We all sat together in a private lounge, looking at one another. Nobody seemed to know what to do next. The doctor had said he would come and speak with us in a little while, but it had been over an hour and we had not heard from him. I did not know if my mother was still in the hospital room or not; I had no wish to go and see. We simply sat. Jeebs cried quietly; my father had put his hand on Jeebs’s knee but otherwise had not moved.
“I should call Campbell’s, I guess,” he said finally, thickly. “I guess that’s the next thing you do.”
“You mean so they can come get her and—do all that stuff to her?” I said.
“Honey, yes,” he said. “They’ll have to, you know.”
“No,” I said. “They don’t have to. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes to be taken—you know—up there, and scattered over the ocean.”
“That’s ridiculous, Lilly,” he said, in what sounded like mere annoyance. “Of course she doesn’t want to be cremated. We don’t cremate our loved ones. She’ll be . . . at Oak Hill, like everyone in this family always has been and will be.”
“I heard her say it,” I said, beginning to cry. “I heard her. She was sitting on the lawn chairs talking to . . . to Mrs.—you know, his mother . . .”
“Jon’s mother? Mrs. Lowell?” he said incredulously. We might have been talking about some happening or other at a near-forgotten vacation.
“Yes.” I wept. “She said so. She
said
so, Daddy. The night of the summer solstice.”
He snorted in exasperation and we fell into silence again. Presently the people from Campbell’s Funeral Home came and took my mother away, although I did not see this, and we three went back to the house on Kalorama Circle where, now, my mother no longer lived. Still we did not talk. Jeebs went, sobbing, upstairs to his room. My father went out to the kitchen and spoke with Flora and Emma in the same dry, dead voice he had used all morning, and I heard them begin to wail.
A little later, I heard my father go down the basement steps and heard, for the first time in a very long time, the rhythmic thump of the trampoline and the metallic jingle of the chains that held the balance bar.
I went swimming.
T
he night after my mother’s memorial service, I woke in the deep predawn hours, in the grip of a terror such as I had never known. If I had read Sartre or Camus, I would perhaps have had a name for it: existential terror. But I didn’t know about Sartre. Not then. All I knew was that if I moved a muscle, made a sound, I would be sucked out of bed and through the roof and up into the whistling, limitless black space beyond the stars, and there I would die. Or I would step out of my bed and fall instantly into the bottomless abyss that yawned hungrily beneath the manicured crust of suburban lawns and cherry-tree-lined malls. The abyss had always been there; somehow I had always known that. If you fell into it, you would never stop falling; you would smell the rotting exhalations of its wet black lungs, feel the pulsing of its swollen, indifferent heart, but you would never reach the actual limits of the abyss.
All this I knew in an instant, in my bed in my room on the second floor of the house where I had been born, and I thought that the terror would follow me all the days of my life. There was no enclosing sky above me, and no solid earth beneath me.
I pressed my face into my pillow and willed the helmet to lock into place, but it did not, and I was not surprised. For the first time I had not really thought it would. The helmet kept the world at bay. This dark thing was not of the world. It encompassed planets, galaxies, the universe. It was everywhere and nowhere.
Alone,
I thought.
This is what alone means.
I needed not helmets, but the touch of human flesh.
I got out of bed and stumbled down the dark hall toward my parents’ bedroom, but even as I pushed the door open I knew they were not there. Well, not my mother, of course. But neither was my father. Wilma was, curled tightly into a shaggy ball on my mother’s side of the bed. It was the first time I could remember that he had not slept the night in my bed.
I thought for a moment that I would seek out my father wherever he had retreated to sleep without my mother, but this did not feel right either. I knew there would be no comfort for me there. Not yet. Tatty Glover, who had orchestrated my mother’s service and the reception afterward because none of us seemed capable of even answering a doorbell, was sleeping over in the guest room in case she was needed in the night. But I could not go there, either. Tatty, though grieving, was so forthright and competent that I could not imagine snuggling up to her smartly angular body. I stood in the doorway of my parents’ empty room, literally wringing my hands, and then I ran back to my room and pulled out the satin drawstring bag that had once held a handbag of my mother’s and now held her hair, and ran back to her bedroom and crawled under the covers. With her hair against my cheek and Wilma sighing and snoring against me, I finally slid into sleep myself, the terror buried for the moment under bronze-gold coils and doggy-smelling fur. I slept until nine o’clock the next morning, and woke trying to hold on to the ghost of my mother’s laughter, to echoes of her deep, gurgling laugh. The obscene fear came crawling back, and I ran barefoot and in my pajamas into the kitchen, where I heard voices and could smell cooking and feel warmth emanating from behind the closed double doors. My hands were shaking so that I could hardly open the doors and when I did, they were all there, my father and Tatty and Flora and Emma. Jeebs, shaken and silent, had gone back to Groton earlier that morning.
My father was drinking coffee and staring over Tatty’s head out the kitchen window, where, in the back garden, wisteria now shawled the trees in purple and birds whisked around the little fountain. He did not seem to see me. Tatty Glover, in a soft, flowered cotton housecoat, sat across from him, red and swollen of eyes, with a yellow legal pad and a pen on the table in front of her. She did not notice me either, but Emma and Flora did, at once, and whirled at me with milk and fresh toast and jam. There were silver snail’s tracks of tears on both their dark faces, but they managed smiles for me.
“You sit right down here and eat your breakfast, Lilly,” Flora said. “You didn’t eat no supper, and you gon’ need your strength. You the lady of the house now.”
I looked wildly at Tatty. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that I would become “the lady of the house”; surely no one would expect that of me. Somehow I had thought that among them, Tatty and my father and Emma and Flora would see to it that life went forward. Who in their right mind would place their trust in a shivering thirteen-year-old in an unseen diver’s helmet whose sole proficiency was swimming underwater?
“You do need to eat something, Lilly,” Tatty said, briskly crossing out something on her legal pad that had obviously been accomplished.
#34, Lilly fed?
I thought. I still looked at her mutely.
My father turned his head toward me. I knew, suddenly, what he would look like when he was very old. All the life was gone from his eyes, life not lived, but drained away.
“Your mother would certainly not want you to starve, baby,” he said, stumbling a little over the word “mother.”
“I’m not hungry,” I quavered.
“Well, of course you’re not,” Tatty said impatiently. “Nobody’s hungry. But life has to go on, and the first step is for you to sit down and eat your breakfast.”
She looked at me more closely. “Are you all right, sweetie? I mean, are you feeling sick? You’re white as a sheet.”
“I . . . I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t find anybody,” I said thickly. “I couldn’t find Wilma.”
“I knew I should have slept in your room,” Tatty murmured. “But we all thought, after having to deal with all those people and everything, that you might want to be by yourself. Never mind. I’ll stay another night or two. It was a bad idea—I see that now.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I found Wilma in Mama’s bed and I curled up with him. You don’t need to stay, Aunt Tatty.”
Tatty Glover was not, of course, my aunt, but my mother had always referred to her as such, so I did, too.
“No,” my father said, his voice stronger. “I need to take over my house now. Lilly needs to come to me if she’s . . . lonely in the night.”
He didn’t say “afraid,” but somehow I knew that he knew what had dragged me out of sleep and flung me into the hall in search of warmth and safety.
“Wilma’s a good sleepover friend,” I said, trying for humor over the terrible trembling in my limbs and voice.
“Wilma’s a dog,” my father said. “I’m your father and I love you and from now on I sleep in your room. Or at least in the room next to you.”
“George, do you really think—” Tatty began.
“Yes. I really think,” he said.
She fell silent.
“I’ve made a little list of things you’ll want to get done right away,” she went on finally. “Notes that simply must be written, decisions to be made about where all those checks should go, setting up the foundation, deciding about Lilly’s immediate plans, whether you’ll keep the house, hiring someone to come in and act as a companion to Lilly. I simply can’t do it with Charlotte still at home, but there will have to be someone she can go to, someone who can sort of—steer through her teen years at least until she’s at college. Things a woman should know, things only a woman can help her with.”
“No,” my father said even more strongly. “Lilly and I together will handle all those things, and if she has a companion, as you call it, it will be me. We’ll make mistakes. I’ll make enormous ones, I’m sure, but they’ll be Constable mistakes because that’s who we are: the Constables. Not that it isn’t lovely of you to think of it all, Tatty. We could never have pulled together a service and a reception so tasteful and beautiful as yesterday’s by ourselves. I don’t think we could even have ordered a pizza. Nobody who was here will ever forget it, Lilly and I most of all. If you’d just leave us the list we’ll start on it right after breakfast. Well, no, but right after Lilly’s home from school.”
“George, don’t you think it would be more seemly if she stayed home a few more days? It’s customary—”
“Her mother would want her to go to school,” my father said, and I knew he was right. I could almost hear her. “Get your behind in gear, baby, and start living
right now
. I won’t have any tiptoeing around and weeping in corners in my house.”
I smiled weakly.
“I ought to go, Aunt Tatty,” I said. “I’ve got swim team practice this afternoon.”
“Oh, the hell with swim team.” Tatty sniffed. “Don’t think I didn’t notice the black straps of that bathing suit you had under your lovely white linen dress yesterday. I can’t imagine what people thought, except that you were wearing black bikini underwear or something.”
“I didn’t notice it, Tatty, and I doubt anyone else did,” my father said. “If it makes Lilly feel better to wear her swimsuit under her clothes, I say let her do it. Isn’t that what this little conference is about? Making Lilly and me feel better?”
“Of course it is,” Tatty said, standing up and gathering up her pens and pads. “You must do what’s best for you. I just thought some guidelines—Lilly’s still a very young girl, you know. But I’ll always be here if you need to talk. I hope you’ll remember that.”
I saw that my father had offended her, and he did, too.
“Don’t think we aren’t grateful, Tatty,” he said. “I meant it when I said it was the loveliest memorial I can imagine. Elizabeth would have loved it.”
She smiled, mollified.
“You have my number,” she said, and went out of the kitchen.
My father and I looked at each other.
“You’d better get dressed if you’re serious about school,” he said.
I got up to go to my room and dress and the great terror flew at me again, almost knocking me to my knees.
“I . . . Daddy, I don’t think I can go by myself,” I whispered, clinging to the back of my chair.
He did not question me.
“Then,” he said, rising himself, “I’ll take you. And I’ll pick you up and bring you home, too.”
When he stopped the car in front of the Cathedral School, I found that I could not seem to get out. I sat studying the small surf of girls surging into the school, the new green trees, the flowers and shrubs rioting in borders. Then I turned to my father.
“I don’t know what to say to anybody,” I said.
“Well, they’ll probably just say they’re very sorry about your mother, and you smile and say thank you.”
All of a sudden I was angry, at him and all the faceless students of the National Cathedral School and at myself for being frightened and at my mother for dying and putting me through all this.
“I don’t see why I have to smile,” I muttered, glaring at him. “They
should
be sorry.”
“It’s the right thing to do, Lilly,” he said, rather crisply, and I knew he was angry too, though most likely not at me. At my mother? But that was impossible.
“Okay,” I said, dropping my eyes. “I’ll see you back home.”
“No. I’m picking you up, remember?”
“You don’t have to do that! Almost everybody takes the bus—”
“I don’t care about almost everybody,” he said. “I’ll see you after school.”
“I have swim team practice—”
“Then I’ll watch you practice. I’ve never done that, have I?”
“Daddy, nobody’s father watches swim practice,” I said desperately.
“Then maybe I’ll start a new trend.”
When I walked out onto the pool apron from the dressing room that afternoon, there he sat, halfway up the metal bleachers, his hat on his knees and his briefcase at his feet. He saw me and smiled and waved. The other team members and our coach looked at me, then at him and then back at me, but no one said anything. The whole school, that day, was tiptoeing around the girl whose famous (well, almost) mother had just died of cancer. I turned to the team and we took our marks and waited for the whistle. When it came, I dived deep, so grateful for the cooling, chemical blue water that I could have stayed there forever. It was not until practice was over and the swimmers were scattering that I looked up again. He was still there, smiling. He made a little circle with his thumb and forefinger. All of a sudden I was smashed by a wave of love for him; almost drowned in it. My person. He was there for me. With him I would be safe.