Things That Grow

by Meredith Goldstein

  “I’m fine,” I say. “We’re all fine here.”

  He closes his eyes again and smiles.

  Chapter 7

  “The Big Whale is still open,” Seth says at my door, which is the kind of announcement that wakes a person up.

  Seth is already dressed and ready, wearing another university T-shirt (Fordham) and nautical-looking navy shorts. He’s waiting for an enthusiastic response. I sit up and wipe the gunk from my eyes.

  “I’ve never been,” I say of the tiny bar, “as I am seventeen.”

  “I can’t believe it’s still around,” Seth says, sitting on the end of my bed. “It was the reunion bar back when I was in college. Everyone would turn twenty-one or get a fake ID, and when they came home for Thanksgiving, they’d go to the Whale to see everybody. It was an absolute scene.”

  “I can’t imagine I’ll ever have a reason to go there now,” I say. “If I move and we don’t own the house anymore, I won’t be back here for reunions.”

  Seth leans back against the wall, propping himself up against my large pillow that’s in the shape of an avocado. It was a gift from him last Hanukkah.

  “I only wanted to see one person—Jake Gunther,” Seth says. “He played soccer, his jaw was so square he looked like a damn G.I. Joe doll, and his voice was deep. And Jake Gunther was not remotely homophobic. He was this ridiculously hot soccer player who could have been toxic to everyone because it was the 1990s and everyone was mad and in flannel, but he was welcoming. I could not have been more out, and he never avoided me. In fact, he flirted with me. Or maybe that was all in my mind, but my god, shit like that made my life easier back then. People cared what he thought.”

  Seth sighs. “There was this era, back when I was your age, when all the best-looking boys were named Jake. It’s like if you were born a Jake, it was your destiny to be a magnet for success, sexual and otherwise.”

  “Our popular guys are Tylers,” I tell him. “There are three. There’s also a Stephan.”

  “The Tylers are all hot?”

  I want to tell him that the Tylers aren’t my type, but it’s Seth and I trust him, so I wind up admitting that I have recurring fantasies about all the Tylers, even though they call each other “bro” and do not seem very welcoming.

  I hate that I want the Tylers to notice me, and that I was thrilled when they were nicer to me during the three weeks I dated a lacrosse player. I tell him that the worst Tyler is Tyler Rych (yes, pronounced “rich”), who’s in my social studies class, who sometimes just stares at my boobs without being shy about it. I hate that I have a fantasy where he begs me to go to prom with him and I tell him no.

  “Hmm.” Seth stands up all of a sudden. “God, I regress in this house. Look at me; I just went from almost fifty to sixteen. You do know your bedroom was my bedroom, right?”

  I did know that, but it’s easy to forget that Seth has a whole history here. He and my mom moved here when they were six. This is more his home than mine.

  I look at the desk across the room, which was also his. Seth became a writer sitting on that hard wooden chair that’s covered in white paint that’s bubbling up and peeling.

  “You’ll probably have some feelings about selling this house,” I say, baiting him a little. “The memories and all.”

  Seth raises an eyebrow. “I don’t have much love for this house. I was desperate to get out of it when I actually lived in it.”

  That’s not the answer I want to hear.

  “But your memories of Grandma are here.”

  “I guess that’s true,” he says, and smiles.

  I grab my phone from where it’s plugged in next to my bed. There’s a message from Chris confirming that after he finishes watching Adam for a few hours, he’ll join us on the drive to Rhode Island to scatter the second box.

  Seeing his name makes the memory of last night come back to me, and I’m baffled by how romantic it felt. My neck is probably getting blotchy, which is what happens when I feel embarrassment, but Seth doesn’t notice. He’s staring out my window, and I imagine he’s thinking about Grandma or the house, or maybe Jake Gunther.

  * * *

  Seth is on the phone with Ethan, behind a closed door, when the doorbell rings. I assume it’s Chris and that he’s early, but when I open the door, it is Jessica. Alone. Which is weird, and she seems to know it. I look behind her to see if Jason is obscured by something, but he’s missing.

  I realize that I’ve never seen Jess without him, apart from when she and I use a public restroom at the same time, or when we happen to pass each other in the hall.

  “Where’s Jason?” I ask.

  “I do exist without him,” she says, smiling.

  “Really?” I answer with a smirk.

  “As much as you exist without Chris,” she says, and that comment knocks my heart around in my chest.

  Jessica’s wearing thin purple athletic shorts and a blue tank top that says RUN in big letters, and I feels like it’s shouting at me. Her black hair is in a high ponytail. She’s wearing the fancy watch she got for Christmas. She and Jason both asked their parents for these expensive watches that track every change in their pulse, as well as a bunch of other athletic things. I cannot imagine wanting to know that much about what’s happening inside my body.

  “How many steps have you taken today?” I ask.

  She looks at her wrist and hits a button.

  “Sixteen thousand,” she says.

  “It’s only one in the afternoon,” I say, and she shrugs.

  “So,” I say, trying not to sound awkward, “what’s up?”

  She’s carrying two big cloth bags, which she brings into my kitchen.

  “Sorry, these are heavy,” she explains.

  I follow her and watch her take out long Pyrex trays. “From my mom,” she explains.

  “Lasagna?” I ask.

  Last night, two random neighbors left lasagna on our porch. “These will be known as our lasagna days,” Seth had said before putting them in the freezer.

  Jessica crinkles her nose at my question.

  “Are you kidding?” she says, and begins to remove a series of plastic containers filled with Korean food. There are enough scallion pancakes to feed us for weeks, and a vat of the clear noodle and chicken thing I’ve eaten at her house.

  “I love your mother,” I tell Jessica as I survey the spread. “I love everybody else’s mother. I’ve never eaten so well as I have over these last few days. I wish Grandma were here just to eat this stuff too.”

  Jessica turns to me, and for a second, I am overwhelmed by her. She is pretty and smart and athletic and easy going, so many things I’m not. She is popular with everyone at school, but she doesn’t seem to care, and she has always prioritized our little group. When I make judgments about kids who seem like dicks, she jumps to defend them.

  “His dad is horrible to him,” Jess once told me when I went off about this menacing bully kid who I caught peeing on a geeky kid’s car. “That kind of behavior starts at home.”

  I never think much about my friendship with Jess, because winning her over never took much effort; she and Jason already knew Chris through middle school, so when I met him, they were part of the package. But looking at her now, I know I’ll miss her too. She’s a really good editor. She’s usually the first person who reads our stories, and she always has cool things to say about them.

  I should have spent more alone time with her. I shouldn’t have thought of her and Jason as extensions of Chris.

  She has finished making a tower of Pyrex in our refrigerator, and she closes the refrigerator door, leaning her back against it, her arms across her chest.

  “I’m sorry I was awkward that shiva day,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since we left. I can talk about a lot of things, but I never know what to say when someone dies. Jason was so good at being comforting, but I couldn’t come up with the words.”

  “You were great,” I say. “There is no right thing to say,
really. It just sucks.”

  She nods.

  “Chris told me you’ve already spread some of the ashes,” she says.

  “We’ll spread the second box today,” I tell her.

  “Was it horrible?” Jessica asks, her voice quiet.

  “Which part?”

  “Seeing it—the ashes.” She blows her breath up into her bangs. She’s uncomfortable.

  “It was strange,” I confess. “I mean, none of this feels real yet. It doesn’t feel like she actually died—like she’ll come home after all this and it’ll just be normal again. I can’t really picture her as ashes.”

  Jessica nods. She gives me a sad smile and then opens her mouth and closes it again.

  “What?” I say, because she has something to get off her chest. She does the bangs thing again.

  “What?” I say. “Just tell me. Please.”

  “It’s just . . . remember Winston?”

  “How could I forget Winston?”

  Winston was Jessica’s family’s German shorthaired pointer who died over the holidays our sophomore year. The unspoken thing at the time was that even though Jessica was miserable—inconsolable, really—in the weeks after Winston’s death, I could tell her parents were totally okay with it and maybe even relieved to let him go. By the end, Winston was so old that he was peeing everywhere, and they had him walking around the house in a doggie diaper. Winston couldn’t hear and couldn’t see, and sometimes he’d bark at nothing. He’d regularly gallop straight into their family’s curio cabinet, not noticing all the breakable glass inside. He looked miserable.

  Jessica hadn’t wanted to accept that it was his time. Her grief was epic. So her parents threw this big memorial dinner after he was gone, so she could feel like her pet had really been laid to rest.

  The meal, which included a lot of the kind of noodles Jessica just put in my fridge, was probably nine courses. We all made speeches. I talked about how warm it felt when Winston put his head in my lap.

  But Chris did the best thing; his contribution was what helped Jess really move on.

  He drew a portrait of Winston that now hangs in Jessica’s bedroom. It doesn’t look exactly like Winston, of course; Chris had imagined the dog reincarnated as a human man. His afterlife version of Winston was a tall, strapping farmer with skin and hair the color of Winton’s dark brown coat. This Winston stood on a farm, tending to vegetables. Chris named the illustration Winston Reborn.

  “He would be a farmer in another life,” Jessica had said, crying, when she first saw the illustration. “He loved carrots.”

  “I know, Jess,” Chris had said.

  “Thank you, Chris. It’s beautiful.”

  They’d hugged then, and I was jealous because the hug lasted several long seconds and he rubbed his hand up and down her back twice. That’s when I started to realize how my feelings for him had grown. I couldn’t even watch two longtime platonic friends hug without being an idiot about it. I realized that no one other than Chris could be so thoughtful, that not even Jessica’s parents could make the kind of picture that would help her let go of her beloved pet without having to feel that he was really gone.

  “What about Winston?” I ask her now. After that night, we pretty much never spoke of him.

  “Well, we cremated him,” she says.

  “Oh. I thought you buried him in a pet cemetery,” I say.

  “We did—he’s on a plot in Middleborough—but we cremated him first.”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t know what she’s trying to tell me. She rubs the back of her neck under her ponytail. I don’t want her to compare the loss of Winston with the death of my grandmother.

  “The vet took Winston’s body somewhere for cremation,” she continues, “and when we went to pick him up, they gave us a bag.”

  “Of his remains.”

  “Yeah, a bag of Winston. I just wondered how it was for you, because when we got the bag, it wasn’t what I expected. I don’t think any of us expected it.”

  “Expected what? That a body doesn’t look like ashes?” I say. “I knew it was going to look like gravel. Bone is white. We learned all about it at the funeral home.”

  “Right,” Jessica says. “It is sort of white, I guess. But that’s not what upset me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well,” Jessica says, her voice soft. “I asked my mom and dad if I could bring Winston down to the cemetery myself, like, to hold him one more time. Like, hold him in my arms.”

  She blinks a tear away.

  “Anyway,” she says, “it was heavy.”

  “Death is ridiculously heavy,” I agree.

  “No, I mean, the ashes were heavy. Like, literally. The bag of ashes—what we got from the vet—it was . . . huge. I was just so freaked out that the bag was so massive. It felt like I was carrying a dead weight, and I guess I was. I don’t know why I thought it would be light and airy. The feel of it made it all seem so much more final. It was a body. Like a full dead body.”

  “Oh,” I say, my brain blank.

  “I asked my mom about it, and she said she was surprised, too. You hear ashes and you think of something light, like feathers that used to be a body, but that’s not how it feels.”

  I nod because I don’t know what else to say.

  “I guess my point is that Winston was, like, a forty-pound dog. So . . .”

  “So?”

  I try to process this as quickly as I can—and then she explains.

  “I was just worried about you. That it would be heavy. That it would upset you. I’ve been so worried about how it would feel for you to hold that bag.”

  Jess is crying a little now, and before I know it, I’m hugging her. She’s been worried about me for days, and she’s so vulnerable right now, and we are having a moment that is just ours.

  For the first time, I feel like she is my friend too. Not just someone I inherited.

  I open the fridge, take out one of the containers of scallion pancakes she just put in there, and start eating one cold. I groan a little because it tastes so good.

  Jessica grins.

  “I made those,” she says.

  “They’re magic, as usual,” I say, and swallow another bite. “Thank you.

  “The thing is,” I continue, needing to make this point out loud so I can breathe easier about the second box, “we asked the funeral home for four boxes. So one box at a time isn’t so heavy.”

  This time she blows her bangs up with relief.

  “That makes sense,” she says. “Four boxes makes it better.”

  “I think so,” I say, and in this moment I want to hug her again. I know it was hard work for her to tell me all this.

  “Lori?” she asks. “Will you have to move?”

  “I think so,” I say. Jessica’s frowns, and I nod at her reaction. “I don’t want to leave. This is the only place that’s ever felt like home.”

  “I like having you here,” she says. “I love our group.”

  We have a group, and I’ve never really understood how important that is.

  “And I’m worried about Chris,” she adds.

  “I’m more worried about me,” I admit. “Me without Chris.”

  “Why do you think you guys have never tried to be together?” she asks.

  She’s never been as blunt with me about this, which is kind of weird.

  I tell her what I’ve already told Seth.

  “We would never risk the friendship,” I say.

  “I’m risking it with Jason,” she tells me. “I know that and I don’t care.”

  “This is better,” I tell her. “It’s less messy. In fact, it’s time for me to get used to needing him less. I’m going to try to wean off. See him one or two fewer hours a day, to start preparing.”

  “I guess I get it,” Jessica says. She doesn’t seem to get it at all, but it’s okay.

  “Anyway, he should be here soon, so I should probably get ready,” I tell her. “But thanks, you know, for the
food and for checking in on me.”

  “Sure,” she says, and she gives me a quick hug and leaves.

  The doorbell rings a few minutes later, and I know it’s him, as if he knows that I don’t really want to have to let go of him at all.

  * * *

  It’s already easier without Mom and Bill. We need only one car for the three of us, and the ride feels upbeat. Less like we’re going to a funeral.

  I keep glancing at the rearview mirror so I can watch Chris, who is sleeping in the back seat. Occasionally his lids flutter, and I know he’s dreaming. He can fall asleep anywhere.

  Seth has been asking me all about school and about my friends—where I want to go to college and why kids like to watch Friends on Netflix even though it’s old (I do not watch that show, I tell him, but I do like older shows like The Office)—and I realize that he is more interested in me than Mom ever has been. The actual me, not just the parts of me on her “I’m not the worst mother in the world” checklist.

  She asks about grades and about what I’m eating and whether I’m meditating with the app she sent me, like I ever would, but she doesn’t ask about things that matter. Sometimes she calls and asks a question but doesn’t pay attention to the answer. Like I could just say random syllables and she’d say, “Okay, good, honey.”

  Seth actually cares who I am.

  He has been extra interested on this trip, maybe because I’m more grown up. I’m becoming a peer. We shared a life-and-death experience together that will bond us forever.

  “Like, what happens with kids and prom these days,” he asked at the start of the ride. “Is that whole promposal thing real? Do people still rent tuxes, or are we finally beyond that?”

  I told him about the controversial promposal last year, when this guy, Nick Luster, convinced his history teacher, Mrs. Holmes, to help him ask Sloane Green to prom. Basically, it was this whole thing where Mrs. Holmes asked Sloane to read aloud from her textbook some passage that was supposed to be about the industrial revolution. Unbeknownst to Sloane, Nick had taped a note to the page Mrs. Holmes asked her to read. It said, “Sloane, will you make history and go to prom with me?—Nick.” He’d made the text the same size, so that it perfectly lined up with the book.