for the guest room, his voice wobbling as he turns. “I loved her too.”
RayAnne opens her mouth, but then frowns, narrowing a distracted eye toward the dog. “Wait. When did Trinket show up?”
“Some skinny old fella dropped her off.”
Mr. D. answers his door wearing only golf shorts and dress socks. After leading her through his cottage and to the back deck, he turns on the patio lights and excuses himself. He’s back a few minutes later, having added a Hawaiian shirt and slippers, carrying a tray with tea and cookies, insisting she sit in what is obviously “his” chair.
Of course he’d known all about it. He wasn’t surprised there’d been no note.
“Your grandmother tried to write one—tried for weeks. Then she finally gave up and decided on cooking her good-byes.” He’d been helping Dot the whole time, running to the market with her lists, collecting extra Tupperware, getting the little colored stickers.
“What else did you help her with?”
He sets his elbows on his knees and looks down as if addressing his feet. “This and that. I drove her to the drugstore across town to get the insulin with a phony prescription.”
“But did you . . . did you help her?”
“Inject her? No.” He meets her eye. “I offered, but she said no. My part was to call the ambulance. We had a nice meal at her place; she wanted to walk down the beach and back alone. We had a glass of wine on her deck and said our good-byes.” Tears leak from Mr. D.’s wrinkly eyes. “I left her there, with Trinket on her lap.”
“Then?”
“Then I came home. I think I turned on the television, tried to watch Dateline or something. Then I heard Trinket barking. I went as far as the gate and lured her with treats and took her in here. I didn’t want her barking anymore, attracting attention. I waited a half hour before calling the ambulance.” He faces RayAnne. “I didn’t wait long enough. I’m so sorry.” His face crumples. “I fouled the whole thing up, and you had to go through . . . you had to . . . and that was just what she was trying to spare you in the first place.”
RayAnne cannot think of any response. She edges next to Mr. D, but he won’t look at her. She gently shakes his knee. If he hadn’t called the ambulance, Gran would’ve died on her patio, and she wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be with her in the hospital, to have had the good-bye she did. “It’s okay, Mr. D, it’s okay.”
When he walks her to the door, she asks a last question. “What did you have?”
“Pardon?”
“For dinner. What was Gran’s last meal?”
“Oh. Um, shrimp scampi, endive salad. A very good bottle of . . .” He seems to be having difficulty remembering. “It was chardonnay. We had . . . grapes, yes, grapes, a baguette, a wedge of Tilson. A simple meal, really.”
RayAnne nods and turns.
He adds, “Oh, and cake.”
She turns back. “What kind?”
“We had chocolate cake.”
On the way back to the cottage, she sees Big Rick coming down the boardwalk and sidesteps behind a palm. He’s headed to the beach, pulling Trinket along on her leash. She’s barely thought of Rory since arriving in Florida and is pressed by a wave of loneliness for him. How good it would feel to pull him into her lap, sink her face into his ruff.
In the morning she gets up early, determined to be out before her father gets up. After jamming her few things into a market bag, she changes the motel reservation for Bernadette from a single room to a double, then, remembering the food Dot prepared, changes it to a kitchenette. When the clerk mentions the price, which normally she would balk at, she says, “Fine.” Back in the murky world of life—somewhere on a different planet—there is a job awaiting her, with a contract, and she can now afford such expenses as a motel in which to mourn the death of a loved one. She upgrades her upgrade to a double oceanside kitchenette with a sitting area and balcony. Bag slung over her shoulder, she heads for the kitchen to pack up some of Gran’s edible farewells when her gaze is pulled to the dining room table and the My Funeral! folder.
She runs her finger across the words, trying but failing to imagine what it might have been like to write them. Within the folder is a preplanned funeral packet from a mortuary called Chesney’s, which sounds to RayAnne more like a bar and grill than a funeral home. Dot had taken care of everything in advance: listed the crematorium, chosen and circled an urn in Chesney’s catalog—a nonfussy raku ginger jar with an engraved brass label. There’s a mix CD of the songs Dot had chosen and a request that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the wetlands conservancy and a nonprofit group supporting sustainable fisheries. The church and the minister’s phone numbers are listed along with the time for Saturday, booked at the Unitarian church down the road.
Dot had not only planned her own funeral; she’d chosen the date and time—had done everything save write her own obituary. A delivery slip for rental folding chairs and linens confuses RayAnne until she realizes they are to be delivered for the reception—one of those awful cake and coffee hours to mark the stretch of limbo between Dot’s funeral and life without her.
RayAnne lets the folder, the script of Dot’s final days, fall to the table.
Atop the pile of papers her father has been working through is a business card over which she does a double take, blinking along the embossed letters of “Hal Bergen.” On the backside is Hawthornden, and another number, private line, all in Hal’s handwriting. Without pausing, she snatches up the phone and paces while punching the numbers. When he picks up on the third ring, she does not bother saying hello.
“Hal, why does my father have your business card with Hawthornden written on it? What’s that about?”
“RayAnne.” There’s a silence on the other end as Hal collects himself. It’s an hour earlier in Minnesota; he’d have been asleep. “First, please just let me say . . . Cassi called. I’m so sorry about your grandmother.”
“Later, okay?”
He inhales. “Right. What do you want to know?”
“What is my father doing with this card?”
“I gave it to him. Listen, I know you must be—”
“When?”
“The morning after the wrap party. You were already gone; he was sobering up in my trailer, and the more he remembered from the day before, the more upset he got. I told him I have a friend at Hawthornden that might help.”
“Treatment was your idea?”
“No. Yes. Ray, maybe you should ask him about this?”
“So, the night you came over to build shelves, you knew he was at Hawthornden? You knew that?”
“Well, I assumed he’d checked in. I’d hoped he would, but figured—”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I figured it was for him to tell you.”
She’s silent.
“RayAnne, I wanted to tell you. Anyway, I didn’t get the
chance, did I?”
It’s as if she’s in a tunnel. Any emotion that is not grief feels invasive, to be deflected. Staring out the window, she wonders what else Hal might be withholding.
“Ray, are you there? Are you okay?”
The welling anger is almost a welcome respite. “You weren’t kidding when you said you have my back, were you? How did I really get that contract, Hal? Was that you too?”
“Absolutely not. I was just looking out for you.”
“What was your plan? Get Big Rick fixed? Then fix my career? Fix me?”
“No. I—”
“Well, I’m not your project!” After slamming the receiver to its cradle she blinks several times in the dusty morning light before quietly exhaling. “Shit.”
She’s halfway to the kitchen when the phone rings. Clearing her throat, she waits a few rings before picking up. “Sorry, but just let me tell you what I don’t need—”
“RayAnne?” Bernadette sounds alarmed. “What’s going on?”
At the sound of her mother’s voice, she bursts into tears. “Mom!”
“I’m here, sweetie. I’m here, at the airport.”
Bernadette, rumpled after traveling forty sleepless hours, is wrecked, but RayAnne falls onto her as though she’s a beanbag. Through an hour of blubbering, RayAnne can only half register her mother’s words of comfort. All that matters is that she is here.
After both are bawled to exhaustion, RayAnne helps her mother unpack, and Bernadette shoves the beds closer to make room for her yoga mat and settles into Shavasana pose.
RayAnne goes to wash her face, and before she can pat her chin dry, Bernadette’s rhythmic Pranayama breathing has morphed into an adenoidal snore. RayAnne covers her mother with a shawl and watches her sleep awhile before finding a pad and pencil and retreating to the balcony, where she’ll try to wring out a few thoughts on the obituary and eulogy.
