“I know,” I say, meeting his gaze and quickly looking away. “You’re right, though. It’ll all go down just like you said, and there’s no need to suffer it when you don’t have to. People get too personal at funerals anyway. It’s just an opportunity for them to nose into your private life.”
“Then I should go,” he says and nods. “You shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of Aunt Rose’s questions alone. And, hey, I can act like a jerk and no one will think anything of it. They’ll expect it of me. It might be fun. Go out with a bang.”
“You’re not going out,” I say. I notice that his sideburns are almost completely gray. Despite how I feel about everything that has passed between us, I have to admit it looks good on him. “Cassie still needs you around. You know that, right?”
Jack twists his mouth in a self-deprecating way. It’s usually followed by a slow fade into his endearing smile, but today the smile doesn’t come.
“Does she?” he asks. “I can’t tell. This isn’t really what I meant to do.”
He’s talking about losing Cassie, not me. I don’t take it personally anymore.
“I didn’t either,” I say. “It is what it is.”
Whatever it is.
This is another one of those weird circumstances of breaking up. Your guard is finally down now that the relationship is broken beyond all repair and you feel a strange comfort in saying all the things that you never said to the one person who would have understood you the best. You’re finally the real you and he’s the real him, but it’s too late.
“So?” Jack asks. “The funeral?”
“I’ll be ok,” I say.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Because you know Rose is going to ask about me just to get your goat. She’ll pretend like she forgot about the divorce, and once you start explaining and backpedaling, she’ll have you right where she wants you and she’ll be as happy as a lark. She’s an ‘I told you so’ looking for a person to scold.”
What she “told me so” about was having another child. I married Jack when I was twenty-five, and he wasn’t much older. We both wanted a pile of kids, and when we had Cassie right away, it seemed like the plan was going to work. But it didn’t. When my thirtieth birthday loomed and nothing more had happened, I started to worry. I hadn’t thought of it as infertility at the time, but when two, four, six more years went by and all the best laid plans of mice and men hadn’t brought us another child, I became obsessed.
I got so focused on getting pregnant again that sex turned into a science experiment. The bedroom was a laboratory where I was in a white coat instead of a black negligee. Each month that didn’t work out, I got angrier and angrier. I saw a therapist, and she told me I had to stop trying so hard to reach an unattainable goal. She said that was false hope. I said that was the definition of hope—the wish for something good, even in the face of its unlikelihood. But then we did it, we got pregnant just before I turned thirty-eight. It was like a miracle.
I miscarried at nineteen weeks.
So, now here I am at the door to my condo saying good-bye to my marriage. I want to tell Jack that I love him, and I know he wants to say it, too, but it’s the sort of “I love you” that the word bittersweet was invented for and we let it go with a nod and a brief hug.
Later, I stand outside Cassie’s room with my ear pressed to the door. I hear shuffling and her pencil scraping across her drawing pad. She draws these little anime characters that sort of look like her. She draws other figures, too, and I imagine they are characters from a story I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if she’s drawing the brother she didn’t get to have. She knew we were having a boy. We had even started a list of names. She had been so happy. I wonder if she’s lonely. Another epic fail on my part. I wonder if I did anything right at all as a mother. I wonder if other mothers feel the same.
3
Funeral day, and I’m thinking about the sound a dental drill makes and that sickly sweet smell of the dentist’s office. When I was little kid, I used to dread going to the dentist. What a freakish job—everybody hates you, and you have to stick your hands in other people’s mouths. What makes someone want to do that? I remember the sickening feeling I’d get when I’d wake up on the day of my appointment, knowing that no matter what I did, there was no way out of it. The anxiety was brutal.
This is far worse.
I keep looking out the window to see if the rest of the world is still there. Everything feels surreal. I’m in a fog so thick I think I can see it in my closet. My heart is so heavy I can feel it in my arms and legs. My clothes are heavy, weighing on my shoulders like a coat too big for me. Maybe I’ve shrunk, grown younger. Perhaps when I look at myself in the mirror, I will see a ten-year-old girl.
I used to think that going off to college would make me an adult. Then I thought getting a job, getting married, having a child would prove to be the turning point. But no, I see now that it all starts today—the day I say good-bye to my dad.
I already see how it will play out. The parts that will hurt the most, the huge chunks of time where there will be nothing to do but endure. The unbearable hugs and people taking my hand—pressing it hard into their own. The polite, but contrived conversations that I’ll
