Chapter 19
19
Rainbow Gnome Fan Club
Sunday 6:18 p.m.
Ollie
Hey who’s around for dinner tonight?
Lily
MEEEEE-EEEEE-
Are you cooking????
Ollie
I’m trying to make myself cook
Which goes better when it’s not just me
Bc it means I’m less likely to just be like “oh hello sad pasta”
Max
OK hear me out tho
What if
Thai food
Ollie
…I could be convinced
Lily
Noah
Work dinner :( #FOMO
Lily
Boo
@Ezra?? I feel like no one has seen you in days
Pls send a sign of life
Still alive
Sorry
Work is just nuts
Ollie
…you have the dog with you tho right?
Lily
Well, that’s a relief
Promise to Ben or not, he doesn’t go home.
He lets himself stay late, because he stands a better chance of not running into Jonathan if he avoids commuting hours. He brings Sappho to work so he doesn’t have to go back to his apartment to walk her, sets up a little corner of Mom’s office—now his—with a new dog bed and a small collection of her toys, and she seems content to sleep the time away.
Lily, Noah, and Max don’t know him well enough yet to call him on the obvious avoidance. Ollie does, but for once—as if he’s somehow sensed that Ezra can’t handle one more thing—he seems to have chosen not to push.
Ezra will probably thank him for that, once he’s back to sleeping more than three hours a night.
On the other hand, it’s only because he’s not going home to sleep that he’s the one who takes Allison’s call.
Like most funeral homes, the Chapel has 24-7 phone availability. Even on holidays and Shabbat, if someone calls needing help, someone will pick up the phone. Outside of business hours, there’s a rotating schedule of staff on-call shifts, and the office phones are programmed to forward incoming calls to whoever’s on shift that day. Zayde’s philosophy was always that no one should ever go to voicemail, and he used to assign someone to stay in the office all night just in case something came in.
Cellphones and call-forwarding systems had been a welcome relief.
The job of setting the phones to redirect calls falls to the last person to leave the office each night. Ezra’s done it for most of the past week before he drags himself out at nine or ten, at least an hour after even Dad has headed back across the yard. Late-night calls aren’t actually that common—the one time he’d been on the on-call rotation, his phone hadn’t rung once—so the sound of his desk phone ringing just after eleven makes him jump, his probably ill-advised coffee sloshing over his hand. Ezra swears, fumbling for a tissue to wipe his hand clean and hastily scooping the phone off the receiver before it can ring through to the answering machine.
“Friedman Memorial Chapel, this is Ezra,” he says, schooling his voice to the professional calm that seems to come so easily to everyone else. “How can I help you?”
There’s a pause, a sniffle, and then an oddly familiar voice says, uncertainly, “Ezra Friedman?”
Ezra blinks. “Speaking.”
“It’s Allison. Allison Collins. From yoga class? I don’t know if you remember me, I— It’s okay if you don’t.”
He remembers her. She’s a sophomore at RISD, small and quiet, a regular attendee at his Yoga for Chronic Pain classes at the QCC, back when he could teach them. Her hair, which seems to change colors every time he sees her, is the loudest thing about her. “I remember you,” he says, and then, because of where he is, and why he picked up the phone, softens his voice to ask, “What’s going on, Allison?”
Allison takes an audible, hitching breath. “It’s Nava,” she says, and starts to cry.
The story comes in a jumble of sobs, anger and grief and frustration clashing together as she slowly forces out the words, stopping every few minutes to just cry. Nava is Allison’s roommate, a bright-eyed, cheerful trans girl with a smile that Ezra can call to mind without any effort. Ezra never spoke to her much outside of the classes she attended, but he knows from Nina that she frequents several of the other QCC programs, especially the support groups and wellness classes. She was a sweet kid, quick to laugh and quicker to offer her time or her energy. She was always willing to stay after class with him to get all the props stored properly back in their closets.
And now, Allison tells him through her tears, she’s dead. And no one knows what to do.
“She hasn’t talked to her parents since she finished high school,” Allison says, her voice quivering. It’s taken them ten minutes to get this far, Ezra gripping the phone with white-knuckled fingers, his other hand pressed tightly to the side of Sappho’s head, which she’s come to lay in his lap. “They disowned her when she came out—they were super religious, they never understood her. She only made it here because she got a full ride, her art is so beautiful, and now— And I don’t know what to do. I had to identify her, and they said they’d hold her—her body—but I can’t send her back to those people . Only I know it would matter that she had a Jewish funeral, but I don’t know anything about that and I don’t know how we could afford—or if we’re even allowed—”
A breath of cool air makes the hair on the back of Ezra’s neck stand on end, and he jumps, turning, already half sure who he’ll see. Zayde meets his eyes with solemn calm.
What? Ezra mouths to him. Zayde gestures to the intake sheet Ezra has been trying to fill out in a shaking scrawl with the few facts Allison has managed to get out. Then, to Ezra’s surprise, he reaches past it to tap one of the few photos Ezra had brought with him to try to make Mom’s space into something like his own. It’s a picture of Ezra with Ollie and Nina at the Queer Liberation March in New York a few years ago, the three of them sharing a grip on a sign proclaiming Your Real Family Is the Family You Choose . The ink on the poster is running from the rain, but they’re grinning nonetheless, heedless of their wet hair and clothes. Zayde taps it again and then looks, more pointedly, back to Ezra once more.
Something clicks.
“Allison,” Ezra says.
She hiccups around a sob. “Yeah?”
“I think we can help you,” he says. “But I need to talk to someone. Can I call you back?”
It takes another few minutes to calm her down enough to take down her contact information, and the contact information for the medical examiner who currently has Nava in custody, and then to make sure she has someone who can sit with her and make sure she’s not alone until Ezra can call her back. She’s still sniffling when they end the call, but she sounds steadier, and there’s a cautious spark of hope in her voice that wasn’t there before.
Ezra hopes he’s not about to kill that spark.
Ezra’s not really expecting Dad to still be in his office this late, but sure enough, his door is open when Ezra reaches it, light from inside spilling out into the hallway. Ezra knocks on the frame and pokes his head inside to find his father frowning at his computer, carefully referencing a file on his desk as he types something up. “Dad? Do you have a minute?”
If his father is surprised to see Ezra there as late as he is, it doesn’t show on his face. “Of course,” he says, motioning Ezra into the room. “Did you take that call that just came in?”
“Yeah.” Ezra takes one of the leather chairs. Sappho wriggles under the chair to curl up between his feet. He puts the half-filled intake form from Allison on the desk between them. “That’s what I needed to talk to you about.”
Dad frowns. “Okay,” he says. “What’s going on?”
Ezra takes a deep breath, steadies himself, and tells him.
Dad listens without interruption, his hands steepled in front of his face, brow furrowed but eyes calm. Ezra is almost certain that what he’s asking for—for Dad to step into what’s almost definitely about to be a landmine of next of kin and emergency contacts and family preferences and God knows what else in order to give Nava the funeral she’d want for herself, for the person she left her entire family behind to become—is far beyond the normal scope of what they do.
For all he knows, it’s not even legal, or if it is, it has the potential to be so much messier than anyone could possibly want to deal with.
But when Ezra is finished, having run out of reasons why they should help, why it’s the right thing to do even if it’s going to be a huge pain in the ass, with horrendous amounts of red tape to cut through, Dad just says, very simply, “Okay,” and takes the intake form.
Ezra blinks. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Dad repeats. He skims over the form, then the half sheet of notes Ezra had scrawled on a piece of scrap paper next to it, and then nods. “I’ll take it from here. Thank you.”
“But—” Ezra falters. “Just like that?”
“Of course,” Dad says, already reaching for the phone. “It’s my job.” He regards Ezra thoughtfully for a moment and then says, “When was the last time you slept, kiddo?”
The change in subject is jarring. “I— Last night?”
“For how long?”
Ezra opens his mouth. Closes it. “How did we start talking about me?”
Dad doesn’t dignify that with a response. Ezra’s almost grateful for it. “Why don’t you head home,” he says. “I’ll have an update for you about this in the morning. We’ll want your help on it, I think, if you don’t mind—I want to make sure we do everything appropriately.” Ezra can’t do anything but nod, a little dumbly, and Dad gives a satisfied nod. “Good. Go get some sleep. I’ll see you back here at seven-thirty.”
His tone leaves no room for argument.
Ezra picks up Sappho’s leash and goes home.
—
The door to Dad’s office is propped open when Ezra returns in the morning, slightly high on the luxury of six and a half hours of sleep. The murmur of voices inside reaches him before he can knock, and Ezra hesitates for half a second when he recognizes them, before he makes himself take a breath and rap his knuckles against the side of the doorframe.
“That you, Ezra?” Aaron calls.
“It’s me.” Ezra steps inside and pulls the door mostly closed behind him, carefully avoiding Jonathan’s eyes where he’s seated next to Aaron across from Dad’s desk. He’s not surprised to see Ben there as well, leaning against the wall opposite the desk, languid and comfortable. He arches an eyebrow at Ezra as he enters, and Ezra pretends not to see it. “Am I late?”
“You’re right on time,” Dad says. “Grab a seat.”
Ezra takes one of the small leather-backed chairs from beside the couch and pulls it closer to the desk, dropping into it. He feels out of place, the way he almost always has in this room, like the walls themselves are judging him for not wanting to be there. “What did I miss?”
“Jonah’s going to go and pick Nava up from the ME’s office in about an hour,” Dad says. “He’ll bring her back here. Allison is coming in at nine or so, along with Nava’s aunt, who has apparently been her guardian since she managed to get emancipated from her parents. She’s driving in from New York, so she might be a bit later, but she’s given us permission to get her transferred and start preparations here.”
Relief hits him like an ocean wave. “Seriously?”
“We got lucky,” Aaron says. “The aunt was on all of Nava’s emergency contact forms at RISD, and they were willing to give us her contact information. It could have been a shit show otherwise. I guess the aunt also kind of left the family fold, so she took Nava in when she left home.”
“Our chevra sent a shomer over to the ME’s office as well,” Jonathan adds. “She shouldn’t be alone.”
“Thank you.” Jonathan gives him a small smile, like Ezra hasn’t been avoiding him for the past several days, and Ezra swallows around the gratitude welling up in his throat. “So…what happens now?”
“We’ll wait to discuss arrangements for the service and burial until the family get here,” Dad says, leaning back in his chair. “I think it would be good to have you there for that, Ezra—you knew her, but you know her community as well. It’ll be important to let them know so they can be here for her.”
“I didn’t know her that well,” Ezra says, and he’s surprised how guilty he feels about it. “I mean, she came to my classes, and I spoke with her a few times, but it’s not like we were…you know, close.” An idea hits him. “Nina knew her, though. Nava came to a bunch of the programs she ran—I bet she could tell us more about what she might want and who she’d want us to call.”
“Good.” Dad turns to Jonathan. “If her aunt wants a taharah—”
“It should be with women,” Jonathan says firmly. “She lived as a woman, she identified as a woman, women should be with her in the room.” He glances at Ezra. “You agree?”
“Yes,” Ezra says, a little surprised to be asked. “Of course.”
Dad scribbles something down in his notes. “You’ll get a group together?”
Jonathan waves his phone, a loose Ready when you are . “As soon as we have the timing, yeah.”
“Thank you.” Dad gathers up his papers. “I’m going to go make a few calls. Ezra, you’ll reach out to your friend and be back to meet with Allison when she gets here?” Ezra nods, and Dad gets to his feet. “Good. Thanks for your time, everyone.”
It’s a clear dismissal, if a kind one. Ezra follows everyone else out of the room, faltering slightly when Dad and Aaron head off in one direction, Jonathan in the other. He hesitates, then turns to jog after Jonathan, catching his arm. “Hey.”
Jonathan turns to him. “Hey,” he says. If he’s annoyed with Ezra for ghosting him after they hooked up, it doesn’t show on his face. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Thanks.” Friend is a strong word, and he feels guilty about claiming it, but the world will be emptier without her. “I just wanted to apologize. And to thank you.”
Jonathan cocks one brow. “For what and for what?”
“For not answering most of your texts this week,” Ezra says, even though that’s the least of it, and they both know it. “And for making sure that Nava gets the rituals she would have wanted. The way she would have wanted them.”
“Oh. You don’t have to thank me for that.”
Ezra swallows. “I really do. It’s not like the rabbis were thinking of people like me and Nava when they wrote this stuff down. And it’d be easier for some people to just say…” He trails off. “It matters. So thank you.”
“You’re welcome, then.” He slips his hands into his pockets. “I need to make a couple calls, and I’m sure you have work to do. But we’ll—we’ll talk later. Okay?”
It’s an out Ezra doesn’t deserve. He takes it anyway, greedy and unapologetic.
—
In the end, it’s beautiful.
Nina takes charge of setting up a phone tree with the kind of fervor only a program manager without programs to manage can muster, and within hours of the single conversation he has with her, Ezra’s fielding calls from what feels like half the QCC. It’s an outpouring of generosity that takes his breath away: someone from the comms team offering to help write her obituary, the development manager volunteering to set up a crowdfunding page to raise money to cover the funeral costs—“Not necessary,” Dad says firmly, when Ezra tells him about it. “We have procedures for this. Tell them not to worry”—and even Ivy calling to ask if there’s anything she can do to help.
“Just be there,” Ezra tells her, surprising himself at how easy it is to say it. “Just come to show her she was loved.”
They hold the funeral two days after Ezra picked up Allison’s call, and the morning brings a break in the cold spring rain that’s lasted most of the past week, blue sky and air tinged sweet with the promise of a sunny day. The Chapel is already buzzing with activity when Ezra gets there, his prescribed black suit and tie brightened with a pink, blue, and white striped pocket square. Aaron cocks an eyebrow at him when he sees it, but doesn’t make a comment, just squeezes Ezra’s shoulder and nods him toward the larger of their two chapel rooms.
“They’re setting up now,” he says. “Could probably use your help finishing up.”
Ezra goes.
Nina meets him in the doorway with a hug, tucking her face down into the crook of his shoulder and then pulling back to adjust his tie, smiling sadly at him. “Look at you, a proper funeral director,” she says, teasing as she boops his nose with one manicured finger. “Not a single pair of yoga pants in sight.”
“They’re under the suit,” Ezra says, and she laughs.
Slowly but surely, the room fills. Ezra goes where Dad and Aaron direct him, helping people find seats and restocking tissues and keeping the flow of traffic into the room running smoothly, but it’s not long before Dad takes him aside and tells him to take himself off duty.
“Go and sit down,” he says, and the quiet kindness in the words reminds Ezra, startlingly, of Zayde. “We’ve got this one covered.”
“But—”
Someone puts a hand on his shoulder, and the protest dies in his throat when he turns to see Becca, wearing a neat black dress and a familiar Friedman Memorial Chapel Volunteer Usher badge. “Like Dad said,” she says. “We’ve got it.”
He accepts her hug automatically, feeling vaguely bewildered. “What are you doing here?”
“Aaron asked me to come. Something about knowing you’d never sit down like a normal person going to a funeral of someone they knew without being totally sure we had coverage?” She reaches up to straighten his tie slightly. “Can’t imagine why he’d say something like that.”
Ezra blinks against the sudden stinging in his eyes. He looks past Becca, across to where Aaron is at the front of the room talking quietly to Allison and an older woman with covered hair who must be Nava’s aunt Beatrice. Aaron meets his eyes and inclines his head, just slightly. “You didn’t have to.”
“I know I didn’t.” Becca gives him a gentle nudge. “Go be a friend.”
There’s an empty seat next to Nina at the end of a row, and Ezra drops into it with weary gratitude. She slips her arm wordlessly through his, threading their fingers together, and he squeezes her hand. Nava’s casket is already at the front of the room, a simple sanded pine with an embossed Magen David, a candle burning at the head. Jonathan had texted yesterday to let Ezra know that he hadn’t had a problem finding four women in his chevra to do Nava’s taharah, that none of them had even raised a question at treating Nava as the young woman she was.
He catches sight of Jonathan now, in his own suit and tie, sitting in the back corner of the room and talking quietly to a middle-aged woman with thick-framed glasses and violet streaks in her hair—probably a RISD professor, if Ezra had to guess. To Ezra’s surprise, looking around the room, he sees Ollie there as well, sitting between Lily and Max. He catches Ezra’s eye and waves, and Ezra returns it. Thanks for coming, he mouths, and Ollie gives him a small smile.
The service itself is music and poetry and laughter and tears. Dad had gotten in touch with a local rabbi to offer a short reading and handle the brief liturgy, but most of the funeral is Nava’s friends talking about her, singing about her, telling stories, and offering blessings. They’re all so young, Ezra thinks, watching them, and it hurts, the quiet, dignified grief that they bring into the room. Allison’s eulogy, delivered through tears, paints a picture of a girl of fierce conviction and an immense capacity for kindness. The story Allison tells about Nava’s first trip to WaterFire, when they’d all gotten so tipsy that she and Allison had nearly fallen into the river together, has the whole room laughing. It makes Ezra wish he’d known Nava better, but even with the limited time he spent with her, he can picture the smile Allison tells stories about, the laugh he remembers lighting up a room.
A whisper of cool air makes him turn, and he looks up to meet Nava’s soft blue eyes. Her dark hair falls in ringlets over her shoulders, the white dress she’s wearing making her look younger than the short nineteen years she’d had to live. She smiles at him. The bright, easy smile that he could never help but return.
And then she’s gone.
He holds Nina’s hand, and lets himself breathe.
—
It’s Chapel practice for staff to stay at the burial site until the last mourner leaves, there to answer any last questions, manage any last logistics, and make sure this last, sacred departure is handled with the same reverent care as every other piece of the funeral.
Standing beside Aaron, far enough away from the newly filled grave to be unobtrusive but close enough to be clearly available, Ezra watches Dad talking quietly with Allison and Beatrice as they head toward the car waiting to drive them away from the cemetery. From this distance, it strikes Ezra just how much Dad looks like Zayde, in the set of his shoulders and the arch of his brows, the way he holds himself as he opens the car door and offers his hand to help them climb in.
“Where are they doing shiva?” Aaron murmurs.
“Ivy’s,” Ezra says. She’d offered up her house to host, since Allison lives on RISD’s campus and Beatrice came in from out of town. It had come as a surprise that Beatrice had given her blessing for Nava to be buried here in Providence at all, but she’d actually insisted on it.
“This is the home she chose for herself,” she’d said in Dad’s office yesterday, holding Allison’s hand in one of hers, the other white-knuckled around a tissue. “This is where her family is now. It’s where she would have wanted to stay.”
Now Aaron says, “That was nice of Ivy.”
“Yeah. Everyone’s been—” Ezra’s voice catches unexpectedly, and he clears his throat. “You’ve all been amazing. Honestly.”
“It’s what we do,” Aaron says.
“Not like this. This was—this was special.”
The expression on Aaron’s face is one Ezra’s never seen on him before. It makes him look older—but gentler than Ezra’s ever seen him.
“Ezra,” he says, like it’s the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. “They’re all special.”