Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Drink with me,” she said.

  I hesitated. I knew if I drank what she gave me, I would stay here forever. It was my mind’s version of Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, the curse that lived inside each happy ending, each act of magic. I could stay here, but I’d never see my child again.

  Lyla held the cup, her eyes black shadows in the darkness, her lovely face expressionless.

  “You don’t understand,” I said.

  She tilted her head.

  “He saved me,” I said. My voice was a croak. “He saved me.”

  “We only save ourselves,” said Lyla. “You know how, don’t you?” Her hand was steady as she held out the wine.

  “It isn’t fair,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed. I watched as she poured the wine on the sand, which instantly absorbed it, erased it.

  I pressed my hands against my eyes, and when I took them away, Lyla leaned close. I could feel her lips moving against my forehead as she whispered, “Then I set you free.” She kissed my forehead with a tenderness I’d never guessed at, had never written about. When she spoke again I heard the warrior’s voice I’d only ever heard in my head ringing across desolate plains and down dungeons’ depths. “Now wake up!”

  • • •

  “Wake up,” said the voice. “Mom, you seriously have to wake up!”

  I opened my eyes in my own world, in my own bed. Joy was standing over me, her eyes red and swollen, her face pale. She was wearing her Class Day dress, unzipped, with two mismatched shoes in her hand.

  “Mom?” she said. Her voice was shrill. “My dress won’t zip, and I can’t find my shoes.”

  “Okay.” I threw back the covers and sat up. My head felt heavy and my mouth was as dry as if I’d spent all night in a desert. Where to begin? “What day is today?”

  She stared at me, looking panicked. “Tuesday,” she said. “Daddy’s funeral’s in two hours. Grandma Ann and Aunt Elle and Aunt Samantha are all here already. You have to wake up!”

  “I’m up,” I said a little grumpily, and I patted the bed beside me. “Come here.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Just for a minute,” I urged her. “When you were little, you used to love to come in here. You’d stand by the edge of the bed, and you’d say . . .”

  “. . . can I be the middle girl?” said Joy. There wasn’t any of the old familiar exasperation in her voice. Her lips trembled. No Peter on the opposite pillow. She’d never be the middle girl again. Joy dropped her shoes on the floor and climbed in beside me and let me hug her.

  “See, that’s not so bad,” I murmured into her wet hair.

  When I looked up, my sister was standing at the doorway. “Are you awake?” she asked.

  “Obviously.”

  Elle walked across the room, kicked off her heels, and got into the bed next to Joy. “Fancy,” she said, wriggling back and forth. “Is it a pillow top?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “Can you have it?” I repeated.

  “Well, you’ll probably want a new one. You know. The memories.”

  “No, Elle,” I said with exaggerated patience. “You cannot have my bed.”

  “She wants the memories,” said Joy. Her voice was muffled by the pillow. Peter’s pillow.

  “Who wants what?” This was my mother, standing at the door, with Samantha looking over her shoulder.

  “Your daughter’s already making a play for my earthly possessions,” I said.

  Elle sat up indignantly to defend herself. “I read that after a long marriage sometimes the surviving spouse dies, like, a few days after. You know, from the grief. And all I’m saying is that if you haven’t made plans—”

  “She’s not going to die,” said Joy.

  My face felt strange. It took me a minute to realize that I’d smiled. “Doesn’t that usually happen with old people?”

  “Like I said!” said my sister, rolling her eyes at me.

  “I’m not that old, and you can’t have the bed.”

  “Good. I always liked it. Scooch over,” my mom said to my sister, and climbed aboard, displacing Joy and Elle, who recoiled in horror.

  “Ew! Stop touching me! You know I don’t like to be touched!” Elle complained.

  “Well, it’s getting crowded, is all.”

  “Ladies,” said Samantha. I stared at her expectantly. She sighed, shrugged, and perched one hip on the very edge of the bed—a symbolic gesture at best, but one that I appreciated.

  “Okay,” I said. “Leaving the nest now.” I swung my feet onto the floor. For a minute I could imagine the sands of an alien desert drifting from my palms onto the floorboards. Philadelphia, I told myself sternly. Tuesday. Peter’s funeral in an hour and a half. I turned to Joy. “I think you can wear a gray skirt and a nice blouse. Your sandals should be okay. They’re in the closet downstairs.” I slid my bare feet along the floor. One step. Two steps. Okay. Breathe. I’d brush my teeth, comb my hair, find my black Today show suit, the one Joy had told me would be perfect for a funeral. I’d get the two of us dressed and out the door, even though all I wanted to do was curl up on my bed and howl into my pillow. I would get through this, and the next day, and all of the days that came after that, days that would pile up endlessly, empty, because I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart or departing for some imaginary desert. When you’re a mother, you can’t. I raked my fingers through my tangled hair. Oh, Peter, I thought. “Come on, baby,” I said to Joy. “Let’s go.”

  • • •

  Goldstein’s Funeral Home on North Broad Street was filled to capacity with our friends and Peter’s colleagues, my family and what was left of his. I saw Dolores weeping into a wad of Kleenex, and Dr. Gerlach, the head of his department, who squeezed my shoulders in a half-hug and told me what a terrible loss this was, for the hospital, for Philadelphia, for all of us.

  Two rows were taken up by Peter’s large ladies, including Mrs. Lefferts and her daughter. Three rows in the back were crammed with Joy’s classmates. The boys looked uncomfortable in the button-down shirts and ties they’d undoubtedly purchased for their classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs; the girls, in skirts and heels, were wide-eyed and whispering as Maxi, in a wide-brimmed black hat, made her way down the aisle and came to sit beside me.

  “Up here,” Elle murmured into my ear. “In front.” Her dress was black and tight but not indecently short or low-cut. Her shoes were closed-toe, with a sensible heel, and she’d cried off her eye makeup. My brother Josh was there, pale and somber in a gray suit. My mother wore a loose cotton dress and clutched Mona’s hand. Joy sat next to her, and I sat next to Joy, and Samantha slipped in the row behind me, reached over to squeeze my hand, and wiped her eyes.

  I patted her shoulders, looking around. “Is your guy here?” I whispered.

  “In the back,” she replied, sniffling.

  “Some first date,” I said, and craned my neck until I saw him, a man in a navy suit with reddish-blond hair, affixing a yarmulke to his head.

  There must have been prayers, though I can’t remember them. I’m sure there was a eulogy, but I can’t remember that, either. I remember thinking, midway through the kaddish, the mourners’ prayer, that maybe someone had found the notes I’d taken about Peter’s demise, and there’d be a flaming funeral pyre and someone to sing “Many Rivers to Cross” once we got to the cemetery. I held Joy’s hand. I dispensed Kleenex along the length of the aisle. I didn’t cry at all.

  Then Joy and my mother and Elle and I got into the back of a rented Town Car (rented when? by whom? I had no idea), and it drove away. “You know, he didn’t want this,” I remarked to no one in particular as I climbed out of the car. “He wanted to lie in state at the Apollo.” I hummed a few bars of “Many Rivers to Cross.”

  Joy stared at me. “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “It was just a joke we had. Just something silly.” Out the window, the leaves on the trees burned brightly against
the perfect blue sky. Cars zipped down the highway on their way to normal places: the school and the supermarket, the drugstore and the post office, and inside of them were people going about their business, singing along to the radio and enjoying the sun. “It was before your time.”

  Rabbi Grussgott stood at the head of a rectangle dug in the dirt and chanted the kaddish, and I was fine. The coffin went creaking into the ground on canvas straps. Still fine. Then, in a ritual I remembered from Bruce’s father’s funeral and hadn’t seen since, the rabbi handed me a shovel.

  Uh-uh. No way. “I can’t,” I said, handing it back.

  “It’s okay,” she said quietly. She held it in her hands. It was just a regular gardening tool with a worn wood shaft and a rust-flecked spade. She looked at us. My mother made a small moaning noise in her throat and stepped backward. Elle took the shovel and looked a question at me. I shrugged. Joy stepped forward and took the shovel in her hands.

  “I’ll love you forever, Daddy,” she said, scooping dirt from where it had been piled by the side of Peter’s grave and sprinkling it on top of the wood of his coffin.

  • • •

  The kitchen and the dining room were filled with flowers, and every countertop held an assortment of trays from the Famous Fourth Street Deli, where the three of us had eaten so many meals. “Deli equals death,” I told Sam. I wadded up the plastic wrap I’d pulled off a platter of cookies and tossed it into the trash can.

  “Would you please sit down?” Samantha asked me for roughly the hundredth time since we’d gotten home. “It’s sitting shiva, not running-around-the-kitchen shiva. You’re supposed to let us help.”

  “I want to keep busy,” I said. “It helps.” That wasn’t actually true. It wasn’t helping. I felt as numb as if I’d been wrapped in six inches of gauze, yet somehow I was functioning, finding plastic cups and extra toilet paper for the powder room and the monogrammed ice bucket one of my Cleveland cousins had given us for our wedding. Every time I turned around, I thought I’d see him walking through the door, sitting on the couch with a crossword puzzle in his hands and his long legs stretched out in front of him, and every time it felt like being hit with something heavy. Oh, I would think as the vision dissolved. Oh, Peter.

  I made myself go to the sink and start loading the dishwasher, even though Sam and my mother tried to shoo me away. “How did that happen? Do you think the Chinese take-out industry’s pissed? Or the fried-chicken people? How come fried chicken didn’t get to be the universal food of Jewish grief?”

  “We can get you fried chicken,” Sam promised. “We can get you anything you need.”

  “Do you remember my bachelorette party?” Because I was preparing to wed a diet doctor (Bariatric physician, I heard my husband say in my head, please!), we decided that instead of a party that celebrated a farewell to flesh and included a trip to the local version of Chippendale’s, we would instead have a Farewell to Trans Fats, which, I’d sadly told my friends, would probably never be permitted to darken my cupboards again. Six of us had gotten all dressed up and gone restaurant-hopping for deep-fried mozzarella sticks, biscuits with honey, macaroni and cheese, McDonald’s french fries, fried chicken, and fried ice cream. Then, I remembered, we’d gone to see the strippers anyhow. I’d gotten home at two in the morning, reeking of grease and tequila and whipped cream (the last acquired at the strip club), with my high heels in my hand and a lei made of condoms around my neck, swearing to myself that it would be nothing but salads and All-Bran until the vows were said.

  I hope it was worth it, Peter had called from the bed, and I’d giggled and crawled in next to him, fully dressed except for my shoes. He’d told me I’d smelled like a zeppole. You know it turns you on, I’d said.

  “You know what the moral of this is?” I asked. I was in the kitchen. There was the table where we’d had thousands of meals, played hours of Candy Land and dominoes when Joy was little and Scrabble when she was big (even though I should have been the family champ, Peter would usually eke out a victory by dint of some obscure medical term that always sounded made up). There was the stove where he’d make his chicken cacciatore, and it was so delicious that I’d never complain about the way he’d use every pot and pan we owned to make it, and I’d wind up washing all of them. The refrigerator still held half of a six-pack of Yuengling and the skim milk he’d poured on his oatmeal. On the door was a Rocky magnet with a picture of the two of us on the museum steps underneath it. “The moral is, eat whatever you want, because it doesn’t fucking matter. You’re gonna die anyhow.”

  “Come on.” Sam gripped my shoulders briefly, then steered me toward the pantry. “Language. And we need more napkins. Just tell me where they are.”

  “Napkins. Right.” Around my waist was the gingham apron I’d bought to impress Remy Heymsfeld from Open Hearts. I guessed I’d need to call him soon, him and Betsy both, to tell them what had happened, to see what could be done. There was a magnetic pad on the refrigerator, and I scribbled down CANCEL BABY before rifling through the shelves. The only napkins I could find were left over from our Fourth of July barbecue. Their red, white, and blue stripes would probably give the proceedings an incongruously patriotic feel. Ah well, I thought, and piled them next to the platters on the table and looked at my watch, wondering when I could go back to bed.

  “How can people be eating?” Joy demanded with her hands on her hips, staring at the spread: corned beef and pastrami, turkey and tuna and egg salad, smoked fish and Swiss cheese and cream cheese, rye bread and bagels, kugels studded with raisins, platters of sugar-dusted linzer tortes and chocolate-chip cookies. “How can anyone be hungry?”

  “Life goes on,” I said. It was the worst cliché, and possibly the most true.

  Joy curled her lip in the scornful manner she’d perfected over the last nine months. Her hair hung in ringlets around her face. “Well, I think it’s disgusting.” She brushed at her swollen eyes and walked out the back door.

  The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” Sam said, wiping her hands on a dish towel tucked into her waistband. A minute later, she came back, leading a little girl and her mother. The girl introduced herself as Cara.

  “From the Ronald McDonald House,” said her mom. “She was wondering if she could say hello to Joy.”

  “Sure, honey,” I said, and I led her into the garden, where Joy and her friends were sitting. Sam’s guy was doing card tricks for them, and they were doing a good job of making a dent in the cookie trays.

  I stood on the steps as Joy looked up. “Hi, Cara.”

  “My mom saw about your dad in the paper,” Cara said. “Is it okay that I came?”

  “Sure it’s okay,” said Joy. My heart swelled as I watched Joy pull up a chair for the little girl, introduce her to Tamsin and Todd, and ask about someone named Harry. “He has hair now,” the girl said, and smiled, and Joy smiled back at her. “That’s good,” my daughter said. Today she is a woman, I thought, and turned away so Joy wouldn’t see me cry.

  Maxi handed me a handkerchief, a crisply ironed monogrammed linen square. I wiped my face, then smoothed my apron and went back to the kitchen. Through the windows beside the door, I could see a station wagon parked at the curb with its blinkers on and six feet of Bruce Guberman standing next to the driver’s door.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Guberman.”

  “That’s him?” Maxi whispered back, peering at the car. She beckoned for Samantha, who took in the scene with narrowed eyes.

  “Do you want me to tell him to leave?” Sam asked hopefully.

  “No,” I said. Then a horrible thought struck me. “Oh my God, you guys. What if he thinks that every time someone dies, I’ll have sex with him?” I started laughing as the passenger-side door swung open, and Emily, dainty as a doll, exited, then opened the door behind her and extracted one of her sons. My fingernails dug into the meat of my palms.

  “Let me handle this,” Samantha said, stepping past me.

  “No,” I said. “No, it
’s okay. They’re here for Joy. It’s okay.”

  I stood there and watched as Bruce took his wife’s elbow and steered her (or maybe “dragged her” would be more apt, although I could have been projecting) up the steps toward my front door. Then I made myself walk down to meet them. “Cannie,” he said.

  “Bruce,” I answered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, like a parrot.

  Emily detached herself from Bruce’s side.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said quietly. “Boys,” she said, bending down (short as she was, she didn’t have far to go). The older boy put his video game in his pocket, and the younger one, the spitting image of Bruce, looked up at me and said, “Sorry.”

  Two little boys. Two perfect boys. Oh, Peter. My throat closed again, but I managed to say, “Joy’s in the garden.” I wiped my eyes and stood aside to let them pass.

  • • •

  Three days later, I made myself play the forty-seven messages on our voice mail. I sat in the living room, a glass of wine in my hands, with Peter’s blue bathrobe belted around my waist, and let the words wash over me. We were so sorry to hear . . . such a terrible shock . . . if there’s anything we can do. I wiped my eyes. I could push through the days, but the nights were terrible. I kept seeing him. That was the thing. Coming out of the shower with a towel around his hips. Walking up the stairs with the newspaper, folded in thirds, in his hand. Pulling a sun-warmed tomato off the vine in the backyard, slicing it and salting it and giving me half. Standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open, like he was hoping the contents would change if he just stared at them long enough. Don’t you be putting my butter back in there, I’d say as I walked past, and saw him eyeing the butter I kept on the counter, and he’d say, If you want this entire family to die from botulism, I suppose I shouldn’t stand in your way.

  Come back, I would try to tell him. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave Joy. Come back to us. Come home. Sometimes I’d get a word or two out. Then he’d be gone.