2. Conrad
CONRAD
The next morning was so cold, it made Billie furious.
“This is rude,” she said from the back seat, and a glance in the rearview mirror showed me she had her nose pressed to the window. “Spring is supposed to be warm.”
“It’s early spring,” Bianca said, and she had her nose practically buried in her book. “Early spring is transitional.”
Billie turned her head slowly. “What does transitional mean?”
“It means the weather hasn’t committed one way or the other yet,” Bianca explained.
“That’s cowardly.”
CJ, sitting between them with the flowers in his lap, adjusted the damp paper towel around the stems. “Weather has a lot of pressure on it. Everyone’s always asking it to be something.”
“Rain is bad,” Billie declared.
“No,” Bianca corrected. “Plants need rain.”
“The plants need to wait until it’s warmer.”
I kept both hands on the wheel and let them talk, because the alternative was listening to the quiet in the car. The quiet was worse.
That morning, we’d cut the flowers from the side of the property where the old stone wall leaned toward the woods.
The pale blooms clustered on thin green stems, stubborn and pretty and impossible to ignore once CJ reminded me they were there.
I’d stood there with the scissors in my hand while the kids crouched beside me, and for a moment, I’d expected Jade to yell from the back porch that I was cutting them wrong.
She’d always had opinions about pruning, and the right way to fold a fitted sheet. She had been very opinionated about whether the good colander should go in the dishwasher.
All those small opinions had seemed mildly inconvenient at the time, then, one day, they became sacred because the person who had them was gone.
The cemetery sat behind a small white church twenty minutes from the house, tucked between old trees and a low, iron fence.
Jade hadn’t been especially religious, but she’d liked the cemetery.
She’d told me that if people had to be buried anywhere, they might as well be somewhere with decent shade and no highway noise.
At the time, I’d told her that was a morbid thing to say over coffee. She’d smiled over the rim of her mug and said being practical wasn’t morbid.
I pulled into the gravel lot and parked beneath a dogwood that had only just started to bloom. For a moment, none of us moved. CJ held the flowers with both hands. Bianca closed her book and slid it into her backpack.
Billie stared out the window with her brows pinched together. “Is Mommy cold?” she asked.
My fingers tightened briefly on the keys.
Bianca answered before I could. “No. Bodies don’t experience temperature after death.”
“Bianca,” CJ said softly.
“What? It’s the truth.”
Billie frowned. “But she’s in the ground.”
“Yes,” Bianca said. “But she doesn’t feel being in the ground.”
I turned in my seat and looked at Billie. “Your mom isn’t cold, sweetheart.”
Billie considered that for a long moment, her lips puckered. “Because she has heaven blankets?”
CJ’s face shifted. He looked at me, then at Billie, then down at the flowers.
“Sure,” he said. “Heaven blankets.”
Bianca opened her mouth, but I caught her eye and shook my head slightly. She closed it again.
Small mercies.
When we got out of the car, Billie grabbed my hand. Bianca walked on my other side, shoulders slightly hunched, scanning the rows of headstones with academic focus. CJ led us, clutching the flowers to his chest. He knew the way by heart.
I clenched my jaw. An eleven-year-old shouldn’t know the way to his mother’s grave.
A nine-year-old shouldn’t know about a body’s temperature once placed in the ground.
A five-year-old shouldn’t have to build an idea of her mother out of photographs and borrowed memories and whatever fragments the rest of us managed to hand her without breaking apart.
But there we were.
Jade’s grave was near the back, beneath a maple tree that had been mostly bare the day we buried her.
There were a few old leaves caught around the base of the stone now, and a tiny purple weed growing near one corner.
I made a mental note to pull it, then didn’t.
Jade had loved a colorful weed. She would’ve called it ambitious.
CJ knelt and put the flowers on the grass in front of the headstone with more care than I ever used for anything. His mouth pressed into a line while he arranged the stems.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
I looked away for a second and focused on Billie’s hand in mine.
She squeezed my fingers. “Do I say hi too?”
“If you want.”
She looked at the headstone. “Hi, Mommy. I found a worm yesterday, but Bianca wouldn’t let me bring it to breakfast.”
“That was a reasonable boundary,” Bianca said.
Billie decided she should clarify. “It was a breakfast worm.”
“No such category exists.”
CJ sat back on his heels. “There could be.”
“There shouldn’t be,” Bianca said.
Billie looked up at me. “Do worms go where people go when they die?”
I exhaled through my nose. “I don’t know.”
“Where do people go?”
Bianca shifted her weight. “It depends on what you mean,” she said. “If you mean physically, then it depends on how someone is interred. Buried means the body goes into the ground. Cremated means the body is placed into an incinerator and reduced to ash through high heat.”
Billie stared at her. CJ closed his eyes.
I squinted in Bianca’s direction. “Maybe we don’t need the full technical breakdown right now.”
Bianca frowned. “She asked where people go.”
“And you gave her the county coroner’s answer.”
“It was accurate.”
“Accuracy isn’t always the goal, especially when you’re talking to a younger sibling. Okay?”
Bianca folded her arms, her lips twisting into a pout.
CJ turned to Billie before she could ask which part of Mom had gone where. “When people die, their spirit goes to a beautiful place where nothing hurts, and nobody is lonely, and nobody has bedtime unless they want one.”
Billie’s eyes brightened. “No bedtime?”
“No bedtime.”
“Unverifiable,” Bianca muttered under her breath.
CJ ignored her. “And there are all the snacks you want.”
“What snacks?”
“It’s different for everybody. Mom probably has those almond croissants from the bakery downtown.”
The smallest sound escaped me before I could stop it.
CJ looked over. “She liked those, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, my throat tight. “She did.”
Jade used to buy those croissants on Saturday mornings, pretend they were for all of us, and then eat half the box in the car before she got home. I’d caught crumbs on her coat once, and she’d acted deeply offended when I accused her of sneaking pastries without me.
Billie tugged my hand. “How do we get to the place with no bedtime?”
CJ sat down cross-legged, warming to the subject. “There’s a big bus station in the sky.”
Bianca turned her head toward him and made a grumbling sound in her throat. “That’s not supported by any major scientific or theological framework.”
Billie clambered onto her brother’s back. “Are there tickets?”
“Yes, but you don’t need money.”
“What do you need?”
CJ glanced toward the headstone, then looked at Billie over his shoulder. His face changed like it did when he was about to lie, but this time, the lie wasn’t designed to get him out of trouble.
“You just need someone waiting for you on the other side,” he said. “Then they tell the driver you belong with them.”
Billie looked at Jade’s name carved into stone. “So Mommy will tell the driver?”
“Definitely.”
“What if she forgets me?”
The question came out with no tears, but it slammed into me so hard that I had to lower myself onto the grass before my knees gave out.
“She won’t forget you,” I said.
Billie looked at me. “But I was a baby.”
“I know.”
“So maybe she doesn’t know what I look like now.”
“She knows.”
“How?”
I looked at the headstone. Jade Lawrence.
Beloved wife and mother. Two words attempting to describe an entire woman.
Her laugh. Her stubbornness. Her ability to fall asleep with a legal brief on her chest and wake up knowing exactly where she’d left off.
Her impatience with cheap coffee. Her deep, immediate love for all three of our children, including Billie, who had only gotten a few short years with her.
Especially Billie.
“Because she loved you,” I said. “And that kind of love doesn’t forget.”
Bianca looked down, blinking furiously, and CJ picked at the grass.
Billie slid off CJ’s back and pressed against my side. “Even if my hair is bigger now?”
I kissed the top of her curls. “Even then.”
“My hair is very different.”
“It is.”
“And I have more teeth.”
“She’ll be impressed.”
Billie nodded, satisfied with that. For a while, none of us said anything. Around us, leaves shifted, and birds sang. The world continued with unreasonable confidence.
CJ reached out and touched one of the flower petals. “I forgot how much she liked spring,” he said.
I knew what he meant.
Spring had always belonged to Jade. She was miserable through February, offended by the mud in March, then suddenly reborn the first time something green sprouted from the ground.
She bought seed packets she didn’t have time to plant and opened the windows way too early, insisting that the cold breeze was bracing and not, in fact, miserable.
“She used to make lists,” I said.
Bianca looked at me. “Lists of what?”
“Things she wanted to plant, stuff that needed to be cleaned. What she wanted to do once the weather got warmer, and where she wanted to spend the summer.”
CJ smiled faintly. “Mom made a lot of lists.”
“She did.”
“She had a list of snacks to pack for when we went to the park,” Bianca said, her lips twitching into a faint smile.
“She had a list for everything,” I said.
Billie climbed into my lap without asking. “Did she have a list for me?”
I wrapped my arms around her. “She had a lot of lists for you.”
“What kind?”
I hesitated because the truth was too tender.