Chapter 10 Eliana
ELIANA
comp /k?mp/: noun
The cathedral is full of strangers.
I can feel them all around me. Bodies packed into pews and the rustle of programs. Sniffles. Throats clearing. Yasmin sits pressed against my left side, her hand wrapped around mine so tight my fingers have gone numb.
We’re in the back, as planned. Anonymous mourners lost in an ocean of them. Yas insists that no one has given us so much as a second glance, thank God. The huge hats and N95 masks she bought for us are functioning as intended.
Up front, someone is talking. Whoever he is, he’s very good at it.
His voice is a butter-drenched purr, so rich and dulcet that it almost makes me forget that everything he’s saying is complete bullshit.
“Bastian Hale was a visionary,” he proclaims. “A pioneer who forever reshaped Chicago’s culinary landscape and proved that fine dining could be both accessible and transcendent. ”
I dig my fingernails into my palm. Yasmin’s thumb strokes the back of my hand to soothe me.
The speaker continues. A buffet of what Bastian achieved in this lifetime. Project Olympus. The Michelin stars. The James Beard nominations. Each achievement gets its own paragraph, polished and perfect and utterly meaningless.
It’s more of a press release than a eulogy. I feel sick.
He finishes with an uncomfortable crackle of microphone static. Another speaker takes over. A woman this time, her voice trembling with what I assume is supposed to be sadness. It comes across more like indigestion, though.
“I had the privilege of working with Bastian on several occasions,” she warbles. “His attention to detail was legendary. He demanded excellence from everyone around him, but most of all from himself.”
Wrong. He demanded control, I think bitterly. And if he didn’t get it right away, he’d slice you open until you fell to your knees and gave him what he asked for.
Sometimes, the slicing was literal.
But she doesn’t say that. None of them do. They don’t know what I know, or if they do, they pretend they don’t.
A third speaker goes. A fourth. Each one builds another layer of the myth, constructing a Bastian Hale who existed only in carefully staged photo ops. The brilliant entrepreneur. The culinary genius. The man who put Chicago on the map.
None of those things are real.
If nothing else, they’re incomplete.
Because the man they’re describing isn’t the same as the one who sang me Russian lullabies in the shower.
That man kept my bucket list tucked in his pocket, and when he looked at me, his eyes were blue, not black.
The blue-eyed Bastian looked at me like I was the only thing in the world worth seeing, even as we were both drowning in darkness we couldn’t escape.
As for the black-eyed Bastian…
Well, safe to say no one’s eulogy mentions anything about alley corpses or severed fingers.
So yes, this is a kind of burial, but only kind of. These people are shoveling dirt on the fake Bastian. It’s nice dirt, perfumed dirt, dirt that’s been run through a machine of PR double-speak and the niceties that people only remember to say about you after you die.
But it’s still dirt. It’s still a lie. It’s still bullshit.
And it’s still forgetting to put all of Bastian Hale to rest.
If anyone asked me, I could give my own remarks about him.
I wouldn’t lie and I wouldn’t omit. I’d tell them he loved me more than anyone has ever loved me before—and also that he hurt me worse than anyone has ever hurt me before.
I’d say he showed me kindness and oysters, bloodied hands and sunrises over the lake.
And then I’d lay him to rest. For good.
But since I can’t say that stuff, it all sticks in my throat until I feel like I’m choking on it. “Yas,” I mutter, “I need to get out of here. Let’s go.”
“Wait just a—”
But I’m already moving, shuffling sideways past knees and purses and mumbling apologies as I go. Someone up front is still talking, but I’m no longer listening.
The cathedral doors are heavy, but I push through them into the open air. Chicago has a smell, I’m realizing. I almost kind of missed it. I thought coming here would give me something. Closure, maybe. Or at least the chance to say what I needed to say, even if Bastian couldn’t hear it.
I hated what you became. I loved you anyway.
You’re going to be a father.
Goodbye.
But I didn’t get to say any of it. The funeral was supposed to be an ending. Credits rolling on a movie. Humphrey Bogart’s final line and fog rolling over the screen before it all went to black.
Instead, I feel worse than when I arrived. I have unfinished business with a dead man who took all the answers with him.
Yasmin catches up to me on the sidewalk, slightly out of breath. “Well,” she says after a moment, “that was…”
“Bullshit,” I finish.
“I was going to say ‘impersonal,’ but yeah. Bullshit works, too.”
A cranky cab driver honks and yells something rude out of his window. The cathedral doors open and close behind us, releasing another batch of early-departing mourners into the afternoon. I shift my weight from foot to foot and re-grip Excalibur in my hand, suddenly desperate to be anywhere else.
“Did you get what you needed?” Yasmin asks.
That right there is the million-dollar question. Did I?
“No,” I admit. “Not even close.”
Yasmin’s hand grazes my elbow in sympathy. “Then what do you want to do now?”
I don’t know. Go home. Crawl into bed. Press the rewind button of my life until I’m back at the beginning and I can make a very different set of choices.
But none of those options will change anything.
Even if such a remote existed, I know deep in my bones that I’m powerless to do anything but what I did.
Which means all of this was always going to happen, every bit of it, and I’d still end up pregnant and alone in front of a church crammed with people who don’t know half the things I know.
So what’s the point in protesting? Closure is a myth and happy endings are a lie. There’s just the same thing there’s always been for me: enduring. Everything else is just a distraction from that grim and ugly truth.
“Let’s just go,” I say finally. “Please. I can’t be here anymore.”
Neither of us says much for the whole two-hour drive out of Chicago. We don’t even turn on the radio. I just rest my head against the window and pretend I can see what’s passing by in the outside world.
Yasmin sighs every few minutes, the way she always does when she wants to say something but doesn’t know what to say. Usually, I’d throw her a bone and ask what’s on her mind, but I don’t have the energy for that right now. It’s been a long day and I’m tired.
When we arrive, Yasmin stops the car in front of our apartment building. “I’ve got to go to work for a few hours. You going to be okay by yourself?”
“Yeah. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Call me if you need anything. I mean it. Anything at all.”
“I will.”
I get out of the car, shuffle up the stairs, unlock the apartment door, and step inside.
I’m already unbuttoning the charcoal shirt that feels like it’s strangling me.
The fabric scratches against my skin, like funeral clothes always do, because if the dead are uncomfortable, you better be uncomfortable, too.
All I want is to peel them off and forget this entire godforsaken day ever happened.
The door clicks shut behind me. I drop Excalibur against the wall and reach for the hem of my shirt and—
“Hello, Eliana.”
My entire body goes rigid.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
I’m hallucinating again. I have to be. The stress, the pregnancy hormones, the emotional exhaustion of the funeral, all of the above—my brain is playing tricks on me like it’s been doing for weeks. Phantom cologne. Imagined footsteps. And now, it seems, his voice in my empty apartment.
Except…
Except I can hear him breathing…
I can smell wintergreen…
And when I take a trembling step forward, hands outstretched, they find a warm chest I know all too well.
“You’re dead,” I whisper. “They said you were dead.”
Bastian pauses. Breathes. Then he says, “Looks like they were wrong.”