Chapter 28
AMELIA
I stayed in the motel bed all day yesterday.
Caiden tried to tell me to eat, to cry, to do something, but I simply laid there. He gave up and went out to do his own thing.
Today was the day that I had been dreading. My mother’s funeral.
I had been restless all night. Drowned by nightmares and sweat.
When we were in bed, Caiden laid on the far end of the bed, while I laid on the other end. He still hadn’t told me why he only got one bed. I thought he might try to use the opportunity to feel me up, but he did not.
He laid there, quietly, unmoving, but he was there.
I was grateful for it.
My lipstick was the wrong color, and my lips did not belong to me. The dress I’d brought was black, but not the right black. The glossy kind, synthetic and abrasive, not the black of true mourning.
I fingered the hem, feeling the static snap under my palm. My arms looked thin and frail as I stared at myself through the mirror.
When the knock came at the door, I let it go unanswered for several minutes, until the banging shifted from “gentle” to “please don’t make me break down this door.”
I shuffled to open it.
Caiden stood there, his eyes widening for a moment when he saw me.
I almost did the same.
He wore jeans and a button-up collared shirt, the sleeves rolled up exposing his strong forearms. For a moment, I forgot we were about to go to my mother’s funeral, and I had the urge to reach out and stroke the skin on his arms.
“You ready?” Caiden asked.
“I guess so.”
We moved through the morning in silence. I pressed my knees together and watched the world blur past.
It was cold, and even with the heater blasting my bare legs were covered with gooseflesh
The parking lot was already half-full. A gathering of battered sedans and two pickups bloomed in the morning fog, like animals huddling over a carcass.
Caiden killed the ignition, hesitated, then got out and came around to open my door like it was a real date. I almost laughed at the formality of it, the way he held out his hand, and the pause before I took it.
We walked together through the low, hunched building and into the thick, humid air of the funeral home foyer. There was a fake fireplace, a bowl of dusty mints, and a velvet guestbook with three pens chained to it. The place smelled of lilacs and antiseptic.
A trickle of people had already begun to pool in the viewing room, each one with the same look: a mixture of boredom and unease, faces flushed with the effort of looking appropriately sad. Most of them I recognized only as shapes from my childhood, blurry as the faces in dreams.
There was Mary, a coworker from my mom’s old job, already teary and clutching a tissue to her nose; Mrs. Francis, who always smelled like mothballs and used to babysit me; and a few of Mom’s old drinking friends, hollow-eyed and leaning against each other. Taylor, my mom’s AA sponsor.
A few people who had known my mom when I was living here came up to me to give their condolences.
The rest were strangers, orbiting the edge of the room, faces pinched in the universal shape of small-town curiosity.
I told myself I wouldn’t look into the casket.
But, standing here, I had a hypnotic urge to walk over there and peer at her face.
I needed to know she was really dead, and that I couldn’t just drive over to my childhood home and see her standing on the porch with her arms wide open, waiting for me to come home.
I braced myself, ready for the phantom ache, but it didn’t come. Maybe I was too empty to feel anything more. Maybe I’d finally reached the bottom.
The casket was front and center, the cheapest pine, perched on a wheeled altar beneath a spray of fake lilies. I steeled myself before looking, but it still knocked the air out of me: That was her, or at least the body that had once been my mother.
They’d made her up, of course: cheeks rouged and lips a glossy pink she’d never have chosen in life. Her hair was sleek and unmoving, like a helmet. She wore a dress I didn’t recognize. A navy sheath with lace at the collar, prim and tight.
I thought about the dozens of times she’d gotten dressed in front of me, unashamed, and how she always said comfort was the only thing worth dying for.
She would have hated this dress. I wanted to take it off her. I imagined climbing into the casket and unzipping it, swapping it out for her ancient Giants tee and sweatpants, the old cigarette burns still visible on the fabric.
My chest felt packed with wet sand. I wondered if anyone else noticed the bad makeup, the hair, the way her hands were folded like she was praying for someone to come and save her soul.
But nobody was going to come and save her. She wouldn’t ever wake up, and I would never have the chance to give her “sober and well” pep talks.
I didn’t even notice Caiden by my side, or that his hand reached for mine, or that I was clenching it so tightly that my fingers began to hurt.
The tears still did not come.
They did not come when we sat down, and the priest began to speak. They did not come when they played the song Brokedown Palace by The Grateful Dead. They did not come when me and a few others went up to say a few words about my mother.
“I have not seen my mom in seven years. When she was sober, she was a good and loving mom. When she was on a binge, she was a stranger. Today, I am mourning my mother for who she was when she was herself. The one who I yearned for, the one who I needed, the one who I miss, the one who taught me and loved me in her own way, the one who slipped away and was eaten by the monster of addiction.”
I continued my speech with sentimental words, ones that did not take much effort to say. Some people clapped, some cried, others stayed silent and still.
When it was over, the crowd shuffled out into the pale light like a herd of ghosts. Most people avoided eye contact, as if grief might be contagious on a day like this. I must have looked like a zombie.
My legs barely worked. Caiden’s hand stayed on my elbow, steady and insistent, guiding me through the knot of lingerers clogging the foyer.
Outside, the world was too bright. The sky was a washed-out gradient, clouds thin as a hospital sheet.
I blinked into it, letting my vision swim, and tried not to shiver when the wind scraped my bare knees. I didn’t want to go to the graveside service. I wanted to run, to get in the car and drive until I hit water.
But Caiden’s presence held me. He didn’t say anything, didn’t try to comfort me, just walked at my side with his jaw set, eyes fixed on the lines of cars and the slow, awkward procession of people who had nothing better to do on a weekday than watch somebody get planted in the ground.
The drive to the cemetery felt like drifting through a fever dream. I didn’t speak, and neither did Caiden. I watched the scenery jump past the window.
We were in his car following the hearse, and I watched the back of it, knowing that my mother’s body was in the back of it, slipping further away. The tension built higher, yet I swallowed it.
I wanted her to come back. I wanted her to pop out of the coffin and open the door to the hearse.
It wouldn’t happen, though, and that thought was slowly breaking me.
We took the long way around, past the strip mall and the shuttered bowling alley where my mother once tried to bowl a perfect game on her birthday and ended up hurling in the parking lot.
At the cemetery gate, a cluster of crows watched from the fencepost, black and motionless as jury members. I stared at them, daring them to fly off, but they didn’t. They just blinked and let the wind ruffle their feathers.
We gathered at the plot, a small hollow on a hill overlooking the town. The graves were so close together the headstones jostled for space, names and years crowding into each other like gossip.
The priest said something about ashes and dust, afterlife and peace, and then it was time.
Two men in suits lowered my mother into the earth, the ropes squealing against the lacquered handles. I watched the box slip down, further and further until it was too far gone to catch, like a decayed falling star.
There was a moment after the casket landed where everything stopped. The wind flattened, the traffic on the distant highway seemed to stall in place, and even the crows sucked in their laughter.
I felt the world holding its breath, waiting for me to do something. To cry, to scream, to shatter into a thousand obnoxious shards so the town could say, “See, she was always going to end up like this.”
I stood there, a scarecrow in borrowed black, and felt all those eyes pressing against my skin. The church ladies, the ex-friends, the men in work boots pretending not to know me.
I recognized them all, even with their faces aged and their hair thinned and their shame showing at the edges.
The priest finished her prayer. The dirt was waiting, piled up like a dare. Everyone stood in a crooked semicircle, not sure whether or not to put their arms around each other.
The funeral director gestured to me, his hand a well-practiced invitation. I stepped forward, my knees numb. I picked up a pinch of earth. It was cold, gritty, not the rich, living soil I wanted.
I scattered it, watched it dust the top of the casket, and felt my stomach knot.
I hated that box. I hated the dress they put her in, the paint on her lips, the way her memory had been flattened into a one-hour slideshow for strangers.
But most of all, I hated this feeling: the emptiness, the erasure. My mother was gone, and all that remained was a catalog of her.
Suddenly, I couldn’t remember all the times she neglected me while off on a drug binge.
I couldn’t remember the times she would say the nastiest things to me as if I were the beast. I couldn’t remember the times she would treat me like a ghost in our own home, looking past me as if she did not have any children.
All I could recall was that she was my mom, and how she was lying in the coffin.
Dead and decayed.
There was no closure, no hope for her to get better and wrap her arms around me while saying, “I did it, sweetheart, I got better, now I can be the mother you’ve always wanted.”
All that remained was this biting, blackening hole inside of me that was building, building, and building so high like a volcano until—
It broke.
It started as a tremor in my jaw, a little shiver that I tried to bite down, but then the air in my lungs turned liquid, and my hands went slack at my sides.
I wanted to scream, or run, or claw my nails into the shine of that coffin until I ripped a hole big enough for my mother’s voice to crawl out and echo one last time.
The noise that came out of me was not a scream, not exactly. It was the sound similar to a bone breaking, a wet snap at the center of my chest that echoed into the hollows of my skull.
I doubled over at the edge of the grave, fists driving into my sternum as if I could pound the pain into something solid, something I could spit out and bury with her.
I felt my knees hit the cold, dead grass, the grit of it scraping through my tights. My mouth was open, but nothing coherent came out.
The mourners startled, faces turning as one, a hydra of awkward concern. I watched their eyes flick away again, unable to bear the spectacle.
I was the show now, the part they’d gossip about later. I would be a legend: the girl who lost her mother twice, once to addiction and once to the dirt.
I thought about biting down on my tongue, drawing blood, anything to give my grief a body.
Instead, I just rocked there, my palms pressed into the rim of the grave as if I could climb in after her. The wind cut across the hill, slicing through my dress and burning the salt from my skin.
Then, without warning, Caiden was at my side. He didn’t try to pull me up or hush me. He just crouched, steady and silent, and wrapped his arms around me from behind, his hands locked over my ribcage like a tourniquet.
“I can’t do this,” I rasped, voice gone. “I can’t—”
He held me tighter, so tight I thought my bones might fuse together. “You don’t have to,” he whispered. “You’re done. You did it, Amelia. You can let go.”
But I didn’t want to let go. Letting go meant admitting there was nothing left. That every hope, every apology, every impossible wish for my mother’s redemption was already rotting in the ground below me.
I don’t know how long we were like that, kneeling in the mud, the mourners receding to their cars, leaving us alone in the graveyard, the air echoing with my weeps and screams.
The crows watched, heads cocked, unblinking. They did not flinch when my voice tore through the air. Their patience was infinite. They would wait until the end, and then they would feast.
Caiden’s grip never loosened. He held me as if he were the last tree left in a hurricane, and I clung back, breathless and shaking so hard I thought I might pull us both into the earth.
His cheek was pressed to my shoulder, the heat of it anchoring me, the rhythm of his heart steadier than anything I’d ever known. For all the years I’d spent despising him, the paradox was that his arms were the only place I felt safe enough to fall apart.
He didn’t say anything, not at first. He let the storm run through me, let the violence of my grief have its way.
When my lungs finally gave out, I let my head hang. Tears soaked the collar of my dress, leaving snail trails down my throat. I could feel the eyes of the town on us, but for once, I didn’t care.
I tried to say thank you, but the words got stuck somewhere between my ribs and my teeth. He didn’t let go, not even when I tried to peel away.
“I made a scene,” I said, pushing my knuckles into my eyes until little galaxies popped behind my lids.
“Yeah,” he said, “but at least it was honest.”
It was Caiden who got me up, wiping my face with the inside of his sleeve, his hands gentle but sure. He didn’t meet my eyes or say anything, just steered me toward the car, leaving behind the casket and the mound of dirt and the last, flickering memory of my mother.
I thought I would feel emptier after the funeral, but the opposite was true.
Grief was a thing with weight, and now that I’d let it out, my chest felt less like a hollow and more like an anchor. I carried it with me, back through the little graveyard, past the stone angels and withered bouquets.
I know how grief played out. Some days it was weightless like the wind, other days it was loud and crippling like the stormy sea during a thunderstorm.
This grief would sit within me like a shadow for eternity, that I knew.