He put the chairs in a semicircle, a safe distance from Sondra’s bier, then made the punch and cake, and reviewed his sermon. He’d hardly ever presided over a formal funeral, though he’d given dozens of little services in the hospital, rituals tailored on the fly to the needs of the survivors gathered around the late person always (even if they had been dying for weeks or months or years) so suddenly and shockingly dead. The mourners usually seemed to him to be waiting for someone to organize their grief, to close the endlessly strange, eternal moment of death enough for them to escape it, however briefly, and leave the bedside and the body and the hospital behind. Not that everybody needed this done for them, but the people who needed it the most seemed never to know to ask for it.
He laid the hymn he’d chosen down on each chair, weighting each paper with an apple from the orchard so it wouldn’t blow away, and he scattered some apples on the bier (not thinking, until much too late, that along with the applewood fuel they would make Sondra, as she burned, smell a little like dinner) and straightened Sondra’s robe, and moved the chairs back a bit more, and then everything was ready.
He waited as long as he could stand to before he started. He went inside once to call up the stairs, “Hey, everybody, it’s time!” but he didn’t go knock on any doors. A few of them, including his Alice, came to their windows to look at the fire once it really got going. “My dear friends,” Jim said to the empty chairs, “let us celebrate the life and the memory of an extraordinary human being. Let us celebrate the story of our friend, and hold the meaning of it together, in this moment which we sanctify together in love.” He paused.
He didn’t ordinarily need notes for a funeral. If he had time, he’d write out an order of service and a sermon, but he didn’t ever read them — they always stuck in his head. Now, though, everything he’d written down so carefully the night before was lost to him, even though he’d been careful not to put it in his book, and been careful not to think of it, as he wrote it, as a story to forget. Nonetheless, that ten-minute story of her life, her fiercely striving, fiercely loving existence, was gone. He could just go upstairs for his notes and read them aloud, but he didn’t want to go inside.
Instead, he sat on the grass next to the bier, and never-minded the sermon and the absent audience. He just talked to her.
“Well, my friend,” he said. “I guess it’s time to say goodbye. To this part of you, anyway. I feel that we’ll meet again, though you won’t know me, will you? Maybe, after my Debut, I’ll come back here as a social worker. I wonder if that’s allowed? If anybody but an Alice could do it? I think it would be a good idea. You know, like how in halfway houses the counselors were usually junkies, once upon a time. Which is exactly what makes them good at their job.” He scooted closer to the bier and took an apple from among the wood, polishing it nervously on his shirt.
“I usually have all sorts of things to say to a dead person,” he told Sondra. “You know, ‘You will be missed. Your life mattered. I could feel the love your family has for you when I walked into the room.’ Half-made-up, of course. But half-true, too. Or true because I believed it, if that makes sense. True for that moment, anyway, because I chose for it to be true, with every death. It’s different when everybody else has left the room. When it’s just you and the body. I have all these lovely one-liners, but I can’t really say them now. I haven’t forgotten them all. I just don’t know what they mean anymore.”
It was the taste of the apple that made him burst into tears. Of course he had cried during funerals all the time, but it was unprofessional to sob. He knew he couldn’t have looked very dignified, with snot in his mustache and apple bits inside his mouth, but he kept talking anyway. “They should know it, shouldn’t they? They should know back home, back then, that we might be sad too. They should think about how we’re holding funerals too, way out here on the other side of life, for all of them. They should all stop thinking about themselves sometime — it’s so selfish, isn’t it? — and think for a minute about how we’re the ones who are actually alone. About how they left us.” He sat and finished his apple, and then he lit the fire.
He added his chair to the flames, and then the other chairs too, and then as many vegetables as he could pull out of the earth, tossing them from a distance as the fire burned hotter and hotter. It was a shame, then, that the others weren’t there, because it would have been nice for everyone to throw a carrot or something on the fire. So he kept an eye on the door into the house, telling himself that his anger toward the others would be undone if just one other person came out to say goodbye to Sondra. Nobody came out, but he could see through the window that they had started to gather in the kitchen. Then, just at the tail end of dusk, a stranger emerged from the orchard, bramble-scratched and sunburned and dehydrated-looking. “Thank goodness for that bonfire!” she said. A tall girl with a pixie haircut, she looked too young and too pretty ever to have died. “I might never have found my way back if I didn’t see it! I’m Olivia. You must be one of my crèchemates!” She stuck out her hand.
“I suppose I am,” Jim said. “And let me be the first to wish you a happy birthday.”
“It kind of is my birthday, isn’t it? Something smells delicious. Is that dinner?”
“Inside,” Jim said. “I think the others are all waiting for you.”
“That’s awesome,” the girl said, still pumping Jim’s hand and looking all around at the house and the sky and the orchard and the dwindling fire. “This is awesome. Are you coming in too?”
“Not right now,” Jim said. “I have a lot of work to do.” When Alice called him to dinner a little later, he said he would come when the fire was out, but when the flames had died to nothing, he went inside through a door close to the stairs and went up to his room. There he began to write out all the memories of his wife he had been holding on to in the secret, stupid hope that he would be allowed to carry them along with him into the new world. He quietly and diligently inscribed his love upon the page, pressing firmly as if to pin the words and their feelings to the paper. But since he could still remember what it had been like to want something with his whole heart and know he couldn’t have it, he said to himself, Now it really does feel like being alive again.
1.15
Jane was afraid Brian would meet her at the airport. She didn’t feel ready to see him. But it was a fizzy young lady who met her, holding up a blue Polaris sign with Jane’s name on it. When Jane approached, the girl bowed to her with her fists pressed over her heart. Jane clasped her hands over her stomach and bowed back, not sure of what else to do. Oh, Jim, she thought to herself. How could you not tell me you were joining a cult? “Greetings and salutations!” the girl said. “I’m Poppy.”
“What a lovely name,” Jane said, pretending to be a nicer version of herself. “I knew a girl named Peony once in grade school. All the boys called her Pee-on-Me, but she didn’t care. I never knew how she could be so gracious and strong but very much later I started to think she was somehow protected by the beauty of her name.”
“I wasn’t born with it,” Poppy said, very brightly of course, as they waited for Jane’s bag to come out on the carousel. Jane hadn’t dared carry it on with the Kiss inside — Hecuba couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t set off alarms at security — and now Jane was anxious that the bag was lost, or being tampered with. “It’s my Polaris name. It’s what I want them to call me in the future. What’s yours?”