up.
“How about that hook and eye up there,” said Grandma Lynn. “Can you get that?”
There were powdery smells and Chanel No. 5 sprinkled all around our grandmother’s neck.
“It’s one of the reasons for a man – you can’t do this stuff yourself.”
Lindsey was as tall as our grandmother and still growing. As he took the hook and eye in either hand, she saw the fine wisps of dyed blond hair at the base of my grandmother’s skull. She saw the downy gray hair trailing along her back and neck. She hooked the dress and then stood there.
“I’ve forgotten what she looked like,” Lindsey said.
“What?” Grandma Lynn turned.
“I can’t remember,” Lindsey said. “I mean her neck, you know, did I ever look at it?”
“Oh honey,” Grandma Lynn said, “come here.” She opened up her arms, but Lindsey turned into the closet.
“I need to look pretty,” she said.
“You are pretty,” Grandma Lynn said.
Lindsey couldn’t get her breath. One thing Grandma Lynn never did was dole out compliments. When they came, they were unexpected gold.
“We’ll find you a nice outfit in here,” Grandma Lynn said and strode toward my clothes. No one could shop a rack like Grandma Lynn. On the rare occasions that she visited near the start of the school year she would take the two of us out. We marveled at her as we watched her nimble fingers play the hangers like so many keys. Suddenly, hesitating only for a moment, she would pull out a dress or shirt and hold it up to us. “What do you think?” she’d ask. It was always perfect.
As she considered my separates, plucked and posed them against my sister’s torso, she talked:
“Your mother’s a wreck, Lindsey. I’ve never seen her like this before.”
“Grandma.”
“Hush, I’m thinking.” She held up my favorite church dress. It was blackwatch wool with a Peter Pan collar. I liked it mostly because the skirt was so big I could sit in the pew cross- legged and flounce the hem down to the ground. “Where did she get
“Who was that man you asked Mom about?”
She stiffened on the question. “What man?”
“You asked Mom if Dad still was saying that
“Voila!” Grandma Lynn held up a dark blue minidress that my sister had never seen. It was Clarissa’s.
“It’s so short,” Lindsey said.
“I’m shocked at your mother,” Grandma Lynn said. “She let the kid get something stylish!”
My father called up from the hallway that he expected everyone downstairs in ten minutes.
Grandma Lynn went into preparation overdrive. She helped Lindsey get the dark blue dress over her head, and then they ran back to Lindsey’s room for shoes, and then, finally, in the hallway, under the overhead light, she fixed the smudged eyeliner and mascara on my sister’s face. She finished her off with firmly pressed powder, whisking the cotton pad lightly in an upward direction along either side of Lindsey’s face. It wasn’t until my grandmother came downstairs and my mother commented on the shortness of Lindsey’s dress while looking suspiciously at Grandma Lynn that my sister and I realized Grandma Lynn didn’t have a spot of makeup on her own face. Buckley rode between them in the back seat, and as they neared the church he looked at Grandma Lynn and asked what she was doing.
“When you don’t have time for rouge, this puts a little life into them,” she said, and so Buckley copied her and pinched his cheeks.
Samuel Heckler was standing by the stone posts that marked the path to the church door. He was dressed all in black, and beside him his older brother, Hal, stood wearing the beat-up leather jacket Samuel had worn on Christmas Day.
His brother was like a darker print of Samuel. He was tanned, and his face was weathered from riding his motorcycle full-tilt down country roads. As my family approached, Hal turned quickly and walked away.
“This must be Samuel,” my grandmother said. “I’m the evil grandma.”
“Shall we go in?” my father said. “It’s nice to see you, Samuel.”
Lindsey and Samuel led the way, while my grandmother dropped back and walked on the other side of my mother. A united front.
Detective Fenerman was standing by the doorway in an itchy-looking suit. He nodded at my parents and seemed to linger on my mother. “Will you join us?” my father asked.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I just want to be in the vicinity.”
“We appreciate that.”
They walked into the cramped vestibule of our church. I wanted to snake up my father’s back, circle his neck, whisper in his ear. But I was already there in his every pore and crevice.
He had woken up with a hangover and turned over on his side to watch my mother’s shallow breathing against the pillow. His lovely wife, his lovely girl. He wanted to place his hand on her cheek, smooth her hair back from her face, kiss her – but sleeping, she was at peace. He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal – whatever normal was. Today he could walk tall with grief and so could Abigail. But he knew that as soon as she woke up he would not really look at her for the rest of the day, not really look into her and see the woman he had known her to be before the day they had taken in the news of my death. At nearly two months, the idea of it as news was fading away in the hearts of all but my family – and Ruth.
She came with her father. They were standing in the corner near the glass case that held a chalice used during the Revolutionary War, when the church had been a hospital. Mr. and Mrs. Dewitt were making small talk with them. At home on her desk, Mrs. Dewitt had a poem of Ruth’s. On Monday she was going to the guidance counselor with it. It was a poem about me.
“My wife seems to agree with Principal Caden,” Ruth’s father was saying, “that the memorial will help allow the kids to accept it.”
“What do you think?” Mr. Dewitt asked.
“I think let bygones be bygones and leave the family to their own. But Ruthie wanted to come.”
Ruth watched my family greet people and noted in horror my sister’s new look. Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women. Samuel Heckler was holding Lindsey’s hand. A word from her readings popped into her head:
“Ruthie,” her father asked, “what is it?”
She focused again and looked at him. “What’s what?”
“You were staring off into space just now,” he said.
“I like the way the graveyard looks.”
“Ah kid, you’re my angel,” he said. “Let’s grab a seat before the good ones get taken.”
Clarissa was there, with a sheepish-looking Brian Nelson, who was wearing a suit of his father’s. She made her way up to my family, and when Principal Caden and Mr. Botte saw her they fell away and let her approach.
She shook hands with my father first.
“Hello, Clarissa,” he said. “How are you?”
“Okay,” she said. “How are you and Mrs. Salmon?”
“We’re fine, Clarissa,” he said.
“Um” – she looked down at her hands – “I’m with my boyfriend.”
My mother had entered some trancelike state and was staring hard at Clarissa’s face. Clarissa was alive and I was dead. Clarissa began to feel it, the eyes boring into her, and she wanted to get away. Then Clarissa saw the dress.
“Hey,” she said, reaching out toward my sister.
“What is it, Clarissa?” my mother snapped.
“Um, nothing,” she said. She looked at the dress again, knew she could never ask for it back now.
“Abigail?” my father said. He was attuned to her voice, her anger. Something was off.
Grandma Lynn, who stood just a bit behind my mother, winked at Clarissa.
“I was just noticing how good Lindsey looked,” Clarissa said.
My sister blushed.
The people in the vestibule began to stir and part. It was the Reverend Strick, walking in his vestments toward my parents.
Clarissa faded back to look for Brian Nelson. When she found him, she joined him out among the graves.
Ray Singh stayed away. He said goodbye to me in his own way: by looking at a picture – my studio portrait – that I had given him that fall.
He looked into the eyes of that photograph and saw right through them to the backdrop of marbleized suede every kid had to sit in front of under a hot light. What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone. He knew that no one ever really looked the way they did in photos. He knew he didn’t look as wild or as frightened as he did in his own. He came to realize something as he stared at my photo – that it was not me. I was in the air around him, I was in the cold mornings he had now with Ruth, I was in the quiet time he spent alone between studying. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow, to set me free. He didn’t want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn’t want to look at me anymore, either. I watched him as he placed the photograph in one of the giant volumes of Indian poetry in which he and his mother had pressed dozens of fragile flowers that were slowly turning to dust.
At the service they said nice things about me. Reverend Strick. Principal Caden. Mrs. Dewitt. But my father and mother sat through it numbed. Samuel kept squeezing Lindsey’s hand, but she didn’t seem to notice him. She barely blinked. Buckley sat in a small suit borrowed for the occasion from Nate, who had attended a wedding that year. He fidgeted and watched my father. It was Grandma Lynn who did the most important thing that day.
During the final hymn, as my family stood, she leaned over to Lindsey and whispered, “By the door, that’s him.”
Lindsey looked over.
Standing just behind Len Fenerman, who was now inside the doorway and singing along, stood a man from the neighborhood. He was dressed more casually than anyone else, wearing flannel-lined khaki trousers and a heavy flannel shirt. For a moment Lindsey thought she recognized him. Their eyes locked. Then she passed out.
In all the commotion of attending to
