by Laura Newman
Ash looks at his sister and says what he came to say from the beginning. “You don’t really remember me.” It’s a true but blunt opening salvo. She has to look at photos to recall his face. “My death is more alive for you than the memory of my life. You have forgotten about me. It’s the loss of me that lives.” From the mouths of babes. “That’s broken, Maggie.”
Maggie pauses. “Did it hurt?” she asks.
“Yes. And then it didn’t.” They stand together in thin air.
Maggie takes a thin breath and asks what she came for. What she just realized she came to do. “Can I leave you here, Ash?”
“Yes,” says the hazy ghost. Maggie can see the mountains right through him. “But I have two requests.” Maggie listens. “Forgive me for causing you pain.”
“Ash, you never meant to...!”
“Did you mean to?!” interrupts Ash. And some of the broken things are fixed.
“What’s the second request?” Maggie asks a few moments later.
“Go ahead and shtup the Sherpa, Mongolia. You know you want to!” With that the smiling ghost of Ash Van Zandt turned into air and blew right through the prayer flags and out into the yonder.
Maggie walks by herself. Tenzin walks well ahead, out of her sight, then waits. When he sees her, he walks ahead again. A true Sherpa. As Maggie drops out of the bowl of the Sanctuary she passes wild lupine just giving up the ghost of purple. Tibetan sheep are grazing on the hillside. Porters rest in the narrow sun and take their time. There is no time here. Time can’t make it over the mountains. Maggie takes slow steps and stays as long as she can in a very high place.
She starts to weave a plan out of thin air …
San Francisco 1996
Maggie and Dorje hurry out the door, join Pradeep in the Subaru, and drive to Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park. Maggie will call her parents tonight to tell them all about the day. As they make their way through the crowd, Maggie waves to Tenzin, who is already there, saving them places up front, holding their son, Ashley Tashi Sherpa. Ashley has little headphones on to protect his ears. The baby sees his grandma and reaches out. It’s only been a year now since Maggie managed to secure legal status for her in-laws to come live in the United States. They are getting ready to open their store in Berkeley, where there are a good number of expats from Nepal and Tibet. Everything will be handmade, quite a bit of it by Dorje and Maggie.
The family is settled in their seats well in time to see the Beastie Boys take the stage for the first ever Tibetan Freedom Concert. Dorje sways with joy even before the music starts. Free Tibet! She passes out wax-paper-wrapped pats of yak cheese so none go hungry. Ever again.
Swisher Sweets
As a mother navigates her children’s grief, she is surprised to find her own is decades deep.
Lake Tahoe, Nevada Late Summer
I pulled open the top of my one-piece bathing suit and poured a good amount of my ex-husband’s ashes down the front. It felt like gritty talcum. When I let go of the elastic front some ash dust puffed up into my face. I managed to resist licking my lips but I could feel it in my eyes. The best thing to do was to just hurry up and jump in the lake. So I did.
The lake was heartlessly cold—it’d just as soon kill ya’ as anything; freeze a body into a sunken, blue-veined alabaster statue. But I’d been in this lake many times, water so clean a child could drink it through a straw. I knew what to do. Big breath, start kicking. My goal was an outcropping of granite rocks not too far away. The idea was that as I swam the ashes would dissipate from my suit and follow the drift in some spiritual, afterlife way. Peaceful. But I kind of felt the way I would feel peeing in someone’s pool. I was pretty certain it was illegal to dump human remains in the environmentally protected Lake Tahoe. But this was our lake. Ben’s lake.
Dead at fifty-eight, heart attack. Imagine being attacked by your own heart.
I could see some of the ash coming out and floating on top of the water. Little pieces of Ben, floating away, sinking, glinting like mica in the late afternoon sun. He was literally next to my heart. I remembered the way Ben looked behind the oil-glossed wooden steering wheel of his Boston Whaler, a place that did not require a college degree. The big mackinaw trout and the smaller rainbow, color ghosted out of their scales as they drowned in the air. The smell of pine needles and fish scales, the thwack of the waves on the side of the Whaler and the thwack of the fish on the deck. Ben cleaned the fish with efficiency, but I felt the little deaths and smelled them on his fingers.
Did I love him then, in those early years when we went fishing and after we jumped off the side of the boat together and cooked the fish in a cast-iron pan over a rose-gold fire? On those nights, when it was cold even in deep summer, I know I loved his shoulders and the way he filled up the space of the plaid flannel sleeping bags, side by side, zipped together.
I climbed out on the rocks, expecting my suit to be empty. But as the water shed off my body, I realized the bulk of the ashes remained in my suit and had turned into a sort of mud, clumping to my skin. The weight of it pulled my suit down a bit and collected at the low point of my one-piece. I sighed. He was in parts of me I had not intended. I had no choice but pull open the leg of my suit and start pulling out globs of ash. It was wet cement. I had to shake it from my hands and hunks of it splashed into the water or splat onto the rocks. This was not what I had in mind. Most of it ended up on the granite. The thought came to me that when the ashes dried in the sun it would look like those rocks that are covered in bird shit and harvested for fertilizer. I wondered how long it would take for Ben to erode.
Oh well, I had tried. To do something nice. When I got home I had to shower the rest of the ashes off and watch my ex-husband go down the drain in a swirl of gray. Some of it clumped around the drain and I used my toes to squish him down. I threw away the suit. Who wants that memory? Then I realized that part of Ben was in the garbage too. What a mess. No wonder people bury people.
I still had his prosthetic arm though. With the hook-hand and the tattoos.
Two Months Earlier, Five Days Before the Wedding
My darling friend Debbi was with me when the phone rang in the car. Later it occurred to me that the Internet of Things people should teach the ringtone to be intuitive and give a little warning. I was expecting a wedding-bells type call, but what I got was Tubular Bells. I put Piper on speaker phone.
“Mom, where are you?”
“I’m with Debbi driving back from the nursery. I got a gardenia plant.” Piper probably doesn’t even know what a gardenia is, doesn’t know that if a wedding could be contained in a single flower it would be the elegant gardenia. “Coming down the mountain if I lose you.”
“Dad died.”
All the gardenias ghosted away.
Could I have planned for that? Along with the taco bar and the twinkle lights in the stream that would be fallen stars in the night. Somewhere in the lists we made and checked off, could there have been a line for “Dad died”?
The road was more clairvoyant than the phone. A pull-out presented itself just around the bend, a little safety sanctuary. I wanted to accelerate, vibrate, teleport myself to my daughter. So Debbi was going to have to do the driving.
Debbi said I was—what’s the word for the way to feel when the man whom I was married to for fifteen years and I divorced twenty years ago dies? I don’t know if there is a single word. There was a time I wanted him dead. I would get the insurance money. Back when I tried to escalate our fights from the fuck-you-bitch level to the breaking-my-arm level so that, like America, I could take the moral high ground, wounded soldier, purple heart. Sort of a Pearl Harbor approach to entering the war of separation. But we had reached an armistice years ago, my arm intact. (His long gone.)
I could feel relief. In old age Ben would have been a burden on the kids. He was a house built of sticks. Or I could feel a sort of laurel-wreathed v
ictory that the living has over the dead. Or I could have felt numb, the way I feel when I smell pine branches encased in icicles in a December forest.
Plus, we had all lost our handyman.
“I don’t even know where to bury him,” was the last thing Piper said before we hung up the phone, Debbi now at the wheel.
“I know where, I know exactly where,” I said, and all the things I could be feeling, could be thinking, dissolved into melancholy and I felt like a sad guppy in a cloudy fishbowl.
Debbi hurried me home and I cried the whole way. A surprise of tears. Not for myself. For the phone calls we had to make, the packages of grief, like dog shit, we were going to deliver. For my son, Jude, who lives four hundred miles away and no one was going to be there with him to ride out the wild. And sadness for Ben. For what he never had and and what he would never get. For Steven, because Piper was going to dance right off the edge and Steven would have to be the one to two-step Piper back. For Steven and Piper’s wedding. How do you have a wedding five days after the father of the bride dies?
A Memory
In the first summer after the divorce we didn’t really know how to end the marriage. Ben and I talked on the phone in the dark hours. Went for walks in the birch trees by White’s Creek, old carvings in the bark. A bleeding heart, maybe 1917, maybe not. The little round birch leaves made that quiet leafy sound when the wind moved through. We had walked this path many times. “Ben,” I said “if neither one of us remarries, let’s be buried side by side.” Ben knew I was serious. I like graveyards.
“That seems a long time to wait to lie down next to you,” Ben softly replied in the birdsong grove.
The Phone Call to Ben’s Sister Angie, Who Lives on the Oregon Coast Where the Ocean Polishes Agates into Sea-Jewels and Then Buries Them in the Sand for Children to Find on a Windy Day
The girl’s neurotic, it’s just a fact. It’s like it’s always Halloween night and there’s candy wrappers all over the place. Her Indian name is Runs at Mouth. Piper got in a hello and then a word-cloud surrounded us. And I was lost in that cloud. Her voice, her excitement. Piper couldn’t interrupt. Angie spoke as if commas were beings of a lesser world. It was almost like listening to a poem. I caught Piper’s eyes with mine. We both knew it. We were going to deliver that singular edge of time where life would always be counted as before or after.
I lost my concentration and started pulling sad haikus out of the word-cloud. Finger-counting syllables in my mind.
Dad’s heart stopped like that.
He drank too much and smoked pot.
Death by KFC.
Or
He deserved to die
He deserted his children
He reaped what he sowed.
Or
Pretty boy, blue eyes
You never stood a true chance
Shame your mom and dad.
“Angie,” Piper finally cut in, and I shook off the haikus. “Dad died, he had a heart attack.” She had to get it out really fast and said it twice so she could put the brakes on Angie and make her hear. The circus tent collapsed and was never going up again. All the elephants went home.
Silence, but not golden. “My brother died,” Angie said, tentatively trying on the ill-fitting words. We all felt sick.
We had more calls to make. His job, his best friend. A shorter list really, than it should be. His mother. Jude.
“Oh, my beautiful boy,” said Ben’s mother, Mariam, with a sigh like the last violin note played on the Titanic. Is it a true sign of my humanity that in that moment I felt nothing but sorrow for her? All the years of flicking blame on her flicked away for the duration of that call, and I could share her pain. She had lost her son, after all. And I was worried about mine.
What this call was going to do to Jude. We saved him for last, for as long as we could.
The Phone Call to Las Vegas Where All That Glitters Is Fucking Plastic
God, what a town. No one really lives there. It’s all dress-up and Let’s Pretend. Jude told us he was at a stoplight by the Strip and a woman’s wood-heeled shoe fell out of an open-sided high-rise parking garage and broke through the back window of his hatchback. Size 7.5, Topshop. He took off before the body followed.
My beautiful boy. He and his sister were all I cared about. The rest of my emotions I pushed to the back of the underwear drawer, right next to the gun. They can blow up later. I spent my life watching these little souls run naked into the world. I wanted to clothe them in petals.
When he was growing up I told Jude don’t do that, do this. And he listened to me, he really did. But every broken bone, every snowboard accident was a bottle of doctor-prescribed Vicodin lining up with his father’s genes. Bad genes in black jeans—that’s what I married. Five years of sobriety, three of graduate school, and still I was worried that this phone call could send Jude straight to the Queen of Hearts, open twenty-four hours, two-for-one shots 6 a.m. to 12 noon. Whiskey, if you please, four deep.
“Hi Jude,” said Piper and I said it too. “Whatta you doin’?”
“Just got back from the gym. Making breakfast.” Bacon and eggs. His house always smells of bacon, which I think is a counter-girlfriend smell. I’m going to send him a diffuser. Orange oil. God, my brain is a sick chicken, I can’t hold on to a straight thought. I took over.
“We have some really bad news, Jude.” No need to stretch this out. “Dad died. He had a heart attack, it was quick.”
His reaction was immediate. “I knew it,” said Jude. I could have imagined a hundred responses and it wouldn’t have been that. “I woke up this morning and I was sad. So I just went with it. I put on sad music and cried for two hours and went back to bed. I knew it.”
“You knew it was Dad?”
“No, just something. I gotta go. I’ll call you back, don’t worry. I love you guys.” He hung up.
Oh, I’m going to worry. I’m worrying so hard I’m going to break out in a sweat like it’s hot yoga. Cow Face Pose. I told Jude a dozen times, a baker’s dozen, “Call your dad, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.” Piper had her dad over for dinner two weeks ago (brisket). She had him fix things at her house and yelled at him regularly. She was going to be sad, but she wasn’t going to be guilty. Jude was due a double shot of guilt and remorse—bitters and absinthe. I wanted to get on an airplane and fly to him, but I wasn’t going to be able to save him from that cloudy glass. Only he could do that.
Well, Cow Face, you didn’t need to worry, oh ye of little faith.
Finding recovery is like finding God. Plenty of paths to the top of that mountain. An addict can sit around with a bunch of sick dicks at AA and talk about it. Rock climb until the wrists will hold no more. Slit a wrist. Jude did those. Why not? They work. Turns out, meditation is his jam. So when he tells Piper and me that he woke up sad and didn’t try to figure out why, just let it get tugged along by a song, we buy it.
Jude didn’t turn to the Queen of Hearts. He turned to stone. He told us later that he stayed up all night in meditation to help his father pass from this world, to bear witness. He built a stairway with a big neon exit sign out of memory and kindness and he kept it flashing until it was dimmed by the dawn. Then he wrote a letter to his grandmother. He told Mariam what he had done for her son and that when she died he would do the same for her. Only he would do it with the pure and hot intention of making her transition hard, harder, hardest. When that time comes, Jude will grind those pearly gates to dust.
Piper, Later That Same Night
God, what a day. Evening now. Piper set up her ironing board and heated up the iron. She took the plastic wrapper off the shirt, pulled out the straight pins holding the square shape, unbuttoned the shirt, laid it on the board. Ironed it. The steam smelled of minerals and desert. She ironed her tears into the shirt. A secret message. She got out the gray wedding suit and into the inside pocket of th
e jacket she put two photos of her and Jude when they were kids. She put the suit, the shoes and socks, the tie, the pocket square into a bag. To take to the mortuary tomorrow. Ben’s life had no use for a suit. He bought it for the wedding, at the JC Penney outlet store, but it was nice. Ben told Piper the only other time he would wear it was for his own funeral, hahaha, so that’s just what she was going to do. She knew he would have preferred Carhartts. Or that jacket with the fur-lined hood he brought from Alaska, all those years ago.
Piper remembered when just the two of them went to Bryce Canyon and got caught in a windstorm. Red dust. Ben put a bandana over her face, bandit style, and they went out into the grit, just to feel it scour their skin, to taste the old earth. Face it down. Ben taught her things like that. How to throw the knife. Rip with your teeth. Sew up what needs sewing.
A Little Bit About the Arm
You’ve never made love until you make love to a man with a hook for a hand.
Well, we each had our own things to think about that night.
Four Days Before the Wedding
(For the record, the only reason Ben took Piper to Bryce Canyon was because I called him and told him if he didn’t pay some attention to his daughter she was going to transfer all her love, one hundred percent, to me. Which I wanted. Which I deserved. Earned. But I loved Piper, so I made that call. Honestly, it cost me something. Sorry, Piper, that I didn’t teach you how to eat grit and sleep in dirty sleeping bags. I’m just the one who bought the lice shampoo.)
Here’s what I learned about calling people to tell them someone they cared about was dead: They keep the call short, they hang up quickly. The terrorist’s bomb has just exploded and they need to count their fingers and toes, check for internal bleeding. Then they call back and the second call takes much longer. That’s the who, what, when, where, why call. And with that second call they want me to become responsible for what they need, or their concepts of what should be done. Fuck ‘em. Why are they even calling me? I only care about Piper and Jude. I had four days until a wedding. I decided to give Ben two.
