Branda begins to speak. Speak and grieve. She explains, grieving, how she never got a chance to meet Gen but had heard so many stories about her over these past months she felt she already knew her.
How Branda had really wanted to get to know her better and thought she would some day but how every now and then we do not have the time we thought we would have to do the things we hoped to do.
How nonetheless she is certain Gen is somewhere special.
Branda can, she alleges, feel her.
Branda can feel, she says, grieving, Gen’s presence all around us.
It’s like… um, she doesn’t know how to say it. It’s like…
May God grant you healing and all the graces you need through the intercession of our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, the condolence card one relative sends you reads.
As Branda speaks, your nose begins to run harder.
It is difficult for you to determine whether you are crying, too, or simply very cold.
The weather being what it is.
You cannot put your finger on it, strictly speaking, but somehow the day suddenly feels so long and gray and dismal.
Andi looks over at you, taken aback.
You can tell she is trying to figure out what is going on.
You take a tissue from the pocket of your ski-jacket and blow, which makes your eyes begin to redden and water.
Maybe you are catching the flu, you think.
Maybe you are not.
Gen: Dad. Daddy. Dad.
Dad:…
Gen: Da-ddy. Daddy. Dad. DADDY. Hey, Dad.
Dad: What is it, honey?
Gen: What did Cinderella say to the photographer?
Dad:…
Gen: You can’t think about it, Daddy. You have to just say the answer right away.
Dad:…
Gen: You can’t think about it. Come on. Guess. Make a guess. Guess. Come on. Do it. Guess. GUESS.
Dad: Okay. Let’s see… How about, hmmmm. How about: Some day my prints will come?
Gen (crestfallen): Someone told you. Someone told you the answer, didn’t they? Someone told you.
Dad: It’s just an old joke, honey. That’s all. It’s just a really old joke.
Some things, in any case, you cannot control, it occurs to you.
Your sinuses are related in intricate-if-difficult-to-articulate ways to your chest muscles, the anatomy of your lungs, the snow picking up speed and density around you, what a small circle of friends these sorts of events come down to in the end.
Kysha and Thom look over at you sympathetically.
Just seven people, you think.
Karla looks over at you and her dark eyes go oily with sorrow.
Seven people.
That is it.
That is all.
This is to certify that your name has been placed at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Flowers to share in the prayers and masses offered there each day, the condolence card another relative sends you reads.
You try smiling at them all reassuringly, which only makes your nose run harder, harder and faster, which only makes you for some reason see Gen tumescent in her pink down coat and pink down pants and pink down hood and pink down booties.
Not so much an angel as the scale-model replica of an astronaut.
She is playing in the yard just off the back deck early one morning, first sunlight flaring through fog between dense lodgepole pines, collecting small smooth stones in her mittened scale-model astronaut palm.
You see yourself pulling the blinds closed and continuing to wash dishes, wash dishes or prepare breakfast, wash dishes or prepare breakfast or read the want ads, and then from an omniscient perspective you see your daughter beginning to wander away, onto the foggy gravel driveway, lifting this stone, that stone, testing its heft, evaluating its beauty, letting it drop, lifting another.
You see her squatting.
Squatting and then standing.
Waddle-walking toward the road at the bottom of the driveway.
Never aware, of course, of that flat-green pickup plunging up behind her.
The driver saying later he never saw her, as drivers often do say in such situations, apparently.
He seemed like the kind of man you could trust.
Visibly shaken, he would always carry this conversation with him.
He simply never had any idea she was there.
He took the curve, which your daughter happened to be occupying, and the day’s first foggy sunflash turned his windshield into a white mirror.
That was it.
That was all.
The two hunters riding in the bed saying it sounded like what they imagined hitting a three-foot-tall water bladder would sound like.
They actually used the words water bladder.
They actually used them right in front of you.
In the flair players who move chips with panache while betting signal they are in reality insecure about their hand.
Four hours later you called Karla. It was well past noon in New Jersey. Your voice shivering so badly it must have given the impression you were standing outside in falling snow in your jockey shorts.
Interpreting this as evidence of emotional exhaustion, Karla volunteered to phone your family and friends on your behalf.
Your behalf and Andi’s behalf.
You thanked her and told her you would never be able to repay her.
You were right.
Your family and friends and Andi’s father, who failed to call you back.
There was, you imagine, no real reason.
There was no real reason excluding compassion, of course.
Excluding compassion and excluding tenderness.
Concern.
Things like that.
Unless his not calling had more to do with the opposite of indifference.
This is not that.
This presumably is not that.
Your parents pronounced your sister’s name one last time at the police station, at what passed for a police station, and then they never pronounced it again.
Kysha is speaking now.
She is talking about how this moment is what friends are for.
People believe friends are for the good moments, she says — the vacations, the dinner parties, the weddings, the sharing in happiness and success.
But friends are really for these moments, these awful moments, these moments you cannot begin to believe you are actually experiencing.
Seven people.
One for every day of the week.
That is what it finally comes down to.
Did you just see what I just saw? is what tourists ask their partners over and over, traveling.
The shitting fields, or how the machine-gun-toting guard pulled you out of line at customs in the Belize airport and made you stand off to the side for nearly an hour before it dawned on you he was waiting for a bribe.
Made dangerous by his own poverty.
How that night you were awakened by a noise in your hotel bathroom, what passed for a hotel room, and when you investigated you discovered a rat chewing on one of Andi’s used tampons in the spilled trash can.
You spent a small portion of the money in the special account you set up for Gen to stage this scene.
Did you just live what I just lived?
On the phone calls, the gravestone, the pick ax you purchased in Deary.
On the drives to and from the airport and on the food.
The food and the hotel rooms.
You will give the rest to charity.
A children’s charity, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying.
Look at us, Thom is saying, his own voice shaking like yours shook when you phoned Karla. What a bunch of basket cases. I mean, seriously. Come on, guys. We can do this thing.