“Remember, honey, if you need to—” my mom started to say.
And without looking at her, I cut her off, saying, “I know, Mom. Thank you.”
The line moved from the foyer, where Mom signed a guest book, into the viewing room, where I was relieved to see Becca’s parents standing beside a closed casket. Closed. Of course it was closed.
A large framed portrait of Becca stood beside her casket. It was her senior picture, the one with her curly red hair cascading over her shoulders. Her smile bright as diamonds, her brown eyes dark and deep, seemingly able to see right inside you. That was what I loved about Becca. She was the first person to know how I was feeling, in any situation, without me ever having to say a thing.
Now her eyes still burrowed into me, but in a way that made me uncomfortable. Now when I looked at her face in that senior picture, I saw her looking back and thinking, Why weren’t you there with me, Ellie? We were best friends. Why weren’t you there?
I took a deep breath, and Mom took hold of my hand and gently squeezed. I felt my resolve weakening, and she could sense it. But we were next in line to pay our respects to Mr. and Mrs. Hendrix and the rest of Becca’s family. The only person I noticed missing was her older brother, Drew. Becca’s parents had disowned him, Becca once told me, because he was gay. The Hendrix family was a pillar in one of Newfoundland’s churches, the sort of family that drew hard lines in the sand, and was vocal about a number of issues I knew that Becca didn’t agree with. She kept her feelings to herself; it was easier than contending with her parents. And as a result, she hadn’t seen Drew since she was a little girl, though I knew that she’d hoped to find him after she graduated.
An organ played somewhere, its soft, sad music moving among the hushed voices, and the scent of lilies filled the viewing room. I hadn’t noticed these things until it was my turn to go up to Mr. and Mrs. Hendrix, who stood with one arm wrapped around each other—Mr. Hendrix’s draped around her shoulders, Mrs. Hendrix’s around his back—looking utterly, utterly destroyed. I didn’t really like the two of them, because of all the things Becca had told me—how controlling they were, how strict and sometimes harsh. But now I couldn’t help but feel pain inside me as I looked into their faces and saw their own. It felt like a spear through my chest, leaving me breathless. And when I opened my mouth to say how sorry I was, a formless moan rose up and pushed its way out of my throat. Tears sprang to my eyes, fast and hot, making me frantic.
“I’m so sorry,” I said in the next breath, and my mother squeezed me close to her. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, Ellie,” Mr. Hendrix said. “Please, Becca wouldn’t want you to feel this way.”
And Mrs. Hendrix came forward to pull me into her arms. “Shh, honey, shh,” she said. Then her hand was on the back of my head, cradling it against her shoulder, and Mom was standing next to Mr. Hendrix, whispering something. “Shh, shh,” Mrs. Hendrix said as I sobbed into her shoulder. “I know what you’re feeling. I know. And there’s nothing wrong with it. You were always such a good friend to Becca. Her best friend. She always said so. Shh. Don’t cry, my love.”
“It’s so hard,” I moaned, and it felt as if the words I spoke were not my own, were some kind of reflex and not how I really felt, or wanted to feel, or wanted to not feel. But all the same, I shook against Mrs. Hendrix’s body, which smelled of lavender, the scent she always wore, and continued to cry.
“I know, sweetheart,” she said, rocking me a little, and then she lowered her voice even more. “But you needn’t worry. Becca isn’t gone. She’s still here with us.”
I was waiting for Mrs. Hendrix to go on, to say the thing that everyone says after someone has died, the thing people say to comfort themselves. That the person who died isn’t really gone. That they live on in our hearts and our memories.
Which is true. I knew I could look inside and pull up a memory of Becca laughing at one of my corny jokes, or huddled next to me, watching a scary movie on the couch at my house, since she wasn’t allowed to see them at hers. Her favorite had been Paranormal Activity, and she’d jumped each time the spirit in the house moved something while being video recorded yet still went unseen. And there in my memory, Becca would indeed be alive again. The sound of her voice, the familiar smell of her coconut-scented shampoo.
But no. What Mrs. Hendrix whispered into my ear next wasn’t that. Instead, she said, “Why, I’ve seen her nearly every night since she passed away. And the next time I see her, I’ll tell her that she should pay you a visit.”
By the time Mom politely excused us from the scene I played a part in making at my best friend’s memorial service, I was running down a hallway covered in Victorian-style wallpaper depicting winding vines and thorny roses, and I was starting to hyperventilate.
Breathe in, breathe out, I kept telling myself. Get out of this place. Don’t think. Make your mind into a white space. Pretend that a nuclear bomb just went off and everything in your world was wiped out of existence.
Which was a strangely comforting idea, dark as it was, considering almost everything and everyone in my world had been wiped out already. My best friends. My boyfriend. My school. The ice cream shop where I always asked to have gummy candies mixed into my strawberry ice cream, and the little boutique where my mom took me to buy my prom dress and didn’t even balk at the price tag. The Italian restaurant everyone went to for special occasions. Anniversaries. Birthdays. Prom. Wedding parties. Blankness was what I craved, but I didn’t need a nuclear explosion to wipe out my world. My world had already been wiped out by an outbreak of tornadoes.
And it was that phrase, too, that kept bothering me. An outbreak of tornadoes. It was how everyone described what had happened: the meteorologists, so grave, so severe as they talked about climate change and how our outbreak might be the beginning of new weather patterns; the local and national newscasters, who were still covering the outbreak and its aftermath two weeks later. Even in newspapers near and far, you’d see reporters pick up the phrase. An outbreak of tornadoes was the line even locals used when they were interviewed. And the more I heard the words, the more surreal it all felt. Like the storms were something I’d dreamed about instead of something that had actually happened.
I’d run from the viewing room after Mrs. Hendrix leaned in to whisper that my best friend, her daughter, had been visiting her almost every night since she’d died in the collapse of the high school. I knew Mom, always the expert smoother-over-of-awkwardness, would have immediately launched into an apology for my dramatic exit, explaining quietly how badly I was taking everything, obviously. And after relaying one more apology and condolence, she’d follow me, pleading for me to slow down.
Which is exactly what she did.
“Ellie,” she called behind me, in a voice loud enough for me to hear yet restrained enough not to draw attention. But I kept hurrying through the mazelike hallways of the old house. “Ellie. Ellie, honey! Please stop.”
“Not here,” I hissed over my shoulder, between gasps of breath. “Please. Let’s just get out of here.”
Then finally I located an exit and burst through the door to find myself in the rear parking lot, in the light of day, away from those dark and mournful rooms shrouded in misery. And it was there that I leaned over, bracing my hands on my knees, and continued to gasp, thinking I might throw up, hiccupping eventually, until finally my heartbeat slowed and my breath started to come back.
Mom emerged a few seconds later, and came directly over to bend down in front of me and put a hand on one side of my face. I looked up to meet her eyes, those eyes that mirrored mine, both of us tearing up and reflecting one another. Between gasps, I said, “Mrs. Hendrix. Said. She. Sees. Becca. Every. Night.”
“Oh my God,” my mother said, shaking her head slowly, eyes widening as she took in Mrs. Hendrix’s secret. And right then I knew that if that was Mom’s r
esponse, she understood exactly why I’d run out of there so frantically. “That poor woman,” she continued. “Ellie, I’m sorry I encouraged you to come here today. I thought it would be a good way to start getting closure, but this is all too much. It’s too much for everyone, obviously.” She looked away then, and wiped tears from her own eyes, trying not to let me see. And when she turned back, she said, “I’m not sure if we should go to Noah’s services now.”
I stood, and Mom stood with me, putting one hand around my arm to brace me if I seemed like I might faint. I straightened my dress with the flats of my hands, trying to shake off the awful dread Mrs. Hendrix’s words had sent crawling through my body. “No,” I told Mom. “You were right. I need to do this. I need to say goodbye to them. Somehow. Otherwise—”
I stopped then, felt a sob start to form in my throat, but pressed my lips together long enough to contain it. Swallowed it back down.
“What, honey?” Mom said, her eyes searching my face with worry. “Otherwise, what?”
I didn’t tell her right then that I’d been seeing a ghost myself. I didn’t tell her that Timothy Barlow, whose memorial service Mom and Dad had attended several days ago without me, had been appearing to me for the past two weeks. As if the tornadoes had never happened, as if he wasn’t one of the people crushed in the west wing of the high school or burned by the explosion. If I told her that, she’d freak out, and I didn’t want her to look at me and say, Oh my God, and then stand in shock, disturbed by what I’d shared, the same way she did when I told her what Mrs. Hendrix had whispered.
So I kept all of it inside, and instead said, “Otherwise, I don’t know what will happen to me. I need to go to Noah’s. I can do this. I have you with me.”
It was the truth, mostly, so at least I didn’t feel like I was lying to her. Not like whenever I played the I’m fine, really game. I wasn’t saying I was fine. I was just saying I could do something. Or that I thought I could do something.
“You are so strong, my beautiful girl,” Mom said, brushing a curl of hair away from my forehead. “Okay, then. Let’s go.”
* * *
I wasn’t strong, like Mom thought, but it wasn’t really the time to debate the qualities of my character. And besides, I thought, shouldn’t someone be able to look into the eyes of another person and see something good, even if it was just for a moment? If my mom wanted to see me as strong, I wouldn’t stop her. She was stressed enough. I had smelled cigarettes on her clothes nearly every day since the outbreak, so I knew she’d gone back to them after that first day, when she thought I was dead.
On our way back to Newfoundland, I closed my eyes and tried to put myself in the right frame of mind for Noah’s memorial service. Tried to put myself in the right frame of mind to say goodbye. I watched the passing scenes of what would ordinarily be peaceful fields of new corn growing taller, and cringed at the way entire fields had been decimated, the earth turned up like God’s own plow had pushed through them. Telephone and electrical poles had fallen onto some of them, one after the other, like crosses snapped at their bases. All gone, I kept thinking as Mom drove past the wreckage. All gone.
And then, when we got back to Newfoundland and took a route that had been cleared to the funeral home where Noah’s service was scheduled to start within an hour, a different thought—a terrible thought, really—suddenly sprang into my head.
Why Timothy Barlow? I thought. If Mrs. Hendrix can see Becca, can I see Noah?
I shook off the thought a moment after I had it. And yet it was a thought that somehow held out a kind of hope to me—even if it was a hope that came with a particular frustration. Because if it was really possible to still see Noah, why hadn’t he already shown himself to me? Why Timothy Barlow?
No good answers come from thinking like that, though, and after Mom pulled into the funeral home in Newfoundland, I tried to unwind my thoughts, to put them away in some dusty, easily forgotten box.
“Listen,” Mom said as she turned off the car engine, letting the keys sway and jingle from the ignition. She looked over at me with her game face back on. She’d used the trip back to Newfoundland to pull herself together like I’d intended to do, though I’d been unsuccessful. “The services for Noah don’t start for twenty minutes, but I see his dad’s car over there. We could go in, pay our respects. You could probably say goodbye to Noah privately, and then we could leave before anyone else gets here. How does that sound?”
I thought about it for a moment, pursing my lips, torn between doing the safe thing and the thing I felt was right. “I should stay for the service,” I told Mom. “But I wouldn’t mind going in and having some privacy first.”
Mom nodded. I always tried to get the best of any decisions in front of me, she once said. When I was ten and she told me I needed to choose between going to camp or taking dance lessons over the summer, I asked her to send me to a dance camp instead. When I was fifteen, instead of choosing between the popular options of cheerleading or the marching band, I decided to cover sports for the school newspaper so I could be at all the games without having to be out in front of other people. It’s how I got started taking photos for the school paper, and how Mrs. Englund, our art teacher, eventually corralled me into working for the yearbook, which she taught every year as an elective.
“That’s a good compromise,” Mom said now, perhaps unsurprised that, even in all this mess, I was still trying to travel the road between what others saw as black-and-white choices. “Okay, then. Let’s go in. And if you change your mind, just give my hand a squeeze.”
She gave me her hand and squeezed mine once, then twice, as if to demonstrate, smiling softly. Then we got out of the car and headed up the front steps of the funeral home.
Here we performed the same rituals we had at Becca’s service. Mom signed us into the guest book, and afterward we headed for the viewing room around the corner, where a minister stood in the entry, talking to someone just out of sight. As we turned the corner, though, I stopped suddenly when I recognized Noah’s dad—his salt-and-pepper hair, his broad shoulders that reminded me of Noah’s—and I put my hand to my mouth. Just the sight of him was enough to shock me into stillness. Mom grabbed my free hand and squeezed. I dropped the one covering my mouth and looked at her. “Sorry,” I whispered.
“There’s no reason to be sorry, Ellie,” she whispered back. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
I nodded again, clenching my teeth, and we moved into the viewing room, where a closed casket was waiting for people to pass by, to say goodbye to Noah, to weep in mourning. Or, in my case, to feel regret burning me from the inside out over the last things we’d said to each other on the morning of the outbreak.
Beside the casket, Noah’s senior portrait had been placed on a wrought-iron stand. It was a formal shot, a head-and-shoulders photo that was going in the yearbook. Navy-blue blazer, white shirt, royal-blue tie with pink and white stripes, his icy eyes highlighted because of it. His chestnut hair blown back a little. His teeth, straight and gleaming. My stomach clenched. Just looking at his face beside his casket, where recessed lights surrounded his portrait with an aura, made me stop. I wanted so badly to apologize, but that was impossible. Instead, all I could do was stand there and hate myself as his face stared back at me, smiling.
Beside me, Mom gave my hand another squeeze. I looked over, and her brows were raised in question. I nodded my okay, and we moved further into the viewing room, where Mrs. Cady sat in a chair while Mr. Cady and the minister talked quietly. And it was Mrs. Cady who finally noticed Mom and me, immediately standing from her chair to say, “Ellie, you’ve come,” and waving me to her.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Cady looked horrible. Although they were dressed for their only child’s funeral—very put together, very formal—their faces betrayed what the last two weeks had done to them. Waiting through the early days as rescuers sifted through the wreckage, waiti
ng to find out if Noah was a survivor, then discovering he wasn’t, and waiting again for this dreaded day to lay him, somehow, to rest. Dark pouches of skin sagged under their watery blue eyes. Those Cady eyes, usually so bright, showed no hint of life in their faces the way you could still see light behind Noah’s eyes in his portrait. Wrinkles had appeared out of nowhere, seemingly etched across their faces overnight. Mrs. Cady had always looked younger than forty-seven, yet here she stood with a wrinkled brow and crow’s-feet spreading out from the corners of her eyes. Now she looked more like she might be going on sixty.
I went to her and let her take my cold hands in hers, let her lean in and hug me, even though I worried she might whisper something terrible in my ear like Mrs. Hendrix had, not even thirty minutes earlier. I said the things I needed to tell her. That I was sorry. So sorry. That I was sorry I hadn’t called. That I was sorry I hadn’t come to see them yet. “I’m so sorry,” I kept saying, and found new tears at the ready, although I didn’t find myself sobbing uncontrollably like I had at Becca’s memorial.
Afterward, Mr. Cady held me for a moment with his hand on the back of my head, my chin on his shoulder, while both he and Mrs. Cady reassured me that they weren’t upset and that they completely understood they weren’t the only people to lose someone. I heard Mom choke up behind me. Was she dealing with her own guilt, maybe, for having a child who survived? But she quickly recovered and said that she was sorry, too. Then, sniffing, she excused herself, saying she’d be right back.
The pastor came over after Mom’s exit, apologizing before saying he had just a few more things he needed to speak to Mr. and Mrs. Cady about before people started to arrive. “Of course,” the Cadys said, nodding. Then they looked back at me with the kind of smiles that seem more like frowns, the kind of smiles I imagine people make only when they’re trying to show courage in the face of incredible devastation. “We’ll see you soon, Ellie,” Mrs. Cady said. “And please, don’t be a stranger. Be good to yourself. Noah would want that.”
The Gone Away Place Page 5
