30. Cali
CALI
The funeral is on a Wednesday.
I don't know if that means anything. It probably doesn't. But Todd used to say Wednesdays were the worst day of the week, dead in the middle, nothing to look forward to and nothing behind you.
I keep thinking about that as we drive out to the cemetery in Queens, with the kids strapped in the back and Ronan's hand loose on the wheel.
I told Hayden and Isabella the truth. I always do now. I sat them down on the couch and I said their dad had died, and that he wouldn't be coming back, and that it was okay to feel however they felt about it.
Hayden went quiet and asked how. I told him someone hurt Daddy, and the police are trying to find out who. That's true enough.
Isabella cried, and then she asked if Daddy was going to be like a caterpillar now and turn into something better. I said maybe. I don't know what I believe about any of that anymore, but I wasn't going to take the hope from her.
She made him a drawing. She's got it flat on her lap in the car, both hands pressed over it so it doesn't crease. She won't let me see it yet.
The cemetery is green and cold and too big. Rows of stones going back forever.
There's a little tent set up over the hole they dug, green canvas, folding chairs underneath.
A hearse. A man in a black suit from the funeral home standing off to the side with his hands folded, waiting.
There aren't many people.
Todd used to fill rooms. He had that big handshake and that big laugh and he could work a party until he was the only thing anybody remembered. And now, there are maybe thirty people standing on wet grass to see him into the ground. Half of them are here for the wrong reasons.
I know that because of how they're standing.
They cluster in twos and threes, and they keep their voices down, and their eyes keep sliding sideways.
Toward us. Toward Ronan.
I hear whispers before we even reach the tent. The treacherous hum of people saying a thing they don't want you to hear them saying. A woman in navy leans toward a man and cups her hand around her mouth. He glances at Ronan and then away, fast.
I know what they're saying. Everyone does.
That's him. That's the one. He killed Todd and then he had the nerve to bring the kids.
Ronan feels it, too. Not a surprise. He reads a room better than anyone I've ever met. But he doesn't puff up or shrink. He stays calm and composed, as if there's nobody watching at all.
"You don't have to stand with us," I tell him, quiet, so the kids don't hear.
His jaw tightens. "I know I don't."
"That's not what I meant. I meant—" I stop. I don't know what I meant. I guess I meant that every person here thinks he did it, and that standing next to us at the grave of the man he's accused of killing is going to look like guilt above all else.
"I'll stay back," he says. "I'll be here. But I'll stay back. This is for them." He looks past me at Hayden and Isabella climbing out of the car. "Not for me."
So that's what he does.
The service is short. A minister nobody in the family knows says a few words about a man he never met, reading off a card.
It's exactly as hollow as it sounds. Todd's mother is here, Todd's mother who is dying herself, in a wheelchair with a nurse behind her.
She cries the whole time. I feel bad for her because none of this is her fault.
She loved her son. Whatever he became, she loved him first, before he'd done anything wrong.
I stand with the kids. Hayden on my right, Isabella on my left with her drawing pressed to her chest now, wrinkling it.
I keep my back straight and my chin up. I decided in the car that I was going to do this without folding. I have done harder things than attend a funeral full of people who think I married my ex-husband's murderer. My children are watching how their mother stands when the whole world is whispering.
I don't cry. I keep waiting to and it doesn't come. I cried for Todd already, I think, a long time ago, before I even knew he was going to die. I cried for him at a kitchen island when I found the Santorini reservation with Paula's name where mine used to be.
That was the funeral, really.
This is just the part where they put him in the ground.
Ronan stands at the edge of it all, back near the treeline, hands folded in front of him, a big, dark shape against the green. He doesn't come closer. He doesn't sit under the tent. He just watches over us the way he watched over the house from the stoop all those nights.
Close enough to reach us, far enough not to make it about him.
Grigor is out there, too, and one other man I recognize, hanging back near the cars. Watching the perimeter even here. Even now. There's a part of me that resents that we need that, but a bigger part that's glad somebody is on duty, because I don't know where Lev is, and neither does anyone else.
I see Paula when the minister finishes.
She's at the very back. Alone, in a black coat that's too big for her. She looks nothing like the woman who leaned into my car window in the school line and told me I looked incredible.
She's thinner. Her hair's flat. She's got her arms wrapped around herself and she's crying in the ugly, exhausted way of someone who's been crying for days.
I didn't invite her. I don't know who did. Maybe nobody. Maybe she just saw the notice and came.
When it's over, when the minister steps back and the crowd starts to loosen and drift, she catches my eye across the grass.
I understand she wants to talk to me. I could ignore it. I have every right.
But I've got no fight left in me for Paula. That died at the gala. So when Hayden asks if he can go look at the big tree, and Isabella wanders after him still clutching her drawing, and I know Ronan has his eyes on both of them even from the treeline, I let Paula come to me.
She stops a few feet off. Like she's not sure she's allowed closer. Smart.
"Cali," she says. "I'm so sorry. I know I shouldn't be here. I just… I couldn't not come."
"Okay," I say numbly.
"I know what everyone's saying." Her eyes flick toward the treeline, where Ronan stands. "About him."
"I know what they're saying, too."
"Do you think—?" She stops. "Never mind. It's not my business. None of it was ever my business, and look what I did anyway."
I don't answer that. There's nothing to say to it that I haven't already said.
She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, smearing what's left of her makeup. "Cali, there's something I have to tell you. It's probably nothing. But it's been eating at me and I couldn't just not."
"What?"
"A few weeks ago, right after everything blew up…
" She glances around like someone might be listening, and out here in this field full of graves, maybe someone is.
"A man came to see me. He said he was a federal agent.
He had a badge and everything, he showed it to me right up front.
He asked me all about Todd. About how Todd met his lawyer.
About you. About your—your company, and the software, whether I knew anything about what it did.
He knew things, Cali. Things I never told anybody. "
The cold that goes through me has nothing to do with the gloomy weather.
"What did he look like?"
"I don't know. Regular. Older. Gray hair.
He had one of those faces you forget." She shakes her head.
"I answered everything. I was so scared, I just answered everything.
But then last week, when the actual FBI came to talk to me—a woman, Mercer—I mentioned him.
I said, 'Your colleague already asked me all this.
' And she looked at me like I'd grown a second head.
She said nobody from her office had ever interviewed me.
She checked. There's no record of it. The man who came to my house doesn't exist."
I stand very still.
Real feds and fake ones. I said that to myself weeks ago and I was righter than I knew.
"Paula," I say, "did he ask you anything about where Todd was? Where he was staying? Where he might go?"
She thinks. Her lip trembles. "He asked if Todd had family outside the city. If there was somewhere he'd go to lie low." She presses her hand over her mouth. "Oh, God. Cali. Did I—?"
"No," I hurry to say. She doesn't deserve the merciful lie, but I give it to her anyway. "You didn't do anything. You answered a man with a badge. That's what people do."
I don't tell her that the man with the badge is almost certainly the reason Todd is in that coffin. She doesn't need to know that today. Maybe not ever.
She's crying harder now. "It wasn't supposed to be like this!" she wails. "Any of it. I lost everything, and now, Todd's—and it's all just—"
"Paula." I put a hand on her arm. It surprises us both. "Go home. Take care of yourself. There's nothing here for you."
She nods. She looks like she wants to say more and can't find any of it. Then she turns and walks back the way she came, that coat swallowing her up, getting smaller and smaller across the field until the cars hide her.
Speaking of Mercer, I see her, too.
She's a long way off, near a mausoleum two rows over, swallowed up in a dark coat against the summer rain. She's not hiding, exactly. She's just keeping her distance, taking notes on the crowd.
The Bureau shows up to its cooperators' funerals, I guess. Todd was talking to them when he died, and that makes him theirs in some cold administrative way. In a strange way, it's almost kind of nice that they don't let their people go into the ground unwatched.
She catches me looking. She doesn't wave. She just tips her chin down, once, a small acknowledgment across all that green, and then goes back to watching the crowd.
I'll call her tomorrow.
Today, I've got a grave.
They're lowering the casket when it happens.
I've got Hayden back at my side by then, and Isabella. The straps groan under the weight of it, the funeral men working the mechanism, and Todd's mother sobs. The little crowd stands in its clusters and watches and murmurs. I feel the whispers pointing at the man by the treeline like fingers.
And then my son lets go of my hand.
I feel it before I understand it. Nine years old, in the little gray suit I bought him for his cousin's christening two years ago, sleeves already too short. He steps out from under the tent. I say his name, but he doesn't stop.
He walks across the grass. Straight across the open space between the grave and the trees, in front of all of them, in front of the woman in navy and the whispering man and Todd's crying mother and the funeral director and Gia Mercer standing by the mausoleum, and every single one of them watches him go, because a small boy crossing a graveyard can make a whole crowd go quiet.
He walks all the way to Ronan.
And he takes his hand.
I watch Ronan look down.
Hayden doesn't say anything. He just holds on. Standing next to Ronan at the edge of it all, both of them facing the grave, my son making a decision in front of every watching eye about who is his and who is not, about which of the two men in his life he's choosing to stand beside.
The whispers don't stop. But they change.
I hear it. The shape of it shifts, from certainty into something less sure, because it's one thing to declare that a man is a murderer and another to watch a nine-year-old cross a field to hold his hand at his own father's funeral.
Ronan wraps his big hand all the way around Hayden's small one. He doesn't say anything, either. He just stands there and lets my son claim him in front of the whole cruel world.
I have to look away or I'm going to lose it, and I promised myself I wouldn't.
Isabella tugs my skirt. "Mommy," she whispers. "Now?"
The casket has settled at the bottom. The straps come free. In a minute, the men will start to fill it in. I don't want her to lose her chance, so I nod and walk her to the edge of the hole. I hold her hand while she looks down.
She's not scared. Six years old and she looks down into her father's grave like it's just a thing that's happened, just like children do.
Then she holds out her drawing.
She lets me see it, finally. It's Todd. I can tell because she wrote DADDY across the top in her careful backwards letters.
She gave him the yellow hair and the big square shoulders.
He's standing next to a stick figure with brown hair that's her, holding her hand.
And behind them, small, in the corner, she's drawn a caterpillar in a box.
And above Todd's head, floating, she's drawn a butterfly.
"So he knows," she says, very seriously, "that he gets to turn into something better."
I can't hold it after that. But she's watching me, so I make myself cling on, because if I go to pieces then she thinks this is a thing to go to pieces about, and I want her to think otherwise.
This is a time where you make a drawing and you let it go.
She leans over the edge, careful, and she lets the paper fall.
It drifts. It catches the air, tips and slides, then lands on the top of the casket, the butterfly facing up.
"Bye, Daddy," Isabella says.
Across the grass, my son holds a killer's hand that never held the knife.
At the treeline, the man I chose against every receipt I own holds it back.
And down in the ground, on top of a box that holds a man who did terrible things and loved his children anyway, a little girl's butterfly waits to be covered over.
I hold Isabella's hand, and I let the whole watching world see exactly who all of us belong to.