Beth
On the very last day of Dad’s life, Mom dragged Kaya and me to his bedside in the hospital. Kaya held Dad’s hand. I didn’t want to go near him. He was unconscious and twitchy and his skin was thin and his bones stuck out. There was a smell. And all those tubes.
Mom sort of hovered, but not in a loving way exactly. Nurses came and went and were kind. Dad made big groaning sounds twice, and shifted in the bed. Once he swore loudly and Mom pushed the button on his morphine dispenser. I would have liked a morphine dispenser of my own that day.
Then Mom was standing over the bed, arms crossed on her chest, tears pouring down her face in a way that I had not known that tears could pour, especially Mom’s. “Your father’s dying, Beth,” she said through gritted teeth. “Get over here and say goodbye.”
Kaya was sitting quietly on a chair pulled up right beside the bed, bent over with her head on the sheet and her arms reached out holding Dad’s hand. She was murmuring something, something strange most likely. And she was ignoring both of us.
I forced myself to cross the room and stand up against the bed. Kaya did not look up. I let an arm reach out and hover above the sheet near Dad’s knee. I let it brush the cotton, the merest whiff of a touch.
“Goodbye, Dad,” I murmured.
Mom made a humphing sound through her tears.
After that, there were hours more to get through.
I slept through a lot of it, in a big chair in the corner, and left the room as often as I could to get stuff from the vending machine. Once Kaya and I went together to the cafeteria and ate burgers and fries off heavy china.
We stayed the night, which was weird and terrible. Kaya slept in the second bed in the room, which wasn’t occupied. I slept as best I could in that big chair. And Mom just kind of stood, at least at first. I jolted awake at one point to the sight of her lying full-length along the edge of Dad’s bed, her head in the crook of his neck, her arm across his chest. I closed my eyes, tight, and opened them again. She was murmuring something. I drifted back to sleep, thinking. That was probably the one and only time I ever saw Mom touch Dad except for a shoulder hug or peck on the cheek or lips sometimes, or the necessary touching of the last year when Dad was really sick. Maybe there had been something between them once, long ago. Maybe I was seeing the leftovers from that.
I must have slept for a long time. The next time I woke, I stayed still, watching Mom through my eyelashes, afraid to move. She was still stretched out on the bed with Dad, but now she was asleep.
At last Kaya rolled over, sat up, brought her hands to her face and said, “Mom?”
Mom was up and off that bed in an instant, like a teenager caught making out with her boyfriend on the couch.
She collected herself quickly, turning back to Dad on the bed. She touched his face, his neck, and took a great, heaving breath.
“He’s gone,” she said.
Kaya let out a sob and ran to her, and Mom let her press up against her and cry. She even laid an arm across Kaya’s back. But she did not hug her. I got up out of the chair and went and stood looking down at my father.
He’s dead, I thought.
To me, Dad’s funeral was just as awful as Mr. Grimsby’s, even though there was no yelling, and there were no crazy people like that loving companion and the angry son. No mysterious granddaughter waited outside either. Dad’s funeral was just family and friends gathered together, sad but polite, a few rituals, a song, maybe two.
I wore a dark blue outfit that I pulled out of the back of my closet. Too tight. Scratchy. A perfect match for how I was feeling. Kaya emerged in pink and purple, all floaty looking. I remembered that Dad had commented on that very outfit just a month ago, told her she looked like a princess or something. He’d hate the bunchy blue thing I was wearing, I thought, if he even noticed. I bit back a snarky comment.
She had a small bag over her shoulder with paper sticking out the top.
“You’re bringing that?” I said.
“Yes.”
I glared at her, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Oh well. At least it ruined her outfit. And maybe Mom would say something.
At the funeral home, a very serious man I had never seen before led us to the front row. I sat beside Mom and stared at the urn, which was on a white tablecloth on a table up front, beside where the minister—was he actually a minister?—stood.
“What’s that?” Kaya asked, following my eyes.
“Nothing,” I said.
Kaya stared up at me and her eyes flashed wide and filled with tears, but I really truly did not care.
I was not going to tell my sister that Dad was in that urn. I didn’t even want to think about it myself. Flashes of bubbling, melting flesh and cracking bones erupted in my mind, and no mental effort seemed to stop them. A proper coffin with a body in it would be much easier somehow. I didn’t listen to the minister or to my uncle, and I only mouthed the words to the songs.
Later we stood with Mom, and all the people walked past us in a line and hugged us one by one. There were a number of strangers, so I didn’t think much of the tall, dark-haired woman and the elderly man with a cane and a British accent. I let the woman kiss my cheek and express her sympathy.
“I’m Jennifer,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I let the man take my hand in his. “And I’m Mr. Grimsby,” he said. “Alan Grimsby.” His hand was cool and dry.
Behind us, my twelve-year-old sister was spread out on the floor with her paper and her coloured pencils. She must have seen Mr. Grimsby in the line, but I didn’t see how she reacted. I do remember looking back at her at one point. I was furious at her for getting out of the line, for being a kid.
She was drawing a swan. It was huge, crooked and smudgy, taking up a whole sheet of paper, which she had unfolded to fill the space in front of her. When I looked at her, she refolded the paper.
Later, in the car, she held the wad of paper in her lap, along with the box of coloured pencils.
My hand lighted on the paper, almost without my willing it, my thumb sliding underneath to take the sheets from her. “Can I see?” I said casually.
I yelped as her arm came down hard on my hand.
“Girls,” Mom said, her voice strange, thick.
I leaned toward Kaya and dropped my voice to a whisper. “You don’t have to show them to me. I’m just curious what sort of pictures a kid draws at her father’s funeral. You’re not a baby anymore, you know.”
She clutched the drawings, refusing to look at me.
“Mom said I didn’t even have to come,” she hissed. “You heard her.”
She angled her face away from me and clenched her jaw. Mine was clenched too, but I held my gaze on her—and she knew it, even if she wouldn’t look.
Unlike Kaya, I had to help out at the reception we held at our house. Food had to be unwrapped and put out, drinks offered. When I went into the living room later on to put out dishes of nuts, I found Kaya perched on the end of the couch, watching the front door. There was an intensity about her that bothered me, but then, everything about her was bothering me that day.
As I hovered in the doorway, Mom crossed the room and bent over Kaya, gathered her into a hug and buried her face in her hair. Kaya raised her arms politely and placed them on Mom’s back. I watched Mom’s shoulders heave. At last two of Mom’s friends gathered round her, pulling her off Kaya and into their arms, where she cried some more. Kaya shook herself off and looked, once again, at the front door. I put the nuts down and headed back to the kitchen, but Kaya shoved past me before I got there, and I watched her head out onto the back deck, where the smokers were.
After that, I don’t remember noticing her until later, on the stairs. She was on her way up, cheeks flushed, hair extra curly with damp ends, and she was holding two orange rosebuds on short stems.
She couldn’t get past me, so I had her captive for a moment. “Where’d those come from?” I asked. “You went out somewhere, didn’t you. Where?”
She looked up at me. “I was here,” she said.
“But who gave those to you?”
“Nobody,” she said.
“Did you take them?”
She was clutching them tight, and her whole face was gathered up into pure possession.
Something in me must have been equally determined. “Then who gave them to you?” I asked again.
“Mr. Grimsby,” she said.
At the church, I hadn’t recognized the bent-over man leaning on a cane, but when Kaya said his name, I found myself back on the corner of Discovery and Fourteenth, letting him take my hand in his. I’m Mr. Grimsby, he had said.
“I didn’t think he came to the house,” I said as Kaya tried to wedge herself past me up the narrow stairs.
“He gave them to me at the church,” she said. “Let me by.”
And I did. I let her and her roses pass me on the stairs. I abandoned my curiosity and went back to resenting her as I said goodbye to guest after guest and helped Mom clean up.
Two years have passed since then. Another funeral. Shoplifting. Juvenile detention. Running away. Drugs, I’m pretty sure. The word prostitution keeps floating into my mind.
Mr. Grimsby’s the key to all of it, I know it, but he’s dead, and Kaya’s gone, and Mom’s posters and midnight searches seem to be getting us nowhere.
I need a plan.