Destination Funeral

Chapter 61

Everyone goes silent.

Rather than show that it hurts, I keep my expression blank.

“I never said I was.”

“Oh, come on. You’re acting like it. You’re acting like everything that’s gone on has happened to you.

But that’s not true!” He shakes his head.

“I’m not saying it to hurt you. I’m saying it to remind you that you’re not some isolated person and everything is happening only to you. You’re not free of fault either.”

“Trust me,” I argue. “I’ve been in therapy for years, and all I do is try to figure out how everything that goes wrong is mine to own. I don’t want it to be your fault. His fault. Her fault. Fucking Babe’s fault. But some stuff is.”

“Yeah, some stuff is,” he agrees. “And you know what? Therapy only goes so far. Then come your friends.”

These words make tears sting behind my eyes again.

“Are you the friends?” I ask.

“Yes!” he exclaims, then sighs. “Jesus, okay. Let’s get it all out there.”

“Fine,” I say.

“You’re not alone, Didion. You never were.

” He hesitates, and then seems to decide to go for it.

“If you asked anything about me or my life, for example, maybe you could see that there’s a way to connect that doesn’t mean you have to carry all that pain!

Do you know how much it’s sucked to not be treated like a friend for the last few years?

When all the shit went down with you and Sammie and Babe, I heard about it from Sammie.

I called her to find out why the hell you weren’t talking to me.

I didn’t even know you’d moved to the same city I lived in until you’d been living there for a year. ”

A rush of shame goes through me. “I shouldn’t have ignored you. I know that. And I am sorry. It was a bathwater, baby situation and that is really unfair.”

“I’m not mad about being ignored as much as I am hurt that when you got that angry, you didn’t trust me. Like you didn’t trust any of us with your feelings.”

There’s a ring of truth in this, something that starts to crack my hard veneer. But it’s also unfair. “That feels like a pretty crazy way to turn my feelings around on me.”

“I’m not. To be honest with you, I think Babe hung you out to dry with your dad’s funeral and she did that a lot to you. She didn’t do it to Sammie, and that’s bullshit. Do you know that if you had called me then, I would have told you I was on your side?”

“No,” I admit.

“You shutting us all out didn’t just mean you had to deal with it on your own.

You hurt us too. Or, I’ll speak for just myself.

You hurt me too. It felt like all those years of friendship meant nothing, hadn’t earned any of your trust. I know how hard-won it is, but didn’t all of us deserve the benefit of the doubt? ”

I shake my head. “I didn’t want to be the one to fix everything. I’d been fixing everything for so long.”

“Yeah, and whose fault is that?” he challenged.

“It’s not my—”

“Nobody asked you to do the things you did for everyone. Nobody even needed you to, a lot of the time. The thing is, you don’t trust anybody to know what they need.

You work tirelessly behind the scenes to give people things they never asked for, and won’t appreciate like you hope, but instead you could just …

talk. Ask people how they feel and what they need instead of guessing.

I bet it would be much less thankless, and much less work.

But you don’t do that, and do you know why? ”

“I—” I feel like a child. Maybe I am one.

“Your mother. That’s why.”

Oddly, I want to defend her. Insist it is my fault after all. But I don’t.

“Babe didn’t talk to you. Either of you.

She just up and left one day, became an unrecognizable coastal aunt, and left you to deal with raising yourselves.

Sammie wasn’t old enough to communicate her needs—or even a lack thereof—to you, nor was she old enough to be expected to.

And you weren’t old enough to know where your responsibilities ended.

You were just old enough to know that you weren’t supposed to be handling things on your own, to know that you were supposed to have a mother around.

You figured out what her job was meant to be, and you did it. Someone had to, right?”

The words settle on my chest like a warm blanket, and I realize how badly I needed someone to say them.

“But that wasn’t Sammie’s fault. She was, and still is, just living. You love her, so you bleed for her. But that doesn’t feel like love—not to either of you.”

This hits me like a freight train. I feel my chin quiver as my eyes well up.

Sammie looks at me. “And you know … you know I saw you, right? Everything you did. The laundry at Dad’s, buying the tampons, paying for everything …

I saw that. And maybe it’s silly, but … I think there was a moment there where we both had the chance to grow up way too fast. And then you did it for both of us.

Selfishly, I let you. Because I was a kid. ”

“So was I,” I whisper.

I see Austin hang his head. He knows it all. We lay in dark rooms, speaking in soft voices, tears falling down my temples and into my ears as he laid a hand on my stomach and touched my hair and listened. He hated it for me, I knew that.

I had forgotten that.

“You shouldn’t have had to do that. You didn’t have to. But you did do it, and I’m so grateful.” Sammie’s voice pitches up as she starts to cry. “I’m so grateful you did because I got to be a stupid kid for a whole lot longer. The only problem is…” She swallows. “You didn’t.”

The truth of her words settles on all of us.

Matt puts a hand on her wrist and rubs her skin with his thumb.

“I’m so jealous of you,” I admit, the tears finally falling. “I wanted to run around messing up in my twenties like you did.”

This makes her laugh, which makes me emit one bark of laughter.

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” She sniffs, wiping her cheeks with her other hand.

“I just didn’t do anything for myself, for all that time. And I think … I think being so angry was the way I did, finally, do something just for me.”

Matt leans over toward me. “Look, Didion, the thing is, you and I have so much in common. In my tumultuous household, I had to be the grown-up too. Way earlier than I wanted. And I’m the peacekeeper, always.

Even right now. Even though I want to throw things at you and yell at you for hardly asking anything about my life since being here. ”

“You can definitely throw things at me.”

“No, it’s your mom’s funeral. It’s okay that you’re preoccupied. The problem is that you ended our friendship out of nowhere and now there’s no time for talking about the other things.”

“You know, none of us like Johnny,” agrees Austin. “We totally all could have ganged up on her.”

Sammie laughs, and then sniffles again. “He doesn’t even make me happy, I don’t know what my problem is. I hate him for what he did to you and to us and to my baby and … I hate him for … well, I kind of just hate him.”

“Thank the lord,” says Matt.

“He’s like a drug,” she confesses. “Nothing better ever comes along, so I keep falling back into him. Even though I know I’m not leaving room for anything better. It’s ridiculous. If I met me in a bar bathroom and heard my story, I’d talk me out of being with him so fast!”

“It didn’t feel great when you stayed with him after that night,” admits Austin. “He did kind of ruin my life.”

She puts her face in her hands and groans. “I know. Which is why I also barely reach out.” Then to me, “It’s not only you, you know. None of us are good at being friends anymore.”

Matt and Austin exchange a look, and then Austin says, “Matt and I are pretty good at it.”

“We could be better,” concedes Matt. “We’ve been talking about going to Costa Rica for years and haven’t done it.”

We all laugh and I play with a loose splinter of wood on the old table.

“I think,” I start, without really knowing where I’m going. “I think I’m really, really pissed at Babe.”

Everyone goes quiet again.

“Tell us,” Matt prompts.

I look up at them all, and then do.

Everything from the school years spent without her, the resentment about college, the shooting pain in my heart after the slap.

The way she made me feel like a mistake, a life-ruiner.

The reason she could never pursue her dreams or lose weight or anything else she put onto me.

But also how all of it hurt more because of the things she did that made my life so rich.

The herbs in the garden. Halloween in July.

Teaching me to love food and to heal through it.

As I say it, empathy grows in my stomach like a live oak, branches low and winding.

I understand that being a mother doesn’t mean you like taking care of other people all the time—I could sure empathize with that.

I could see now that the way she changed was about her own self-preservation.

It was how she found her way to something like peace, even if life didn’t bloom into something grand.

I had always, a little bit, resented how much love she showed everyone else around me, but now I see that by loving Matt and Austin, and all the friends we trucked through the house with—she was also showing her love to me and Sammie.

I had expected love the way I show it. I show love by providing acts of service and doing favors before anyone even knows they need them done.

In that way we were so similar. But then we were also so very, very different.

I think both of us got hung up on the wrong things; she was stuck on all the ways we were the same, and I was stuck on all the ways we were different.

And now I’m pretty sure that I will spend the rest of my life uncovering the ways my mother showed her love. The ways we were so very, very alike.

When I’m finished venting, I feel like a body with no skeleton. I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since I told people how I felt. Yes, my therapist. But Matt was right.

Then come your friends.

Then come the tears that I, for once, don’t suppress and I say, “She was my mom.” My breath comes in shards.

“And I can’t believe my mom is a part of the past now.

Entirely. That I can never yell at her, and we can never fix all this stupid shit.

It’s so unfair that she died while I was still so caught up in my own”—I gesture frenetically around me—“bullshit to just … talk to her and ask her. Anything. Stop assuming. Give her the chance to be human and be allowed to mess up.”

All three of them stand and come over to me, which only makes me cry harder. I shake against them and they hold me tighter.

“It’s like I expect everyone to be perfect, not just me. My stupid perfectionism is like … completely unfair to everybody.” My throat catches. “But she wasn’t perfect. And neither am I.”

“No, no,” they all say in some form. Which makes me laugh-cry again.

Everyone goes back to their seats, Austin giving me a kiss on the head first, and then he says, “I’m not either. I mess up all the time. Pretty spectacularly with you, Red.”

“I am also not perfect,” admits Matt. “I’m diving into work and parenthood and avoiding the truth, which is that, uh”—he nods and stares at a spot on the horizon—“I sort of hate my life.”

“What?” I ask. “Really?”

“Yeah, see, if you’d asked, it’s juicy,” he says, smiling.

I laugh, but then ask, “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know how much I hated all the yelling growing up.” He sees us all nod.

“That’s my house now. Beau didn’t want kids, I pressed him on it, we both thought he’d come around, but he is resentful still and I’m at work all the time, and this makes us fight.

I spend all day arguing in court and then come home and fight there.

Oh, and then I wind down with some nice reality TV.

It’s almost interesting how much I’ve tailored my life to be full of all my worst triggers. Everything is yelling!”

“Holy shit,” Sammie utters. “I’m so sorry, Matt.”

“It’s okay. Or, it’s not okay. Being here has kind of helped me realize that. I need a change.”

“Me too,” I say. “Not to reroute it back to me, but I can relate. I used to love cooking and now it’s like …

it’s horrible.” I laugh, a little hysterically.

“Everyone makes it seem like reaching to be the best is a good thing, but I don’t want to be the best. I want to cook good food and make people happy. And I’m sick to death of New York!”

“Me too!” agrees Matt. “I miss grass! I miss air.”

“I miss air too!”

“I’m so sick of being stuffed in an overfull train from the seventies that comes fifteen whole minutes late, has no A/C in August, and stops in between stations for longer than Google Maps said it would take to get where I was going in the first place.”

“Hate it,” I say. “Let’s leave New York.”

“Let’s leave New York.”

We both smile and then he stands and says, “It’s time for booze again, right?”

“Oh yeah,” we all agree.

“I’ll help.” Sammie stands.

Austin and I look at each other. A muscle twitches in his jaw and he gives me those soft, irresistible eyes. “I’m sorry, Didion.”

I know what he means. And for the first time, I’m sorry feels like it contains everything in its simple, seven letters to make it actually feel better.

I nod at him and smile. “I know. Me too.”

The other two return with all the fixings needed for gin martinis with a twist, including a lemon from the garden.

“Yes,” I say, approvingly.

Matt points his stirring spoon at me. “I make a very good martini.”

“I believe you.”

He sets about making them and then Sammie says, “Guys?”

We all look at her, Matt stirring.

She inhales deeply and then exhales. “You’re all really, really right about Johnny.

I was stuck in something for a long time, a different, much worse loop than this.

” She gives a laugh. “And I’m too fucking smart for that.

I don’t know how to grow up really. But I do know how to block someone and completely ice them out.

” She looks at me. “I learned from my sister.”

This brings tears back to my eyes even as I laugh, and I stand and go to her.

We hug. Hard. Tight. In the twisty, coiled way we used to do all the time, but haven’t in years.

Something inside me settles back into place.

“It’s time to let go. Of all this,” Sammie says.

I look at Austin, my heart fluttering as I do. “Yeah,” I say. “Time to let it go.”