I should consider myself lucky. I won’t drift away into the gray-blue sky and be a dot in a black dress lifting higher and higher until no one can see me as anything other than a balloon jerked away by the wind. I’m heavy enough with grief to stay firmly on the ground.
I think about calling Jack, but I need to learn to face this new life. It seems strange that our time together is through. Things were bad for a long time, but the actual end seemed so sudden, like when you’re a teenager in love and don’t know that the other half of your union is already calling Sarah Whitmore asking to meet after school on Wednesday because you’ll be in piano lessons and unaware that while you’re playing your heart out, thinking of him, he’ll kiss her for the first time under the bleachers where he first kissed you. You’ll be thinking that when the lesson is done, you’ll meet him at Dairy Queen like you always do, but he’s not coming and you will sit there long into the afternoon, wondering what happened and why you are sitting at this cement circle with the hole in the middle, all by yourself.
Losing Dad came on sudden as well. Even after all that time in the nursing home, him drifting farther and farther away, the call that he was gone still came as a shock. Dad breathed out, and just never breathed in again. Like perhaps he just forgot he was breathing and would remember in a bit and we’d all laugh and say he was trying to trump Lola at forgetting the craziest thing and he’d say I win.
That day the stroke happened, I thought he was kidding. We were at Barley’s Pizza and he was telling a joke and, mid-sentence, he started slurring his words and cutting out every other one and then he just slipped off his chair and was gone. He never got to the punch line. It hangs out there in front of me like a speech bubble in a comic, but I will never be able to turn the page and see what he would have said next.
Those years in the nursing home were like purgatory, though I don’t know if it was his or mine. All of it is so precise and surreal at the same time. The urine stink and medicine cups, the indignity of hospital gowns when he got too difficult to dress, and Dad’s roommate, God bless him, talking about little men in sombreros sitting on top of the television.
When I visited, I would manage to smile all the way out of the building, nodding to the head nurse when she waved at me, and thanking the activities coordinator when she told me how much Dad enjoyed the banjo player who’d been there the other day, or the movie in the great room, or the whatever-the-heck-it-was that they rolled him to that he couldn’t have given two licks about. I could even hold it together until I made the turn out of the parking lot. But once I was on the road and headed home, I’d always break down into sobs—those snotty ones that takes several hours to recover from completely.
Lola says her good-byes to Chris, and I try to snap out of my funk.
“Is it better that he knows you know?” I ask when she’s off the phone.
“Yeah,” she says. “He said that at first he thought it was nice that I didn’t seem to care about the commercials. Then he realized that I didn’t know about them. But once he figured out why, he felt terrible for letting it go on like that. He said it was just so nice to have the anonymity.”
“So are you going to give it go?” I ask. “He seems to really like you.”
“Yeah,” she says, nodding pointedly. “He’s says they’ll start shooting the new spot next week. Mom will love it. He wants me to come out there and visit.”
“Do you get to be on set?” I say excitedly, glad for this diversion in the conversation. “Can I come?”
“Sure,” she says. “But you can’t laugh when he sings the jingle.”
“I don’t know if I can agree to that,” I say, unable to keep a smile off my face.
She throws her pillow at me again and bites her lip—just like Ray, so much like Ray.
She sighs heavily. “I doubt I’ll go. It’s all the way across the country. I don’t know if I’m up for that. I’m a chicken, huh?”
“You’re the bravest person I know,” I say and hand her back her pillow. “Good night, little sister.”
“I love you, too,” she says to me.
In a short time, Lola is asleep. I see us years ago, before the accident even, before she forgot who she was, before her ankles were bound by metal braces and her life bent beyond recognition. Before we knew there were things we would never understand.
I lay back and close my eyes, wanting black, dark, nothing. But I see too much. I see Dad’s nurses, my doctor with his solemn face confirming no heartbeat, Mom’s neighbors bringing food, my neighbors asking about Jack’s parking space. I see white tulips in the front yard, and I know that before long, they will open too far, bend back, and do their best to look like some other kind of flower, unrecognizable as what they used to be.
Once I’m sure that Lola is asleep, I slip my funeral clothes back on—less because they’re the closest and more because they fit my mood—and I sneak out to the car. I never once snuck out of the house when I was
