“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” one of the twins said.
“We need someplace to visit,” the other argued. “Someplace to remember. The Angeline won’t always be there. . . .”
Alexis nodded, feeling the weight of the soiled cardboard box in her hands.
Inside were her mother’s ashes.
Clovis had relented, preferring to bend the rules of his crematorium rather than store her mother’s body indefinitely. In the process, he had removed the pearl necklace Edith wore, not realizing they weren’t real. Only paste. But Alexis wore them anyway.
As she handed her mother’s ashes to Ursula, she noticed the old Seafair pirate was tearing up behind her ceremonial eye-patch (worn for special occasions such as this). Everyone was. Her mother’s death heralded the end of an era.
Mia walked up, glamorous in a long black dress, and late, as usual. Mr. Kenji handed her the violin and she began to play a haunting melody.
Nervously, Alexis touched each pearl, the way a priest might regard a rosary bead, the way she’d seen in movies. Each pearl represented a resident, a member of her extended family—a wayward saint cared for by her mother.
As the wind blew, Alexis closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was at another funeral, the only other funeral she’d ever attended, nearly ten years earlier. A memory that she’d rarely revisited, until now.
Lost in the dusty corners of her childhood, she remembered a similar gathering. Her mother was ever-present, as was Ursula, who had more teeth back then. The rest she didn’t recognize, though she knew they were part of her colorful extended family.
As she struggled with the faint images, she realized where she’d been—her father’s funeral. He’d knocked up her mother and vanished, but evidently the circumstances of his death brought strangers back together, if only for one surreal afternoon.
“Who was he?” she had asked.
“Just a friend.” Her mother answered, fidgeting with the pearls around her neck.
Alexis had never realized it was her father. But now it made sense. The most vivid memory was of LJ, a huddled mass on the periphery, babbling to himself.
“He mixed up his medication this morning,” her mother had said.
As Alexis watched the scene again, she realized what LJ had done. She’d seen it once before. He’d dosed himself and was tripping badly, probably on purpose. He wasn’t escaping the memory of accidentally killing her father; he was forcing himself to remember every detail. He was punishing himself. The guilt had derailed him, along with the acid, until his murmurings took a detour and he started shouting about how Buddy Holly had been a narc and was killed by J. Edgar Hoover.
Ursula pulled him away, sending him on a mission to clean Jimi Hendrix’s grave. That task kept him occupied for some time; Jimi was buried in Renton.
Afterward, they’d had a wake at the Angeline. Alexis had sat on the cracked, coffee-stained linoleum, coloring letters on a scrap of cardboard. The adults milled about, drinking her mother’s sherry like sacramental wine.
“She’s so creative,” Mr. Kenji had remarked. “Practicing her ABCs?”
The conversations drifted in and out. No one realized that her letters formed a sign that read need help. She had learned how to read early and write early, and people were still surprised by it. And in between debates over her father’s career choice and whether Jerry Garcia was actually a better guitarist when stoned, she had wandered outside and found a spot on the sidewalk next to the meth kids that was overlooked by members of Seattle’s more polite society. She hadn’t realized that they were panhandling. But she’d seen the signs soliciting assistance and thought she’d fit in.
Alexis sat there, alone in a crowd of strangers with her cardboard sign, expecting something—she wasn’t sure what. Then she felt he mother’s hands on her shoulders.
When Alexis opened her eyes again, she was at Lakeview, Ursula was pouring out her mother’s ashes. Part of them. The rest would be scattered as she’d wished. She felt hands on her shoulders again.
“You OK, chica?” Linda whispered in her ear. “You were gone there for a while . . .”
She felt Linda’s hands wrap around her waist and leaned back as her dry, chapped lips brushed her neck.
“You didn’t think I’d stay mad forever, did you?”
Alexis inhaled Linda’s scent, reached down and touched her hands. She noticed that Linda’s fingernails had been chewed to the quick. She did care.
“Not forever.” Alexis said, looking at the rest of the funeral gathering. “Just until you track me down in Arizona and I have to get a restraining order . . .”
“I don’t mean to spoil the moment,” Linda said, “but I think this is where—you know—you’re supposed to say a few words. You’re family and all. . . .”
Family? Alexis glanced at her uncle in the distance. And what about the residents? Her mother had known them for a lifetime longer than hers. They were family as well.
Linda whispered in her other ear, “Awkward . . .”
Alexis leaned back, enjoying the embrace. For once Linda was there for her, not just in it for coffin time—unconditional and unexpectant.
It was an interesting change.
Inhaling, Alexis blurted out, “I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you how great my mother was, but most of you know that.”
Alexis paused to collect herself, noticing a crow flying overhead, wondering if the black bird might be Habib.
“Edith was a lot of things. A friend, a defender, a protector, a benevolent dictator, a warden, and ‘a bull-goose loony,’ as LJ once said. But to be honest, she had her struggles as a mother.” Alexis swallowed hard. “All of you were her family—she called you heroes. But what was I? Where did I fit in? She kept me here, under wraps. Sometimes it was like she needed to be needed. I needed a mother, not a caretaker. But she did her best . . .”
Alexis paused, staring back at the eyes that watched her struggle to put together a fitting eulogy. She wished LJ were here in more than spirit; he would have been up to the task.
“Last year, for Mother’s Day, I went looking for the perfect card, among all the sappy Hallmark offerings. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Because the perfect card for Edith would have read, “Well . . . you tried.”
“She did,” Roberta chimed in, and the others nodded in agreement.
“And I’ve tried, too,” Alexis answered, “to keep going, to keep the Angeline sailing.” As she spoke she winked to Ursula in her pirate garb. “But we’ve run aground without her, and despite my desperate attempts, I need to move on.”
She couldn’t make eye contact with Otto, Mr. Kenji, Roberta, or any of the residents. She knew they were crestfallen.
“Now for the hard part,” Alexis said as she knelt down and removed the necklace, placing the pearls in the grave, kicking up a bit of dust from her mother’s ashes.
After each resident said a few words, sang a few songs, or recited a few lines of poetry, Alexis walked back toward the black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the cemetery. Her uncle was waiting for her. Linda trailed behind.
Mia caught up with her, handing out the violin. “I’m sorry I didn’t get the concert planned in time.”
“Don’t worry about it; that wouldn’t have changed anything.” Alexis took the violin with a weak smile. “Maybe I’ll actually learn to play this in Sedona.”
“Don’t tell me that’s it?” Linda said. “You’re free now, you can emancipate yourself, go from minor to major. You can stay here, in Seattle. My stepdad can help with the lawyerly things, he’s good at that.”
Alexis paused, nodding, part of her agreeing. “But I can’t.” she said. “Look at me. I’m the world’s oldest fourteen-year-old. I’m not my mother—”
Linda interrupted. “You’re more. You’re like Edith 2.0. And Edith 2.0 can do what she wants now.”
“Even if that means going to Sedona?”
Linda looked crushe
d. She dropped her head, paused a moment, maybe waiting for a reprieve; it never came. She turned and walked away.
Alexis knew that despite Linda’s support, there were strings attached and those cords were binding her here. If she were to have any kind of life, it would have to be away from those closest to her. She would have to leave the Angeline. Like Habib, she would have to fly away.
CHAPTER 33
CLYDE FORD
DEATH.
Alexis looked around, a tiny shaft of sunlight glinting off the shiny surface of a nearby tombstone.
Death.
Sunlight, also off the window of Uncle Burr’s sleek black limo.
Death.
The caw, caw, caw of a crow. Alexis chuckled to herself. Wasn’t it supposed to be a raven and not a crow that heralded and accompanied death?
Death.
She seemed too young to have Death following her so closely for so long. Death felt like to her than the child’s blanket she never knew.
Death.
LJ in his drug-induced stupors used to rant about Death . . . And . . . He used to rant about more. What was it? Death and . . . The word, the sense of what he used to mumble escaped her.
“Alexis.”
Uncle Burr’s voice called her back from the past.
“Dear, I think it’s time we made our way to the airport.”
His voice blurred in her mind, blurred into LJ’s ramblings about Death.
“Alexis.” Uncle Burr raised his voice.
She looked in his direction, nodded. Her feet trailed through the grass, each blade festooned with tiny globules of moisture, reminding her of minuscule tombstones, reminding her of . . . What was it that LJ used to say?
She ambled toward the limo. The chauffeur held the door open. Uncle Burr’s face was barely visible in the dark recess. Alexis lingered, a part of her not wanting to enter the limo, as though she were being asked to enter her own moving tomb. She looked back at the cemetery with a strange, macabre fondness as though the familiarity of death was also a comfort and this new life she was off to something wonderful, perhaps, yet strange.
She slipped into the passenger’s seat beside Uncle Burr. He patted her fondly on her thigh. A part of her stiffened. As appealing as the idea of now having a father figure was, it was also appalling. She’d been alone. She’d tried to make her own way. Tried to meet the world head-on as an adult. Tried . . . and failed. Yet another death—the death of Alexis’s attempts to be a grown-up, a young woman.
“Alexis.” Uncle Burr’s voice, almost hoarse, rumbled from his chest. “You know this is the point in the story where—”
“What story?” Alexis blurted out.
“Any story,” Burr said. “This is the point in the story where the characters remaining after a death comfort each other.”
“But it’s not a story,” Alexis said. “It’s my life, and anyway how would you know this is that point in the story?”
“Well, because I’m a mystery writer.”
Alexis looked at him in disbelief.
“It’s true.”
“I guess I always assumed you were an accountant or something.” She felt off-kilter. “Well, being a writer, even a mystery writer, doesn’t make you an expert on a real person’s life.
“LJ used to say,” Alexis continued, “I mean he used to ramble about how truth was stranger than fiction, and fiction, he’d say, was better than truth.”
Uncle Burr chuckled. “Readers read my mystery novels because they want to escape from the truths of their lives.”
The limo slunk down the narrow roadway between burial plots. Alexis’s gaze lingered on each passing tombstone “And is that what you’re hoping for me? Escape from the truths of my life?”
“No, dear,” Uncle Burr said. “I’m hoping that in Sedona you’ll find the time and the space to discover the truths of your life.”
Death and . . .
LJ’s rantings still hovered over her, like the mist hanging over this Seattle day.
The limo passed through a chain-link fence, turned into a small parking lot. Out the windshield, Alexis saw a gleaming, needle-nosed, white plane parked on the asphalt, the whine of its engines barely audible within the car. She chuckled, this wasn’t SeaTac.
“That yours?” she asked.
“No,” Uncle Burr said. “It’s chartered.”
“Cost a lot to charter a jet?”
“Enough.”
“Not sure I’ll get used to living with someone who can charter a jet at his whim.”
Uncle Burr laughed. “Oh, I imagine you’ll find a way.”
Alexis rubbed her hand over her butter-smooth leather seat. The jet’s engines whined louder. She watched out the window as the ground passed by faster and faster. Then, just as the plane’s wheels left the ground, a flock of crows at the end of the runway scattered as a group, leaving one lone crow to fly its own way.
“Habib,” Alexis said to herself. “Habib, what was it that LJ used to say? Death and? . . .”
Uncle Burr’s jet pierced through one layer of clouds after another. Finally, bursting through to a sunlight that seemed too brilliant for Alexis. The plane made a sweeping bank to the right and now, out the window, the majestic peak of Mount Rainier awash in golden sunlight protruded above the highest layer of clouds.
LJ had once told her the story of two mountain climbers so anxious to make their ascent that they climbed the wrong peak. She understood what that must have felt like. Hadn’t she been climbing the wrong peak for years?
She turned to Uncle Burr. “Why?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Yes, why did you want to keep the Angeline? Why not sell it and let the everything . . . let all of the past die? Wouldn’t that be easier, better?”
Uncle Burr leaned back in his seat, rocked slightly, folded his hands, brought them under his bottom lip.
“Easier? Yes. Better? No. In the end, the promises we make to loved ones are the most important gifts we can give.”
“Not to my mother. She wanted nothing to do with the place, and stupid me. I thought all along that she did.”
“Edith didn’t know all of the Angeline’s secrets.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did Edith ever tell you the history of the Angeline?”
“Yes, that it had been a funeral home and it was named after Chief Sealth’s daughter, Angeline.”
“Yes, but before that, long before that, the ground that the Angeline was constructed on was a sacred Suquamish site. In handing over that site to the founding families of the city, Chief Sealth, as was his actual name, asked that whomever the owner was, whatever use was made of the property, that some aspect of that original sense of that place be retained.”
The cockpit door opened, and a tall man wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with military epaulets stepped out. Alexis flinched, her first thought that a captain should never leave the controls of a plane. He must have noticed her surprise. He smiled, pointed back to the cockpit. “There are two of us up there, and the plane’s on autopilot. I stepped out to see if there’s anything I can get either of you to eat or to drink.”
He pushed down on a lever and a table rose from the console between Alexis and Uncle Burr. The captain smoothed out a linen tablecloth over the table. He placed a bowl of phở in front of her.
Uncle Burr smiled. “Heard somewhere that you liked that.”
“The Suquamish used that site for a masked ceremony of initiation. Anyone making a transition could go there. If you were moving from childhood to adulthood, you went to this site. If you were moving from being single to being married, you went to this site. If you were moving from being a woman to having a child and becoming a mother, you went to this site. If you were about to die, you went there. And the ceremony . . . well, I actually wrote about it one of my mystery books.
“The ceremony was a death ceremony. You laid on the ground while other tribal member piled on top of you dirt, and ashes, and sm
all stones, and objects that you had once held important. And then they drummed and danced around you, and sang songs of your death. ‘Die you must die,’ I have heard the songs said. ‘You must die in order to live.’”
Uncle Burr tapped on the table as he spoke. The sound, his rhythm entangled Alexis’s thoughts, entrained her mind, seducing her.
An image of her mother lying in a coffin flashed before her; her father, bubbles issuing from his mouth, drowning; LJ bleeding on the sidewalk; her life exploding, imploding, exploding again. The sound of the jet engine now fusing with Uncle Burr’s drumming, pushing her deeper into herself, into her life.
Tears came uncontrollably. A few at first, then a gush. Her body shook. She cried, not knowing why, not caring. She cried for all of them, for all of it. For her mother. For her father. For LJ. For Linda. For her life . . . interrupted so many times.
Uncle Burr continued. “When the person lying under this pile of their past started shaking, the drumming, singing, and dancing stopped. Everyone fell silent. Then, whew. Whew. Whew. The entire community gathered around this person and began blowing breaths. And one by one the objects were removed. An old woman came forward and reached a hand out to pull the person up from the rubble. She was called the ‘Bringer of New Life,’ and the person was then considered to have born again. Angeline, Chief Sealth’s daughter, was the last Suquamish native who knew this ceremony, she was the last ‘Bringer of New Life.’ Chief Sealth simply asked that this site always retain some manner of helping those who entered it to find ‘new life.’”
Uncle Burr’s words mixed with Alexis’s tears, with the sounds of the jet engines, then suddenly LJ’s voice burst through, not as a mumble now but like a clear bell . . .
“Death,” Alexis heard LJ say. “It’s all about death and resurrection; about what you have to let go of in order to move on.”
“I wanted to keep the Angeline,” Uncle Burr whispered, “to keep that promise to the chief.”
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