I turned on the basin taps so the kids wouldn’t hear me. ‘Joe? You gotta come back. Listen to me. I can’t fucking do this.’ The sleeper wave had come out of nowhere, and now I felt that wave in the bathroom, the inability to breathe, fighting the thunderous slam that ripped away Joe… Annie and Zach’s daddy. They’d already been abandoned by their birth mother. How much could they take? I had to pull it together for them. But at the same time I knew that their very existence would help hem me in, keep all my parts together.
I dried my face and took a few deep breaths and opened the door. Callie pressed her cold black nose into my hand, turned and thumped me with her tail, licked my face when I bent to pet her back. I wanted to be there for the kids when they woke, so I climbed back into bed and waited for the sun to rise, for their eyes to open.
Annie stood on a stool, cracking eggs. Joe’s mom was going at my fridge with a spray bottle, the garbage can full of old food. I went over and hugged Annie from the back. The yolks floated in the bowl, four bright, perfect suns. She broke them with a stab of the whisk and stirred them with concentrated vigour.
She turned to me and said, ‘Mommy? You’re not going to die, are you?’
There it was. I touched my forehead to hers. ‘Honey, someday I will. Everyone does. But first, I’m planning on being around for a long, long time.’
She nodded, kept nodding while our foreheads bobbed up and down. Then she turned back to her eggs and said, ‘Are you, you know, planning on leaving anytime soon?’
I knew exactly what she was thinking. Whom she was thinking about. I turned her back around. ‘Oh, Banannie. No. I will never leave you. I promise. Okay?’
‘You promise? You pinkie promise?’ She held out her pinkie and I looped mine in hers.
‘I more than pinkie promise. I promise you with my pinkie and my whole big entire self.’
She wiped her eyes and nodded again. She went back to whisking.
People kept arriving and fixing things: the unhinged door on the chicken coop, the fence post that went down in a storm months before; someone was changing the oil in the truck. Who had driven it home from Bodega Bay? Who had put Joe’s jacket back on the hook, and the blanket back on our bed, and when? The drill started going again. The house smelled like an Italian restaurant. How could anyone eat? David, the writer in the family, who was also one helluva cook, was working on the eulogy out on the garden bench he’d given us for our wedding, while some of his culinary masterpieces graced the table. Everyone seemed to be doing something constructive except me. I kept telling myself that I had to be strong for the kids, but I didn’t feel strong.
My mom, who’d arrived from Seattle, hadn’t let Zach out of her sight and was digging in the dirt with him and his convoy of Tonka trucks and action figures. Joe’s mom and Annie kept busy cleaning, stopping to wipe each other’s tears, then going back to wiping any surface they could find. I found myself wandering back and forth between Annie and Zach, drawing them in for a hug, a sigh, until they would slip down off my lap and back into their activities.
While she cleaned, Marcella sang. She always sang; she was proud of her voice, and rightly so. But she never sang Sinatra or songs from her generation; she sang songs from her kids’ generation. She loved Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper — you name a song from the eighties and she could sing it. Joe and David had told me that when they were teenagers, blaring stereos from their bedrooms, Marcella would shout up from the kitchen, ‘Kids! Turn that crap up!’
While she scoured the grimy tile grout in my kitchen with a toothbrush, she started singing in an aching soprano: ‘Like a virgin… for the very first time.’ I let out a strange, sharp laugh and she looked at me, shocked. ‘What, sweetie? You okay?’ She hadn’t intended to make a crack at my housekeeping, was so preoccupied with sadness that she didn’t even realize what she was singing. But I knew Joe would have got a kick out of it, that on another day, in another layer of time, we both would have pointed out the lyrics, laughed, and teased her. She would have responded by swaying her big bottom back and forth, adding, ‘Oh yeah? Take this: The kid is not my son…’ But instead she searched me for further signs of grief-stricken insanity to accompany my shriek of laughter. I shook my head and waved to say, Never mind. She took my face in her thick hands. ‘Thank God my grandchildren have you for their mother. I thank God every day for you, Ella Beene.’ I reached my arms around the massive trunk of her.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I said, then started to take the spray bottle from her hand. ‘Rest. Let me pour you a cup of coffee.’
She pulled it back. ‘No. This is what I do. This is all I can do. Resting, it makes it worse for me.’
I nodded, hugged her again. ‘Of course.’ Marcella always believed in the clarity of Windex.
The next morning, I slid my black dress from its dry-cleaning bag and lifted my arms and felt the cool lining slip over my head. I considered slipping into the plastic instead, letting it tighten against my nostrils and mouth, and letting them lay me in the same dark hole with Joe. It was the thought of the kids that helped me push my feet into the black slings my best friend, Lucy, bought me —’You cannot wear Birkenstocks to a funeral, my dear, even in Northern California’ — and find both of the silver and aquamarine drop earrings Joe gave me our first Christmas together.
At the church, thirty-six people spoke. We cried, but we laughed too. Most of the stories went back to the time before I knew Joe. It seemed odd that almost everyone in the church had known him much longer than I had. I was the newcomer among them, but I found a certain comfort in telling myself that they didn’t know Joe the way I did.
Afterwards, I remembered having conversations I couldn’t quite hear and receiving hugs I couldn’t quite feel — as if I’d wrapped myself in plastic after all. The only thing I could feel was Annie’s and Zach’s hands slipping into mine, the solidity of their palms, the pressings of their small fingers, as we walked out of the church, as we stood at the grave site on the hill, as we walked down towards the car. And then Annie’s hand pulled out of mine. She walked up to a striking blonde woman I didn’t know, standing at the edge of the cemetery. Perhaps one of Joe’s old classmates, I thought. The woman bent down and Annie reached out, lightly touched her shoulder.
‘Annie?’ I called. I smiled at the woman. ‘She doesn’t have a shy bone in her body.’
The woman took Annie’s other hand in both of hers, whispered in her ear, and then spoke to me over her shoulder. ‘Believe me, I know that. But Annie knows who I am, don’t you, sweet pea?’
Annie nodded without pulling her hand away or looking up. She said, ‘Mama?’
Chapter Four
Annie had called her Mama. She and Zach called me Mom and Mommy. But not Mama. Never Mama. I’d never questioned it, or really even thought of it, but the distinction rang out in that cemetery: Mama is the first-word-ever-uttered variety of mother. The murmur of a satisfied baby at the breast.
I recognized Paige then. I’d once found a picture of her, gloriously pregnant, that had been stuck in a book on photography entitled Capturing the Light — it was the one photo Joe had forgotten, or maybe had intended to keep, when he purged the house of her. I was astounded at her beauty and said so. He’d shrugged and said, ‘It’s a good picture.’