Chapter 7
NOW
I don’t stop to think before I fly from the room and down the steps, my muscle memory making up for the fact that I haven’t consciously even remembered where I am. My eyes are barely adjusted to the bright morning light, but I don’t need my eyes to get from my room to anywhere in this house.
“Shit,” I shout, my foot slipping in my hurry. Once down, I call out, “Sammie?”
“Didion!”
I follow the sound to the den and push open the door. “What are—”
The words die in my throat as I see what caused her to scream.
“Oh my god.”
“Yeah.”
In the wood-paneled room, past the TV and the old floral couch, flanked by the shelf of DVDs and the table that holds a small lamp, there is a gleaming, polished, pink wooden casket.
The room is as cold as a refrigerator as it always has been, where the AC works the best, but that’s not why my skin suddenly rises with goose bumps.
“Is that…” I start.
“It better be, Jesus Christ,” says Sammie.
“I certainly hope not.” Austin appears behind me. “If that’s Jesus Christ, we’re going to have a complete media fiasco on our hands.”
I turn. He’s got a healthy glow and dewy skin, and I gather from his outfit that he’s just returned from a run.
My gaze sticks on him a second too long, and I only realize when he starts to grin at me. I clear my throat. “You saw this?”
“Saw this morning. I thought about screaming, but thought Sammie was a better fit for that. And we couldn’t both do it.”
She gives a light laugh, still obviously horrified.
“Were we told this was going to happen? That it’d … she’d be here?”
“Ah, yeah, I hoped I’d get to warn you before you found her.” Matt ducks under Austin’s outstretched arm in the doorway, an apologetic expression on his face.
“You know something about this then?”
“I found another letter in the paperwork. This one from Babe’s friend in Switzerland.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, god, Giulia? That murderer?”
“She’s not a murderer,” Sammie groans.
“Matter of perspective.”
Sammie sighs deeply and Matt hands her the letter. She reads it aloud.
Dearest Didion and Samantha,
Your mother has been dead, but I loved her! I am knowing now that she has experienced the fires of life, though I had not to know when we have constructed this construct for life.
It is my wish for us that you should treasure this box for Babe and use for any ceremonials to memorial for her life.
Keeping for all evers! Understand we that is tradition in US but not her.
Your mother’s friend and my friend is a craftsman and has been building this make for her as surprise, but alas has never been seen by her.
It is my belief to bury for you? And have visiting place, so this helps I hope. Burning is common here.
Apologizing for my English, I am not complete learning!
Without love, Giulia
When she’s done reading, Austin says, “Do you think she’s good at German?”
Matt bites in a smile.
“That is complete nonsense. Can we call someone?” I try to remember where I left my phone, then remember that I dropped it into a basket with all our other screens.
“Sunday I can ask Miranda, of course,” says Matt, composed again.
“Should…” says Sammie, “we open it?”
“Oh my god, Sam!” I exclaim.
“I want to see her! It’s not like there will be damage to like … to her face or anything.”
“No, but she’ll be dead!” I shoot back, looking at the others for a little support.
They look as lost as I feel.
“Well … what if she’s not in there? I mean, the letter says…
” She reads it again. “‘It is my wish for us that you should treasure this box for Babe and use for any ceremonials to memorial for her life.’ And something about the fires of life? Didn’t Mom want to be cremated? Are those the fires of life?”
She’s asking me. “I have no idea, like Giulia, I don’t speak the language in that letter.”
“You don’t know what Mom wanted?”
“She didn’t tell me.”
I think she’s going to react to my tone, which was admittedly colder than I intended, but instead she drops her gaze to my chest. “Your bra is completely see-through, by the way.”
“Oh, my god.” I gasp and fold my arms in front of my exposed chest.
I’m in a butter-yellow bralette made of a fine mesh material. You can unquestionably see straight through to my nipples, which are, in this ice-cold room, quite prominent. In the frenzy to find the source of Sammie’s scream, I hadn’t thought about it.
“It’s fine, I’m gay and she’s your sister,” Matt quips.
“And I’ve seen them.” Austin’s sage-green eyes actively not dropping to my chest. Respectful, or whatever. But really, he doesn’t even seem tempted to glance.
“And Mom’s dead, so, nobody’s interested,” Sammie says on a breath.
On the way back upstairs to change, I physically shake my head to remove the image making its way in, like clearing a Magic 8 Ball.
Babe.
Dead.
Her body.
Downstairs.
Inches from where we’d stood. One quick motion from being seen—all we needed to do was lift the lid. And there she’d be.
In a way, I understand Sammie wanting to open it.
It’s not like I don’t remember the ghoulish nights we spent hovering over a glowing laptop screen in a darkened room, googling pictures of dead Marilyn Monroe or JFK.
We had lingered on the last, haunting pictures of Princess Diana, her in the elevator, in the car with her head turned, the men in the driver’s and passenger’s seats.
The horrendous sight of the Mercedes under the Pont de l’Alma crumpled like a soda can.
Our ghoulishness followed the quick succession of our grandparents dying, both of whom had had open-casket funerals, revealing waxy, paper-thin skin and an emptiness there that really made us both believe in the soul.
This was before the craze of true crime, which made all these curiosities a little more mainstream, or at least confirmed the commonality between so many of us to see the horrors and fascination of our mortality.
I really have had a lot of key players die in my life in the last fifteen years. Where are all the grown-ups? It’s not like new ones come in to replace them.
Or … actually I guess they do. I guess that’s supposed to be us.
The idea that Babe is down there right now, her own body left vacant …
I can’t do that. I can’t see that. It’s such a cliché.
She was so full of life, it’s impossible to imagine her dying.
It’s so very, very true in the case of our mother.
I might not have loved every moment of her, but I admired her for who she was.
No, no, this is exactly why I’ve been working so hard to avoid thinking about it.
If I think about it too hard, I’ll get sad.
If I get sad, I’ll feel shame, if I feel shame, I’ll start to regret!
I’ll start to play back the years and think where I could have or should have done things differently.
If I do that, I’m afraid I’ll never come back up again.
That I’ll drown in all the time lost and mistakes made.
Because the truth is, I already know I messed up.
I grab a pillow off the bed and scream into it.
When I come back down a few minutes later, it’s to the smell of coffee.
There’s an ancient espresso machine brought back from Italy by our grandfather.
Sammie sticks the wand of the milk frother into a small metal pitcher and expertly raises and lowers it so that the high-pitched whine quickly quiets to a low rumble.
“Coffee?” Sammie offers, when she realizes I’m behind her.
“Please, god.”
Outside, Matt and Nora are sitting at the table. He has a coffee on ice, and Nora is coloring on a big piece of paper.
“Regular milk? Hot, iced?”
“Oh, black is fine. An Americano or espresso just by itself. Whatever’s easy.”
“So bitter.” She turns off the frother.
“I am not, it’s just—”
“No,” she interrupts, saving me from myself, “espresso by itself. It tastes so bitter to me.”
“Right. Obviously.”
“I’m more of a sweet person, myself.”
Her gaze goes to mine, as she leans back toward me dramatically, making it clear she is making an implication here. Me, bitter; her, sweet. She’s not the only one who would say so.
“I’ll do an Americano for you. You can go out if you want, I’ll bring it.”
I start to insist that she doesn’t have to wait on me, but fear it will only come out like I intend to hover over her. “I’ll be outside.”
The morning air is warm with a crisp breeze. Outside, the palm trees brush together in a way that always used to be calming with the ebb and flow of the tide. Now it all feels a little relentless.
“It’s so nice out,” says Matt.
“It is. And weird. Hi, Nora.”
She grins big but doesn’t take her eyes off her drawing.
“I’m going insane without my phone,” Matt whispers. “All I can think is how crazy everything must be at work.”
“Same. It’s not that I think the place would burn down without me there, but also … kind of?”
“Yes!” He shakes his head. “Are we narcissists?”
“I think we might be overworked people with a phone addiction.”
He shakes his head. “I never wanted her to become an iPad kid. We’re strict about her screen time. But not so much with ourselves.”
“Ha. Yeah. Same. I always think I’ll lay off it after work, but then I’m too tired to do anything but watch brain-dead TV and scroll. It’s awful.”
“Babe wasn’t wrong about what a life-suck they can be. Remember how nuts she was about it?”
My heart swells and then shrinks again. “Yeah, she said the iPhone was a sign of the end-times.”
We both make a face that means she wasn’t wrong.
“Are you doing okay with everything?”
For a split second, I wonder what it would be like to be honest. To tell him how very, very not okay I am, like I always used to do. Nothing was off-limits.
“Yeah, I’m good.” Then, trying to sound casual, I ask, “Where did uh … where did Austin go?”
Matt gives me a questioning look that I ignore. “He’s at the athletic club.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Why is he…”
“He still practices, every day.” Matt’s eyes are heavy with meaning over his daughter’s head.
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”