ONE
On the morning of your husband’s funeral, under no circumstances should you be:
a. Hungover.
b. Cocooned in a sleeping bag that smells like Jolly Ranchers.
c. Seventeen.
d. All of the above.
My phone chimes, a series of cascading bells meant to lure me peacefully from sleep. I swipe groggily at the screen and the phone slips under my clumsy fingers, skidding across the floor.
I unpeel my cramped legs from the sleeping bag I found in a box in Noah’s basement. It’s child-size, and judging by the lingering candy scent, I’m guessing Noah hasn’t used it since the summer he went to band camp in New Hampshire. It wasn’t actually called “band camp,” it was something fancy sounding, like Improvisational Techniques and Compositional Theory on the Mountaintops, something he won a scholarship for and pretended to hate, even though I could tell from his rambling letters and kitschy postcards that all music, all day was basically his idea of heaven.
I wonder if I could trick myself into thinking that that’s where he is now. Back at camp with the Jamaican chef and the bunkmates who never showered and the endless jam sessions, where he learned to tie-dye T-shirts and start a fire and write his own songs.
The sun screams through the bare, open windows. Curtains were my responsibility. There was a time—it was just last week but it may as well have been the dark ages—when I thought about going to the fabric store and asking Noah’s mother, Molly, for help with the antique sewing machine she keeps in her office. Noah insisted he’d like anything I chose. I knew he just didn’t care about curtains, but I was happy to have a task. It was our deal. Noah and his dad, Mitch, would build the house. Molly would help me decorate it.
Instead, I’m stuck with a half-finished shell, a glorified cabin with windows and walls and not much else. A bed I can’t look at. A bathroom with no sink. My dead husband’s kid-size sleeping bag in a puddle at my feet.
I rub my fists into the throbbing sockets of my eyes and peer through the window, factory-issued stickers still glued to the outside. It’s a clear shot across the pebbled driveway to Mitch and Molly’s house; the Jeep is gone but Mitch’s truck is still here, which means they drove together. Mitch left a note last night asking if I wanted a ride, but there was something about carpooling with Noah’s parents to his funeral that felt wrong. It’s bad enough I’m living in their backyard. The least I can do is drive myself.
I hurry to get dressed, pulling one of Noah’s flannel shirts from a half-packed suitcase on the floor and buttoning up the faded jeans I’ve worn for the last four days in a row. I grab my keys from a hook on the wall, trying not to see Noah, hunched over and happily focused, as he nailed it in. Trying not to hear the soft scratch of his voice, reminding me that it’s harder to lose things when you have a place to put them.
Outside, the air is sticky and full. It feels threatening, like it might rain, and I wish that it would. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and it seems unfair. This day should be dark. The sun should beat it. Instead, it’s showing off. An obnoxious blowhard, a relentless, uninvited sparkle.
Across the street, a screen door slams. Mrs. Hodgson thumps across the rickety wooden deck, wrinkled hands cupped around her mouth. Her hair is wild and unbrushed, and she’s wearing thick, wool socks with sandals. “Birdie!” she shouts, calling for her three-hundred-year-old fluffball of a cat. I imagine the cat, perched high in a tree, or nestled in the damp space beneath the foundation; I imagine the harried lilt in Mrs. Hodgson’s voice when at last she hears a rustle; I imagine the sweet, scurried reunion they’ll have on the steps, and while I’m imagining I remember, once again, how wrong it is that life is a thing that still happens.
Not my life. My life hasn’t happened for days. Not since the morning Noah didn’t wake up. He’d come in late from rehearsal at Max’s the night before. I listened to him fumble around in the dark. I felt him kiss the top of my head. I heard him nuzzle the pillow the way he always does—did—to find the place where his head fit the best. And at some point between then and when I found him, after breakfast—half a banana on toast with peanut butter and honey—his heart had stopped beating.
Most of the time it feels like mine stopped, too. But I’m still here. Mitch and Molly are still here. Mrs. Hodgson, Birdie, sleeping bags, Jolly Ranchers. All of it still exists in the universe, pointless and oblivious and taking up space. I start Noah’s car and listen to the engine wheeze, thinking for the thousandth time this week that I’d happily trade it all in. I’d live in an empty cardboard box and never see another person again if it meant I could go back to the way things were, when Noah was alive and I could sleep and the rest of the world wasn’t such an asshole.
* * *
The church lot is packed. Hatchback Subarus and rusty pickups and older-model Volkswagens are shoved up against each other, scaling the grassy hill and clogging the narrow roads. I do a lap, give up, and find a spot at the playground across the street. The park is also jammed—the early Saturday morning crowd. A couple of kids are swinging and two boys in matching fleece coats are pushing the empty carousel while their parents sit on benches and ignore them.
Ahead, I see Ross and Eugene loping across the church gardens. They’re each wearing pieces of what looks like the same suit: sweaty gray herringbone that definitely doesn’t belong to either of them. But they look okay. Better than I do. Better than any of us should after staying up all night in Ross’s basement, pretending to rehearse but mostly just staring at our hands and talking about how disgusting it is that Noah’s gone and we’re not.
Traffic slows and I cross the street without looking. Anybody who is supposed to be here is already inside. The rest of the cars are blatantly rubbernecking, curious drivers biting their nails, shaking their heads. I can practically hear them telling each other whatever they think they know, in hushed, capital-letter tones. Did You Hear? Mitch Connelly’s Kid. Was It Drugs? Just Awful. Can. You. Imagine?
Gossip on an island bounces around like pinballs in a machine, fact and fiction whipping up and down and around. As a former-runaway-turned-teen-bride-turned-widow, I’m something of an expert on gossip: how it starts, when it’s real, and when it’s a convoluted mess of nothing even resembling an original kernel of truth.
The truth, in this case, is unbelievably dumb. Noah’s heart stopped beating. That’s it. He didn’t have a “condition.” No drugs or abnormalities were found in the autopsy, which, it turns out, is a thing that happens to real people, not just the unlucky victims on Law & Order: SVU. The on-call emergency room doctor, a lanky man with a wispy comb-over, explained that it was probably something called Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndrome. SADS. That’s the official acronym. There was no way of knowing, and nothing that could have been done. It was, as far as we know, just SAD.
The inside of the church is quiet and smells like coffee and gardenias. Flowers are everywhere, exploding in large bouquets from the end of each pew and potted at the front on either side of the coffin. My knees get tingly, and I think for a second that I might pass out and also that I wish I hadn’t worn jeans. Nobody else is wearing jeans, and the last thing I need is another reason to be stared at.
Noah would have worn jeans. Noah always wore jeans. Secondhand jeans, with rips and tears and awkward hemlines, that somehow always fit him just right. He wore jeans to our wedding. They were his Fancy Wedding Jeans. We got them together at the J. Crew outlet on the mainland, dark wash with white stitching on the pockets. He pretended he was going to iron them. Nobody we knew owned an iron, but he kept the jeans folded over a wooden hanger in our makeshift closet, before and after. He never wore them again.
I look for a seat in the back but there isn’t one. There isn’t an open seat anywhere. People are stacked three deep against the walls, and I think about squeezing between them, but the first person I see is Miss Walsh, my old AP English teacher. Not old like she’s old, she’s actually really young and has this amazing curly red hair and I probably would have liked her and her class if I hadn’t been so committed to dropping out of school altogether. But I was, and when I told her she did a lot of squeezing my shoulder and looking disappointed and asking if I was sure, and now I can’t imagine having to stand in the same room with her and all of these other people and a coffin.
Pastor Paul is hunched over Mitch and Molly in the front row, and all three of them turn to wave me up. I haven’t been in a church since Dad and Juliet got married, and even then I spent most of the ceremony outside.
Nothing in me is prepared for the long, silent walk up the center aisle, my stupid flip-flops slapping against the dull wooden floor. It feels like a nightmare where you’re naked in front of a bunch of strangers, only instead of strangers it’s everyone I’ve ever known, and instead of being naked I’m just a girl in flip-flops who wants to be dead.
Last Saturday Noah and I went out to breakfast, the two of us. Molly usually makes a big deal out of weekend breakfasts, but we wanted to do something special. We were celebrating our one-month wedding anniversary. We went to the Tavern, got cinnamon French toast and eggs Florentine and shared them both. We said we’d make a weekly thing of it. A Saturday breakfast date.
Mitch shuffles on the bench and makes room for me beside him. He’s wearing what appears to be every article of black clothing he owns, all at once. A black vest and a black turtleneck and black dress slacks. Molly sits to my right, swathed in a black skirt and black sweater and even sheer black pantyhose, as if the neutral tone of her bare legs would have been an insult to the memory of her son.
For some messed-up reason this almost makes me laugh. I don’t laugh. I sit, and Molly hands me a crumpled tissue and I look at the open casket for a second to make sure all of the laughing feelings are gone. From this angle I can see only the tops of his hands, folded over his belt in a way that looks uncomfortable and absurd, probably because he never, ever wore a belt. I can almost see the glint of his ring, and my jaw goes slack and I think I might puke. I look away and force myself to believe in a parallel universe, where Noah and I are holding menus and ordering coffee and thinking about all of the Saturdays we have left.
Pastor Paul walks to the podium and says something that sounds like a greeting and something else about these difficult times. He says it’s okay to have questions for God, but I don’t have any questions. What I have is a half-used tissue and two dangling flip-flops and a lump in my throat the size of a small continent.
I swallow, but instead of going away the continent morphs and gets bigger, like it’s oozing between my lungs and up into my throat, and suddenly, too late, I know that it’s not a lump. It’s puke, actual puke, and it’s not going away.
I claw at my mouth with my hands and I shuffle back down the aisle, trying not to run or make too much noise or throw up on my flip-flops, which are flipping and flopping so obnoxiously that I think Pastor Paul stops talking, though I’m sure I couldn’t hear him even if he didn’t.
I stare ahead at the swirled stained glass of the chapel doors and push through them, the idiot sun mocking me all the way to a cluster of soon-to-be-sullied hydrangea. I fold in half and let it all go, or what I hope is all of it; anything that was ever a part of me today, proof that this happened, this is happening, a record that I’m here: I bend and I retch and I heave, until it’s gone.
Copyright © 2015 by Alloy Entertainment and Alexandra Bullen Coutts
