Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

  “I like that plan.” I stroked her face and kissed her good night.

  The next morning, Lili surprised us by getting up early and going for a run. I was making pancakes when she came through the back door, her cheeks red from the cold.

  “How’s the ankle?” I asked.

  “Still hurts.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. Give it more time.”

  “Running is the only thing I’m good at.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I’m perceptive, you’re going to say.”

  “Case in point. That is exactly what I was going to say.”

  She let out an exasperated breath and went up to shower.

  Lili was always a little grumpy when she had to return to school after vacations, but she was particularly sullen on this Monday morning.

  “What’s the plan for after school, Lil?” I asked casually. Anything could set her off when she was in one of her moods.

  “Dunno.”

  “Want to come with me to visit Grandma?”

  She started texting, ignoring me completely; her warm feelings from the night before had vanished.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” I muttered.

  Her fingers continued to dance across her keypad.

  “I have a planning meeting this afternoon, and then I’m going right to Lakeline. I should be home by five.”

  “Okay.” She barely acknowledged me.

  Sam busied himself making coffee, but I could tell he was listening, and when she left for school, I went over and rubbed his shoulders.

  “Can we not fight again like that?” he said.

  I reached for him, and he held me so tightly I thought he’d crack a rib.

  Not even my students could distract me from worrying about my mother. I let Theresa take over leading the lesson, and she rallied as always. After finishing up in the classroom, I sat through a meeting about hiring a new music teacher, not hearing a word that was said. When the meeting was over, Sarah pulled me aside and asked me if I was all right, and I told her yes, but she knew I was lying. “Whatever you need, Barbara,” she said.

  I stopped at Starbucks to pick up my latte fix and spilled the whole cup down my shirt on my way to the car. “Shit,” I muttered. I was anxious to see my mother and relieve Neil, and now I’d have to stop home to change.

  Perfect. Taylor’s car was in our driveway. There were two other unfamiliar cars on the street, one with a University of Wisconsin decal.

  I huffed up the front steps, furious that Taylor had the audacity to park in the driveway. When I opened the door, I heard loud music, and the foyer smelled like cigarettes and beer. I rushed to the back of the house.

  “Hey, Babs,” Taylor said. She was lying on our couch, one elbow behind her head, her boots planted on the cushions, her eyes cutting into me. Our afghan was on the floor, and there was a keg on my coffee table. Lili’s Adderall bottle, the second one she’d asked me to replace, was lying on top of Taylor’s purse.

  I snatched the bottle. “What the hell?”

  Taylor smirked. “Oh, I was just holding this for Lili.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” My voice trembled.

  She shrugged and took a drag of her cigarette, scattering ashes on the carpet. I stormed into the kitchen, where two girls were eating Lili’s apology cake with their fingers. I marched over to Sam’s iPad and turned it off. The house quieted, and a dozen kids stared at me. “Where is Lili?” I asked in a tone Sam called quiet crazy.

  “I think she’s in her room,” said one of the girls, who looked older and a little drunk.

  Christ. I thought of those girls who had just been killed in a car accident. These kids could wreck their cars after drinking in our home. I felt dizzy.

  “All of you sit down, and don’t move until I come back,” I barked, and ran upstairs to find Lili.

  I heard retching sounds from the bathroom. I went in and found Megan holding Lili’s hair while she vomited.

  “Christ, Lili.” Her eyes were closed, and she was moaning. Seconds later, I heard footsteps and turned around to find Dawn standing there in her scrubs.

  “Lili called me, and she didn’t sound right, so I called my mom,” Megan said apologetically.

  “You did the right thing, sweetie,” I assured her. “I’ve got it from here.”

  Dawn walked over to Lili and examined her. “Lil, can you hear me?”

  Lili nodded her head.

  “How much did you drink, sweetie?”

  She answered by throwing up.

  Dawn wiped Lili’s mouth and checked her eyes and took her pulse. “Okay, she’s going to be fine. You stay with her while I go collect those brats’ keys and make sure nobody drives home drunk.”

  Megan lingered in the hallway. Lili was literally hugging the porcelain bowl. She wore an off-the-shoulder sweater I’d never seen before and jeans so tight I wondered how she got them on. When she looked up, mascara streaked her face.

  “I’m so sick,” she groaned. I ran the water, wet a washcloth, and wiped away the mascara and liquid eyeliner.

  Dawn’s voice drifted upstairs. She was calling parents to come and pick up their kids. Every time my doorbell rang, I cringed. The timing of Lili’s caper meant everything. You didn’t have to be a parenting guru to figure out that she was screaming for my attention.

  When Lili finally finished throwing up, I stuck her in the shower to rinse off the vomit. I helped her into a clean pair of pajamas and tucked her in bed, a wastebasket at the ready.

  “I’m so sorry, Mommy,” she mumbled over and over again.

  Dawn came upstairs with a big glass of water. “Drink this, Lil. Slow sips.”

  I went into the hall and Dawn followed. “God, this is so awful. She’s been supplying her little friend Taylor with Adderall,” I said.

  “You can deal with that later. For now, they’re all gone.”

  “Where is Sam?”

  “On his way.”

  The phone rang. “Just a second.” I ran into the bedroom to answer it.

  “It’s Mom,” Neil said. My knees went weak because I knew what he was going to say next. “Her organs are starting to shut down.”

  “Oh, God.” I told him about Lili. “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know what to say, but it’s bad.”

  “What do you mean? I thought she had a few weeks or days at least.”

  “I’m sorry, Barbara.”

  I hung up the phone and sat on my bed. I couldn’t leave Lili when she needed me most, but if I didn’t, I might miss the chance to say goodbye to my mother. I didn’t want her to die without me there to hold her hand. I felt the profound pull of her need, as a dying woman, as a motherless child alone in the mikveh talking to the dead.

  “Barbara.” Dawn was standing in the doorway. I pictured her in some hospital room, guiding a family through an impossible decision.

  I told her about my mother’s condition. “What should I do?”

  “That’s your choice, but know that I’ll stay and take care of Lili.”

  “Where the hell is Sam?”

  He appeared behind Dawn. “Right here.”

  “Tell him,” I said to Dawn, and she relayed the facts of the situation.

  He walked over to the bed and sat next to me. I was being sawed in two. There was no good choice. I got up and went into Lili’s room. She usually slept on her back with her arms slung over her head, but she was curled under the covers in the fetal position, her hands over her ears. I’d assumed this exact position when I’d had my breakdown. Now I only slept on my stomach. I wanted nothing more than to wrap my body around hers and hold her.

  “I’m going to the hospital,” I told Dawn and Sam.

  He leaned over and whispered into my hair, “I got this, sweetie.”

  Dawn looked at me like she wanted to say something.

  “You think I’m doing the wrong thing?”

  She shook her head and pointed toward my coffee stain.

/>   “Oh. I owe you.”

  “You’d do the same for me,” she said.

  I would, but up until now, I’d never been able to ask for help. When this was over, I’d tell Lili that I did have a friend. Dawn.

  I put on a T-shirt and yoga pants. It took every ounce of strength I had to walk past Lili’s room and go to my mother’s side.

  Bonnie was trained as a hospice nurse, and she’d been assigned to my mother’s care full time. My mother probably weighed no more than eighty pounds. She’d been shrinking since her heart attack, and her breathing was labored. Bonnie had dressed her in one of her favorite nightgowns and put a clip in her hair. Seeing her that way made every bone hurt, as if I had the flu.

  Andy sat on one side of the bed, and Neil and I on the other. We stayed with her for the next twenty-four hours. This time we were not waiting for her to come back to us.

  I held her shrunken hands, the hands that had braided challah dough and put a candle to the fine hairs of the kosher chickens she bought for Shabbos. The hands that had stitched my Purim costumes and shampooed my hair when I was too young to wash it myself. The hands that had given and received love from Andy, the Schines, Neil, my father, and me. I could see her in her entirety. I prayed for peace, hers and mine. She squeezed my fingers so slightly that I barely felt it. Neil had been surviving on Diet Pepsi and hospital food, and his face looked bloated. And very sad. His relationship with my mother had been less complicated and painful than mine. She’d played a role in his adult life. While I mourned lost opportunities, he was grieving over something real. She knew his kids, and they knew her.

  “Do you want a minute alone with Mom?” I asked.

  “Thanks, Barbara. You go first, though. I need to check in with Jenny.”

  Andy followed Neil out of the room. I had so many things to tell my mother. I scooted my chair up to the bed, until I was only a few inches from her. She no longer smelled like lavender or Chanel, she smelled like hospital and death. I leaned over and whispered to her through the dirty gray strands that covered her ears. I whispered our secrets as if the naming of them could close the distance that had grown between us over the years.

  “I know who you are and who you were, Mom. You were a good mother for a long time. You taught me how to write a proper thank-you letter, and you rubbed Vaseline into my feet during the harsh winter months. You listened carefully to Neil and me when we told you about our playground scrapes, and for a long time we knew that we mattered most to you. I know this to be true now, too—it was you, not the Schines, who cast us from the mansion, and I understand why only now, only after I have left my own family when they needed me. I know why you loved Andy and that you didn’t pick him over us. I have felt the powerful pull of our family history. History, you always loved history, yet it kept you from the present. There is no shame in the desperate sorrow of a motherless girl, Mom. Please forgive me. Please forgive yourself.”

  I put my head on her chest and listened to her addled heart. She would go soon, I could always sense her impending absences.

  The door opened and closed. “I just heard the death rattle,” I told Neil and Andy, and rose from my mother’s death bed. Neil, Andy, and I sat next to her, afraid to leave for a second, while Jenny came in and out with offers of coffee and vending-machine food.

  My mother died shortly before midnight, one week shy of her seventy-ninth birthday. I felt her spirit leave her body before Andy told me that she was gone.

  Neil swung into action. He called the nurse, a youngish dark-haired man in scrubs who offered his condolences and explained the procedure for transporting my mother to the funeral home. Andy and I sat with her until the orderlies arrived. They pulled the curtain around her, so we couldn’t see them removing all the tubes, and then they wheeled her away.

  Neil came back to the room. “Go home and get some sleep, Andy.”

  “Can I have a moment with your sister first?”

  “Of course. I’ll be outside.”

  Andy stared at the floor and collected himself. “I want you to know something, Barbara.”

  “Andy, you don’t have to explain anything—”

  “No, that’s not it.” He gave his nervous cough. “You were her Sweet B.”

  My nickname on his lips pierced me.

  “And she loved you with all of her heart.” Andy reached out his ropy arms, and held me, maybe pretending for a second that his Junie had come back to him. I wished my mother had married him.

  I was happy to offer Andy this small comfort. I was grateful to him for relaying a message from my mother, and to the rebbetzin for guiding me back to her. They helped me see that my mother’s absence was a part of her, like a rest in a piece of music, beautiful notes followed by unpredictable silences that made you wonder if the song had stopped playing for good. Now I knew that her music pulsed through the silent notes.

  27

  I designated myself as my mother’s shomer; I would watch her body until the funeral.

  Neil didn’t dare ask the Abromowitz Funeral Home to accept a dead Jew who had had an affair with a Shabbos goy, so he chose a nondenominational funeral parlor in Mequon. I drove there alone to wait for my mother’s body to arrive. Mr. Gorzon, the funeral director, a middle-aged man in a nice-fitting suit, offered me tea. His easy smile soothed me.

  After we finished discussing the details of my mother’s burial, he showed me to a comfortable bench in the drafty corridor outside the preparation room. He offered me a siddur, the same prayer book we used in Temple Micah, and then he patted my shoulder and disappeared. He returned a half hour later, wheeling my mother’s gurney into the preparation room. Her body formed a small mound under the sheet. I lowered my eyes and turned the pages of the prayer book until I located Psalm 51.

  Have mercy on me, O God

  According to your unavailing love;

  According to your great compassion

  Blot out my transgressions.

  Wash away all my iniquity

  And cleanse me from my sin …

  Create in me a pure heart, O God

  And renew a steadfast spirit within me …

  I read it over quietly, in a whisper, and then again and again in full preschool-teacher voice until I was hoarse.

  Hot air started to blast out of the old radiator across from me, and soon it lulled me into a nap. I woke up when I felt a presence in the corridor. The basement light was dim, and my eyes were bleary from exhaustion and reciting the psalm without my reading glasses. The rebbetzin walked toward me as if she were emerging from an old black-and-white movie. She put her hand on my cheek. I bolted up in my chair.

  She was not alone.

  Tzippy stood behind her in a sheitel and a long skirt. I recognized her instantly. My mouth could barely form her name.

  “It’s me,” she murmured. She sat herself on my left, and the rebbetzin sat on my right. Tzippy put her hand over mine, and we sat together for a minute or two in silence.

  “Your letter was beautiful,” she said.

  I took her face in my hands and touched my forehead to hers, and we stayed like that for a time, talking without words. I didn’t need to tell her how much I’d missed her, because I knew she felt the same way, and for now that was enough.

  I sat back. “I want to pinch you to make sure you’re real.”

  “I know, I know.” Tzippy laughed through her tears, and the sound carried me back to all the nights I’d slept at her house, lying on her trundle bed, holding my eyes open with my fingers so I wouldn’t drift off while she was talking. I didn’t want to miss a word.

  “Look.” The rebbetzin pointed down the corridor.

  I squinted at an approaching figure. Kinky hair and wiry limbs. Lili. She was wearing a modest sweater, a long skirt, and boots. I stared at her, and then I stared at the rebbetzin and Tzippy. “How in the world?”

  They got up and started down the hall to leave me with my daughter, but she grabbed their hands. “Please stay.”

&nb
sp; “We’ll be right around the corner,” the rebbetzin said and stroked her arm.

  Lili knew them! I looked at them, trying to wrap my head around the absurdity of this threesome. “How?” I asked dumbly.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Lili said.

  “What? What will I not like?”

  She played with the buckle on her purse and then swallowed hard. “I know them from the letters.”

  “Letters?” I felt ill.

  Blood rushed to her cheeks. “In the cedar chest, please don’t kill me.”

  “Lili, those were private.”

  She looked down at her boots. “I know.” She pinched her eyes shut the way she did when she was trying not to cry.

  I was scanning my memory for all the embarrassing and taboo things in those letters when Lili came over and sat on my lap. I stopped scanning and held her. On some level, I must have known that an old cedar chest would entice a scavenger like Lili.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Last summer, a few weeks before my injury. Mom, those letters are so sad.” She told me that my falling-out with Tzippy broke her heart and that she wanted to get us back together, like the sisters scheming to reunite their divorced mom and dad in Parent Trap. She’d always noticed my look of longing when I saw her with Meghan or Kara, and she wanted that for me, too.

  I rested my cheek against the itchy wool of her sweater.

  “And then there was the mysterious Grandma June,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine you leaving me like that. I hated her, and then I felt guilty when she stayed with us after my surgery, because I could see why you loved her, and that made me feel even worse.”

  “Oh, Lil. This must all have been so confusing for you.”

  Her voice grew shaky. “And then you started to get all distant and weird, and I worried that you were going to run off with some Shabbos goy.”

  I almost laughed. “No danger there.”

  “Annette,” she said, recalling the name Tzippy and I had given the Shabbos goy’s imaginary dead wife. “After I discovered the letters, I went on the Schines’ website and found Tzippy.”

  “Come,” I said. I helped her up, and we walked down the hall to Tzippy and the rebbetzin.