The Beautiful Between

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  I imagine that Jeremy sprints into class, getting away with being late as only he can. Everyone stops what they’re doing. Everybody stares at Jeremy—the big grin on his face, the happiness he seems to have brought with him into the room. He comes straight toward me and scoops me up into a hug—a dramatic gesture he would never make in real life.

  “Kate’s going to be okay,” he whispers into my hair. The bone marrow worked. Kate is well. Everything will be fine and Jeremy isn’t mad at me anymore—he’s too happy to be bothered about our stupid fight. He didn’t call because he was at the hospital so much, taking care of her, recovering from donating the marrow. Kate is well, and she can eat sundaes again, and she’ll come back to school and her hair will grow long and she’ll cheer for Jeremy when his name is called at graduation. Just like I knew she would.

  Then the classroom door opens—not in my fantasy, in real life. I actually spin around on my seat, just in case it really is Jeremy. But it’s not: it’s the assistant principal, and she’s calling my name.

  “Connelly?”

  Everyone turns from the chalkboard to the door at the back of the room, where the assistant principal is standing timidly. Then everyone turns to look at me. I think I’m still looking for Jeremy.

  “Please come with me.”

  I gather up my books and grab my bag. I must be in trouble, but I can’t think of what I’ve done to get the assistant principal to call me out of class. I avoid everyone’s faces—I wonder what reasons they’re coming up with for my being called away. I hate the way it feels, having everyone looking at me. I wish I’d dressed better; I wish my bag wasn’t full to overflowing, my ponytail was a little neater.

  “There’s a phone call for you,” she says once the door to the science lab has closed behind me. Quietly, like she doesn’t want anyone to hear.

  “A phone call?” Only something urgent could make them come get me like this. “Oh God, what’s wrong? Has my mother—”

  “It’s not your mother.” I follow her to her office. I wonder why she’s being so quiet, but it occurs to me that it’s because any of the kids or faculty in the halls might hear and she doesn’t want them to. I still don’t think that it’s Jeremy; I still don’t think that it’s because anything has happened to Kate. My fantasy has made me believe that maybe Kate can and will be well again.

  I pick up the phone and hold it gently to my ear, barely touching me.

  “Hello?”

  “Sternin?”

  “Jer?” It’s a relief just to say his name. “Jeremy.” I’ve missed it so much that I say it again.

  “I’m sorry to get you out of physics.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Of course it’s okay.” And then I know why he’s calling, why his call was enough to get me out of physics. It’s why, for the rest of my life, I’ll wish I’d called to wish them happy holidays, or a happy new year, or called just to say hi. And it’s why we’ve skipped over the making-up part of our fight. Best friends can do that, I guess.

  I hear Jeremy take a deep breath, and then he says, “Kate’s died.”

  I don’t say anything. I stare at the carpet on the floor of the assistant principal’s office, a hideous shade of maroon that makes her whole office seem dark and weighty. I hear Jeremy’s voice in my head again: Kate’s died. There’s a catch in it, something I’ve never heard before. It’s like he said it but he still can’t believe it. I wonder how many times he’s had to say it since it happened, how many family members and friends he’s already called. I wonder if every time he says it, he believes it a little more.

  “Sternin?” he prompts.

  “I’m sorry, Jeremy,” I say, half apologizing for her death, half apologizing for my silence.

  Then I say, “I can come down there. I can leave right now.”

  “Not right now. It’s strange here.”

  Maybe he’s still angry at me. Maybe he’s angrier still because I didn’t call. I bite my lip.

  “But I’ll see you later tonight,” he says, and I know he means he’ll come over for a cigarette. Then he hangs up, so I do too.

  The assistant principal is watching me like she’s waiting for me to tell her something. I remember Jeremy’s voice saying, “Kate’s died.” It’s not as though I’d forgotten it, but while I was on the phone, I couldn’t really think about the way that it sounded. I’d been trying to say the right thing, waiting to hear what Jeremy was going to say next. Now I close my eyes, and I hear Jeremy saying it again: Kate’s died.

  I sit down in the desk chair and cry. I cry so long that the assistant principal calls my mother to come pick me up. I cry so much that I’m sure my tears are making a wet spot on the ugly carpet, so much that none of the tissues the assistant principal hands me make a bit of difference. I feel pieces of them sticking to my face. I’m crying for Kate, and I’m crying for the Coles, and I’m crying for Jeremy and me, and for how happy I am to have him back, and how distraught I am that this is the reason why.

  And maybe I’m crying for my dad; maybe I’m mourning him too.

  18

  My mother is white when she picks me up. As soon as I see her, I realize that the whole time I’d been crying, I’d been thinking, Oh God, I want my mother.

  The assistant principal must have told her about Kate, but I don’t believe that my mother can understand what this means to me. She looks like she wants to hold me but she doesn’t know how. I wish, more than anything, that I could just climb into her lap and be rocked from side to side—but I’m too big for that, and anyway, I don’t know how.

  My mother walks me to my locker so I can get my books (it’s inconceivable that I wouldn’t take my homework with me), and when we step outside, my eyes are dry and my face is clean because I stopped to rinse it with cold water. She hasn’t said much—hasn’t said anything except for “Hello” to the assistant principal and “Is that all your books?” to me.

  I wonder what it was like the first time I saw her after my father died. I wonder if she was this quiet. I don’t remember how I found out that he had died—whether she was the one who told me. We walk home quickly, both of us wearing boots that click on the cement. It’s freezing out and the air is cold in my nose, down into my lungs, and out again in smoke before my face. We pass a flower shop. I turn to face my mother. “I want to stop—I could order some flowers to send to the Coles.”

  “No, sweetie, don’t send flowers.”

  “Why not?” I say meanly. “They’re my friends, even if they never invited you anywhere.”

  My mother looks hurt—I only said that because I understand what an invitation from the Coles would have meant to her. Still, she’s patient with me.

  “No, honey. Jews just don’t send flowers.”

  “Why not?”

  “Umm,” she says, looking up, over my head, “I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing you just find out.”

  “When?” I ask.

  She doesn’t say anything. We walk in silence; now we’re only a block from home. In my head, I am repeating a line: Among the dead, there are so many thousands of the beautiful. I can hear it being said. I can’t remember what it’s from; can’t recognize whose voice is saying it. I’m sure it’s from a book; maybe it was a teacher, saying it in class. The line stays in my head for days, and it will be a long time before I figure out where it’s from.

  Among the dead, there are so many thousands of the beautiful. My father is one. And now Kate is one too. Maybe my father will take care of Kate. And then I realize something I never thought of: I don’t know if my father was—or would have been—a good father. I don’t know if he’s someone I want to watch Kate. I am filled with a need to do something, anything, for Kate.

  We’re standing across from our apartment house, waiting for the light to change so we can cross the street. My mother looks at my hands: my fingers are cold, and I’m not wearing gloves, and I realize that I left them in the bathroom when I went to rinse my face off. I stuff my hands in my pockets. I
ask my mother, “Well, what can I do, or send?”

  “We’ll order some food when we get home. Or sometimes they’ll ask for donations to a charity.”

  “But how will I know? How will I find out what charity?”

  “It’ll be in the obituary,” she says, and begins to walk again.

  “But then how do they know that I sent it?” It sounds like I want credit. It’s not that; I just want to do the right thing, whatever it is you’re supposed to do when this happens, and I have no idea what that is.

  But my mother does. My mother knows that Jews don’t send flowers and she knows that they will probably ask for a donation instead and she will know exactly what words I should say when I see them at the funeral, the words to put in the condolence card I will send. (And she knows about condolence cards too, the existence of which never occurred to me.) My mother knows all of this. She knows it from experience.

  It’s after midnight and I’m waiting for Jeremy. I didn’t stay up this late on New Year’s. I’m not impatient. I know he’ll come. I’m looking, again, at the picture of my parents. My mother is asleep at the other end of the apartment but I’m scared she’ll wake, come in to check on me, see me looking at the picture. I shut my door and sit down against it so that I’m leaning on it, holding it closed.

  I wonder why I was so drawn to this picture. There were pictures from their wedding day, pictures with me in them, pictures with my grandparents. Why does this picture mean so much to me?

  And then I see it: something I never noticed before. I recognize the chair that they’re sitting on. I recognize it from the house we lived in before my father died. I even remember that the cloth that covered it was itchy. I wonder what happened to the chair when we moved here. I want to ask my mother, but I won’t. I can’t. I can’t even tell her that I have the photograph.

  I’m putting the picture away when my phone rings.

  “I’m downstairs.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He’s already finishing a cigarette when I get downstairs. When I hug him, it smells like he hasn’t stopped smoking all day today. Once, he made a joke that it was ironic that Kate’s illness made him smoke more, rather than discourage him as one might think. “You know,” he added when I looked at him blankly. “The whole cancer connection.” At the time, we’d both laughed. It shouldn’t have been funny, so our laughter was guilt-ridden.

  “I’m glad to see you,” I say.

  “Me too,” he says.

  “Do you want to—”

  “No. I don’t. Let’s just not talk about it yet.”

  “That’s fine too.”

  Jeremy lights two cigarettes, passes one to me. A few weeks ago, he got us both fingerless gloves, just for smoking, and we’re both wearing them now.

  “Jeremy.” I say his name slowly, and I wait until he is looking at me to continue.

  “I shouldn’t have not called.” I don’t know why I say it like that, so I say it again, better this time: “I mean, I should have called.”

  Jeremy nods.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Jeremy drops his cigarette on the ground and crushes it. He looks up, blinking. I wonder if he is trying not to cry. I am.

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” Jeremy says finally. “I don’t want to worry about that right now. I just want to be here. Okay?”

  I nod. “Okay.”

  Jeremy lights another cigarette. “The funeral’s so quick,” he says, exhaling.

  “I know. It’s a Jewish thing. My mother told me.”

  “She never struck me as particularly religious.”

  “She’s not. But I think her parents were.”

  “So she’d know, then.”

  “Yeah, she’d know.”

  Jeremy looks up as he takes a drag from his cigarette. “I didn’t know,” he exhales.

  I nod. “I guess you only really find out when it happens to you.”

  “Unless you’re religious.”

  “Right.” I pause. “Did you know Jews don’t send flowers?”

  He shrugs. “No one told my parents’ friends that. The house reeks of lilies. We were going to run something in the paper about ‘In lieu of flowers, send a donation to the American Cancer Society,’ but we weren’t fast enough.”

  “Guess not.”

  “You know, until, like, this morning, I always thought that ‘in lieu of’ meant almost the exact opposite of ‘instead of.’ I thought it meant … I don’t know, like, ‘By way of flowers, please send them to the American Cancer Society.’ Like, ‘Send flowers there for their sick people, ’cause our sick person is gone, so send them to people who can still appreciate it.’”

  I laugh unexpectedly. “Oh my God, so did I! Once my grandmother was having a party and I asked her what she was having in lieu of food!”

  “Liar.”

  “I swear to God. She laughed at me and told me what it really meant.”

  Jeremy grins wide, and then the grin fades into one of his crooked smiles.

  “I’ve been Kate’s big brother for as long as I can remember—I was only four when she was born, even though I always felt so much older than she was.” He takes a sharp breath in and exhales slowly, and I wait for him to go on. “And now I’m not a big brother anymore. And, I don’t know, I guess that was always the first thing I thought of myself as being.”

  I want to tell Jeremy that he’s my big brother, even if it’s not the same thing. That even though we’re the same age, I look up to him and he seems years older, wiser, and more worldly than I’ll ever be. But I know it’s not the same, so I keep quiet—except for my sniffling, which I pretend is only because of the cold and has nothing to do with the tears hanging on to the edge of my eyelashes.

  “It’s good to be here,” Jeremy says, and he puts his arm around me and we stand like that, in the cold, for a long time. I know I’m crying and I suspect he is too, but I don’t look up at him to see. The next day, I won’t even remember his leaving or my coming back up on the elevator and getting into bed. No, the last memory I have of that evening is of standing close to Jeremy in the cold, watching his breath come out in puffs of smoke.

  19

  I want very much to wear the right thing to the funeral: it feels like it is the last thing I will ever get to do for Kate, and I must do it perfectly. I think wearing all black would be presumptuous of me; that should be reserved for family members. I will wear gray or navy, and only a little black. I don’t even know whether this is my first funeral. I imagine my two-year-old self at my father’s funeral, sitting on some willing grandparent’s lap, sucking my thumb—something that would normally be forbidden, but surely no one would have said no to me that day—and watching the service, not understanding what it all meant. I see myself hot, cranky, and hungry; I imagine my hair being stroked; strangers kissing me, pitying my mother and me.

  It’s easier to think I didn’t go, and so I imagine the adults saying, She’s too young. Leave her home with the sitter—a funeral’s no place for a child.

  My mother and I take a cab together to the funeral home, even though it’s only eight blocks away. There’s a crowd outside, people waiting to get in. My mother had insisted we leave early. I thought she was just nervous about being late. But maybe she knew you get there early so you can see the family first, crowd into a little room and express your condolences, before taking your seats. Maybe she knew that afterward, when the family members rush into the black cars that take them to the cemetery, there might not be time.

  I didn’t ask my mother to come with me today; I knew she would come. The room next to the chapel is packed. Jeremy is surrounded, and I don’t think I should squeeze past all these people to see him. I saw him last night, and I’m sure I’ll see him again tonight. So my mother and I stand in the corner, waiting for it to be time to move into the chapel, to sit and watch. I’m surprised when Jeremy is suddenly standing next to me. He leans down quickly, whispers in my ear, “Go and hug my mother.
She loves you.” His breath is warm on my neck. And then he’s gone, back in that crowd of people.

  I don’t know why Jeremy’s asked me to go hug his mother. She’s probably surrounded by her family and her closest friends. I’ll be intruding. But I also don’t want to let Jeremy down; he said she loved me. I know Jeremy wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true, but I barely know her. I don’t know why she would particularly care about seeing me now.

  Kate would know, I think. If I asked Kate, she’d be able to explain it to me.

  I start to look for Mrs. Cole. My mother follows me through the crowd and then I see her, Mrs. Cole, sitting on a velvety couch, silently staring ahead of her. People are talking to her, or anyway, talking to each other around her, keeping their hands on her shoulder, her knee, over her hands folded in her lap. I walk straight toward her. My mother hangs back; I’m relieved that she understands not to follow me. Mrs. Cole’s face almost brightens when she sees me; her arms extend toward me like she knew I was coming to hug her. She rocks me back and forth, or I rock her. When I let go, she takes my hands and squeezes them, and I know that she knows how sorry I am, how much I loved Kate, and how much I love her son. And I know that’s what Jeremy was talking about when he said that she loves me.

  I turn around, see my mother waiting. A flicker of something I don’t recognize passes across her face—is it jealousy? Not jealousy that I’m so close with the Coles, but jealousy of the way Mrs. Cole and I just held each other.

  We file into the chapel, and soon I am watching Jeremy: first the back of his head as he sits in the front row—his brown hair that’s almost wavy, but not quite—and then his face when he gets up to speak. Neither of his parents speaks. He is wearing a dark gray suit and it occurs to me that I’ve never seen him dressed so nicely and that he looks very handsome and tall, speaking about his sister without crying like the rest of us. The only thing that gives him away is the way that he’s digging his hands into the side of the podium, hanging on like it’s holding him up—but I think you’d have to look very closely to see that. Otherwise, he looks collected. He looks regal. I realize this is where princes earn their titles: their titles are something they must live up to, and Jeremy is doing that now at this Upper East Side funeral—he is keeping everything together and being every bit the man that we all need him to be. And it’s strange, and maybe a little condescending of me, but I feel enormously, tenderly, and warmly proud of him.