The Beautiful Between

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  I wonder what it’s like to be strong like Jeremy. As I sit in the pew, my body curls up around itself, like it’s trying to keep me warm. My shoulders are hunched and I’m slouching as low as I can, my arms crossed in front of me, my hands clutching opposite elbows, like I think I will fall apart if I let go.

  But my mother is sitting up straight next to me. She is staring straight ahead, focused intently on the back of the head of the man sitting in front of her. I look up at Jeremy, and I see that he is doing the same thing: staring straight in front of him at the back of the room. Neither he nor my mother flinches, whatever words he says. They just hold their gaze in front of them as tightly as I’m holding my arms. Maybe they aren’t so different.

  Kate is in a plain, closed wooden casket at the front of the room. The only thing that gives anything away about the person inside it is its size. It’s short, so you can guess that it’s a young person. Before the service began, people were walking up to the casket and touching it like they were saying goodbye.

  I didn’t go near the casket. I don’t see how touching a piece of wood will make it any easier to say goodbye to Kate. But it feels a little better now, listening to Jeremy talking about his sister.

  “I don’t know how to tell you about Kate. I don’t know what words are the right ones to use so that you know that she was more than funny, or smart, or beautiful, or kind. But I can tell you this: Kate would know the right words. A friend of ours once told me that Kate always knew the right things to say.”

  Startled, I drop my soaked tissue into my lap and sit up a little straighter. Because that was me: I was the friend who said that. I look around—no one can tell, of course, that he was talking about me. And even though I’m still crying, it’s somehow comforting to think that this is something that only Jeremy, Kate, and I know.

  When I look down at my lap, I see that a fresh tissue has replaced the one I dropped. My mother is stuffing the dirty one into her purse.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, and she nods at me, almost smiling.

  When the service is over, the family files out in a different direction from everyone else, to what I guess is a room beside the chapel where they can get ready for the trip to the cemetery. A crowd gathers outside on the sidewalk, everyone waiting to say goodbye to the Coles. It’s remarkably cold today. There are a bunch of students here; some teachers too. I wonder if the students are getting excused absences and I wonder who’s covering the teachers’ classes. I wonder if they made an announcement. I bet they’ll hold a special assembly to help everyone deal with the loss—an hour I know Jeremy will spend hiding out somewhere else.

  I button my coat up to my chin; dig my hat out of my bag and put it on. My mother pulls on thin leather gloves that I can’t imagine will keep her hands very warm. Someone grabs me from behind. It’s Jeremy, and he drags me around the corner.

  “I want to have a cigarette before we leave, but I can’t do it in front of everyone,” he says, talking fast. I nod; everyone is out here, and they’d be mobbing him.

  I look back for my mother—I don’t know if she saw Jeremy grab me. She might be looking for me. Jeremy takes me to the driveway behind the funeral home. There is a hearse parked next to where we stand. While Jeremy smokes, Kate’s casket is brought out and loaded into it. People who work here do it, like professional pallbearers. Jeremy acts like he doesn’t see, so I do too.

  My eyes sting in the cold air from crying so much earlier, and smoke clouds Jeremy’s face.

  “You did really well in there,” I say. “I was really proud of you.”

  “Thanks, Connie,” he says, and lights a second cigarette. He seems to be in no hurry. I wonder if his parents are waiting, if he told them he needed a few minutes.

  “You have to do something for me,” he says.

  I look up at him, thinking, Anything. I’ll do anything you need me to. But I just say, “What?”

  He inhales deeply. “I was thinking about you almost as soon as Kate died, thinking about how she’d died and the way it ended, thinking about how I was there and then the doctor explained every detail of what it was that killed her, why it had happened at that moment.” He pauses, and then he says, “It meant something to me, hearing all that.”

  I picture Jeremy standing in a hospital hallway, a doctor talking to him, trying to make Kate’s death make sense.

  “Connelly, you have to know. You’re sixteen years old and something happened when you were a baby that you couldn’t have understood, but you’re old enough now. Your mother botched it up, and now you have to demand that she do it better.”

  “I have to demand that she do it better?”

  “Yes.” He nods, and I can tell that he’s given this some thought, that he came up with the phrase “demand that she do it better” some time before and has been waiting to say it to me.

  “You have to tell her that she was wrong to keep you in the dark this long and you can forgive her now, but she has to tell you the truth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jeremy looks down at me, not impatiently, but maybe he’s wondering why it’s taking me so long to figure out what he means. “Ask your mother. Just ask her. All this figuring it out, trying to find out—it’s bullshit. It’s beside the point. You should find out from your mother, not because I got some doctor to break his confidence. It’s your business, Connelly; it’s your history, and it’s time for your mother to tell you. So ask her.”

  “Ask her what?” I say, truly confused.

  “Connelly, are you listening to me?” Jeremy tosses away his cigarette, puts his hands on my shoulders, and looks right at me, and hard. “You have to go home right now and ask your mother how your father died. I can’t imagine how lost I would feel if all I knew was that Kate had died and I didn’t know what it was that killed her. Can you imagine? Just being told that my sister died without any kind of explanation?” Jeremy’s voice catches for a second. He takes a breath and continues, “Cancer, car accident, whatever it was, it’s making you who you are, so you need to know what it is. It matters, Connelly. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. It gives sense to it.”

  “I can’t ask her,” I say, and twist out of his hands. The lump that’s been in my throat since Kate died begins to rise.

  “Why?”

  I shake my head. “I can’t. You don’t understand.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t, I can’t.” I heave the words with my breath. The lump in my throat hurts so much, I can’t catch my breath. I begin to cry, and I really didn’t think I could cry any more today.

  Jeremy takes my hand. “Explain it to me.”

  I don’t know what to say. It seems wrong that he should be comforting me. But I understand: even though my father died years ago, I am only beginning to mourn him now, just like Jeremy is only beginning to mourn Kate. And Jeremy knows that, even if I didn’t.

  “Explain it to me,” he repeats.

  “It would hurt her. You don’t know. I can’t do that to her.”

  “Connelly, you have to.”

  “You don’t know.” My face is soaking wet again. “I asked her once, just once, and nothing has ever been the same. I’ve never been able to just—I don’t know—get into her bed and watch TV. She couldn’t even hug me after Kate died.”

  “Maybe you need to just get this out of the way, then, Connelly. Maybe then you can even have your mother back.”

  “It’s been too long. I can’t. Questions—questions like that are too much. They ruin everything.”

  “No they don’t. It’s the exact opposite.”

  I shake my head. I can’t. He can’t make me.

  “You can do it, Connelly,” he says, like he knows what I’m thinking. “You can and you have to.”

  I don’t say anything. He sounds so positive that he’s right.

  “You’ll feel better.” With his heel, he grinds the cigarette he’d tossed away and then he puts his arms around me. “You’ll feel better
,” he repeats into my hair, and he kisses the top of my head.

  “I gotta go,” he says. “My parents are waiting.”

  “Okay.” I’m distracted now, thinking about my mother, about what I have to ask her now. Then I realize I should be thinking about him, at least somewhat. “Call me if you need anything. And give your family my love, and—”

  “I know. You too.”

  Jeremy smiles and heads inside through the back entrance, and I walk back out to the front to find my mother.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I say.

  “You don’t want to wait to see the Coles again?”

  “Another time. We’ll go to shiva tomorrow or something.” “Shiva” is a new word to me, another thing my mother taught me. I knew that it meant prayers for the dead, but I never knew it meant visiting someone’s home, eating catered bagels, sitting on the couch and keeping the mourners company.

  She doesn’t argue, and together we walk home.

  20

  At home, I experience a phenomenon that someday, years later, when I have been to more funerals and have experienced it after every single one, I will call the post-funeral jitters: when almost anything can make you explode into a fit of giggles because you’ve been holding in all this nervousness—you’ve literally just cried yourself silly. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone else experiences the post-funeral jitters, but when we walk in the door, my mother asks me what I want to eat and I think she’s said that the funeral was neat and we can’t stop laughing. The thing that finally makes me stop is the thought that maybe she broke down giggling after my father’s funeral. And I think that the thing that makes her stop is when she realizes that I’m not laughing anymore.

  We’ve just walked in the door; we’d been hanging our coats in the hall closet when she’d asked. She closes the closet door and turns back to me.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry.”

  “I know,” I say, and then I walk into the living room. I’m scared. She thinks I’m acting strangely because of Kate. She doesn’t know what I’m about to do. I think I should work up to it somehow, use Kate as a segue. But I don’t want to use Kate like that, and subtlety has gotten me nowhere so far.

  I turn around to face her, and then I say, “Mom, how did my dad die?”

  She doesn’t say anything. She sits at the table and I sit across the room, on the sofa. She takes off her shoes and turns in her chair to face me.

  “What?”

  I repeat the plain question: “How did my dad die?”

  “Your father died when you were two.”

  “I know.” That’s not the answer to my question. “And I was too young to remember much of anything about it or anything about him.”

  My mom sighs. Maybe she thinks that it’s only Kate’s death that has brought this on; maybe she thinks she can still avoid telling me. “What do you want to know?”

  My hands are still cold, so I sit on them to warm them. I speak slowly and softly. “Mom, please. How did my dad die?” It’s the third time I’ve said it. Every time, it’s gotten a little easier, like learning a new language.

  “You were too young to know.”

  “I’m older now.”

  “No. You were too young.”

  “Mom, look at me, please. We’re not talking about when it happened; that was fourteen years ago. It’s been fourteen years. You can tell me now.” I pause. She is looking at her feet, resting them on top of the shoes she just took off. “You have to tell me now,” I say.

  “He was sick,” she says.

  “I know; he had cancer.”

  She looks up at me, surprised. “I didn’t know you knew that.”

  I know she wants me to explain how I knew; I know she’s racking her mind for the ways I might have found out, planning angry phone calls to my grandparents. But I know I have to keep her focused or I will lose this chance.

  “But it wasn’t the cancer that killed him, right?”

  “He was sick,” she says again.

  “How sick?”

  “Very sick,” she almost whispers.

  “Not just the cancer?”

  “No,” she says, staring past me to the window behind me. “Not just the cancer. They thought he would survive the cancer.”

  “It was leukemia?”

  “Yes. But not like Kate’s. His prognosis was good.” This surprises me. Jeremy had said they had the same kind of cancer.

  “What else was he sick with?”

  She pauses, and I think she’s going to cry. “Please, Connelly, it doesn’t matter now. It’s been years.”

  “It matters to me.”

  “Oh God, sweetie, please.” She puts her head in her hands, presses hard on her temples.

  My hands are falling asleep beneath me, but I don’t move. “Please just tell me. Just … just get it over with.” I stand up and walk close to her, and take her hand. “I’ll help—he was sick, right? He got sick after the cancer?”

  “No,” she says, staring at my hand holding hers. “He had been sick before the cancer. When they began treatment—chemo—he went off his other medicine.”

  “And that’s what killed him?”

  “Yes,” she says, and I can tell she thinks we’re through. She drops my hand and leans down to pick her shoes up from the floor, stands to go into her bedroom. She’s going to put her shoes away, take off her funeral suit, and change her clothes, just like I will. But not until we’re done.

  “What was it?”

  She turns and looks at me. “Honey, it’s been a long day. For both of us.” I can hear the desperation in her voice. Her shoes are clutched in her right hand. She is, in her way, begging me to stop. “Let’s rest. I’ll get us some food and we’ll relax and tomorrow we’ll go to the Coles’. This has been a hard day for you.”

  I walk to where she’s standing. “Mommy, listen to me. You have to tell me. It’s mine to know. It’s what I’m made out of.” I can’t remember the last time I called her Mommy.

  “No,” she says emphatically. “It is not what you’re made out of.” She drops her shoes to the floor with a bang and takes hold of my left arm. “It is not what you’re made out of. You were too young to understand. It hasn’t left a mark on you.”

  “Hasn’t left a mark on me?” I say, almost shouting. “Mom, I grew up without a dad. Of course that left a mark on me!”

  “Then why does it matter how he died? All that matters is that he’s dead.”

  “What did he do, Mom? There’s something you don’t want me to know, something you think you can’t tell me. But you can, and you have to. And I can take it—I promise. What I can’t take is not knowing.” I twist my arm from her grasp and hold her hand instead, gently. “Mommy, please. Please.”

  “He was sick,” she whispers, not looking at me.

  “How?”

  “Very sick. He’d always been sick, but he managed it. When the cancer came, he couldn’t manage it anymore. He wanted to devote himself to the cancer. Or maybe the cancer made it worse. I don’t remember.”

  “But what do you remember?”

  She lets go of my hand, walks away from me. She sits down on the couch. I follow her and sit down next to her, close. Our sofa is nothing like the one in the Coles’ den, the leather one with buttons all over that creaked when I moved on it. Ours is plush and soft, cozy, with extra pillows bunched in the corners—a feminine couch. For the first time, I realize that ours is a house where only women have lived—that Jeremy has spent more time here than any other man, and I wonder why his maleness never felt invasive here. Just stepping inside this apartment, you’d know it was the home of a girl who didn’t have a father.

  My mother continues, slowly. “He was taking so many pills. I didn’t notice, because there were so many others. He was always taking pills; I assumed he was taking all of his pills.”

  “What kind of pills did he stop taking?”

  “Antidepressants,” she whispers.

  “He was depressed?”

&n
bsp; “Yes, but he managed it.”

  “And then he didn’t?”

  “And then he didn’t. I thought he was just, well, sad because of the cancer. I thought that was normal; I thought he and his doctors were taking care of everything, managing both. And he was a doctor. I always trusted him to know what was best, because he’d always been so responsible about it in the past, so determined to be well and have this life that we were making. He even gave me some antianxiety pills because I was so tense over the cancer. I wondered, later, if he did that so I could keep calm—” She pauses, and she doesn’t finish the sentence. She’s crying hard now and I want to cry too, but I try not to let that show because I’m worried that if I reveal any weakness, she’ll stop telling me.

  “We put him back on the pills, the antidepressants, as soon as I found out. I insisted and I trusted him, but maybe he wasn’t taking them, or maybe he started and they made it worse. I was sure all those pills would fix everything. They’d always worked before.”

  I think I understand, but I need to say it out loud.

  “He killed himself.”

  She nods. Her head moves so shakily, I think it will fall off her neck.

  “By taking pills.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he get them?”

  She laughs, and it comes out like a cackle. “Sweetheart, that man had more pills than a Duane Reade. He had access to pills; he had extra pills; he was never at a loss for pills. His life had been run by pills since before I knew him—pills to control the depression, pills for migraines, pills to sleep at night.” It occurs to me that I inherited my migraines from him. I’d always assumed it, since my mother doesn’t get them, but she’d never said anything.