Everyone laughed and before they realigned into their more closed selves—this being together so hard for them even if it was
what they all had wanted—Samuel came into the room along with Grandma Lynn. She held a tray of champagne flutes ready to be
filled. He glanced at Lindsey briefly.
“Lynn is going to assist me by pouring,” he said.
“Something she’s quite good at,” my mother said.
“Abigail?” Grandma Lynn said.
“Yes?”
“It’s nice to see you too.”
“Go ahead, Samuel,” my father said.
“I wanted to say that I’m happy to be here with you all.”
But Hal knew his brother. “You’re not done, wordsmith. Buck, give him some brush.” This time Hal let Buckley do it without
assistance, and my brother backed Samuel up.
“I wanted to say that I’m glad that Mrs. Salmon is home, and that Mr. Salmon is home too, and that I’m honored to be marrying
their beautiful daughter.”
“Hear! Hear!” my father said.
My mother stood to hold the tray for Grandma Lynn, and together they distributed the glasses across the room.
As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then,
I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost,
but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without
me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time
in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone.
With the promise that Hal would teach him to do drum rolls after dinner, Buckley put up his brush and drumsticks, and the
seven of them began to trail through the kitchen into the dining room, where Samuel and Grandma Lynn had used the good plates
to serve her trademark Stouffer’s frozen ziti and Sara Lee frozen cheesecake.
“Someone’s outside,” Hal said, spotting a man through the window. “It’s Ray Singh!”
“Let him in,” my mother said.
“He’s leaving.”
All of them save my father and grandmother, who stayed together in the dining room, began to go after him.
“Hey, Ray!” Hal said, opening the door and nearly stepping directly in the pie. “Wait up!”
Ray turned. His mother was in the car with the engine running.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ray said now to Hal. Lindsey and Samuel and Buckley and a woman he recognized as Mrs. Salmon
were all crowded together on the porch.
“Is that Ruana?” my mother called. “Please ask her in.”
“Really, that’s fine,” Ray said and made no move to come closer. He wondered,
Is Susie watching this?
Lindsey and Samuel broke away from the group and came toward him.
By that time my mother had walked down the front path to the driveway and was leaning in the car window talking to Ruana.
Ray glanced at his mother as she opened the car door to go inside the house. “Anything but pie for the two of us,” she said
to my mother as they walked up the path.
“Is Dr. Singh working?” my mother asked.
“As usual,” Ruana said. She watched to see Ray walking, with Lindsey and Samuel, through the door of the house. “Will you
come smoke stinky cigarettes with me again?”
“It’s a date,” my mother said.
“Ray, welcome, sit,” my father said when he saw him coming through the living room. He had a special place in his heart for
the boy who had loved his daughter, but Buckley swooped into the chair next to my father before anyone else could get to him.
Lindsey and Samuel found two straight chairs from the living room and brought them in to sit by the sideboard. Ruana sat between
Grandma Lynn and my mother and Hal sat alone on one end.
I realized then that they would not know when I was gone, just as they could not know sometimes how heavily I had hovered
in a particular room. Buckley had talked to me and I had talked back. Even if I hadn’t thought I’d been talking to him, I
had. I became manifest in whatever way they wanted me to be.
And there she was again, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She
would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl
haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death,
was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.
* * *
It was late in Ruana and Ray’s visit when Samuel started talking about the gothic revival house that Lindsey and he had found
along an overgrown section of Route 30. As he told Abigail about it in detail, describing how he had realized he wanted to
propose to Lindsey and live there with her, Ray found himself asking, “Does it have a big hole in the ceiling of the back
room and cool windows above the front door?”
“Yes,” Samuel said, as my father grew alarmed. “But it can be fixed, Mr. Salmon. I’m sure of it.”
“Ruth’s dad owns that,” Ray said.
Everyone was quiet for a moment and then Ray continued.
“He took out a loan on his business to buy up old places that aren’t already slated for destruction. He wants to restore them,”
Ray said.
“My God,” Samuel said.
And I was gone.
Y
ou don’t notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You’re not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper
or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one
notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an
unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint
juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She’ll be here in her own sweet time, I’m sure.
If I’m to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can’t help it, and sometimes they still think
of me. They can’t help it.
After Lindsey and Samuel got married they sat in the empty house on Route 30 and drank champagne. The branches of the overgrown
trees had grown into the upstairs windows, and they huddled beneath them, knowing the branches would have to be cut. Ruth’s
father had promised he would sell the house to them only if Samuel paid him in labor as his first employee in a restoration
business. By the end of that summer, Mr. Connors had cleared the lot with the help of Samuel and Buckley and set up a trailer,
which during the day would be his work quarters and at night could be Lindsey’s study room.
In the beginning it was uncomfortable, the lack of plumbing and electricity, and having to go home to either one of their
parents’ houses to take showers, but Lindsey buried herself in school work and Samuel buried himself in tracking down the
right era doorknobs and light pulls. It was a surprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant.
“I thought you looked fatter,” Buck said, smiling.
“You’re one to talk,” Lindsey said.
My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness
and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not
about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn’t about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley’s garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of
plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was
what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back—at the twists
life took.
And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Good Will, along with Grandma Lynn’s things.
They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of
their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums.
Ray became Dr. Singh, “the real doctor in the family,” as Ruana liked to say. And he had more and more moments that he chose
not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white,
he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes,
that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me.
If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who had graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side.
Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone
to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh
with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.
Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and
grand. The word my grandfather uses is
comfort.
So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet
room where you can go and hold someone’s hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live
at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves,
wild roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in
your small-heaven dreams.
* * *
One afternoon I was scanning Earth with my grandfather. We were watching birds skip from top to top of the very tallest pines
in Maine and feeling the bird’s sensations as they landed then took flight then landed again. We ended up in Manchester, visiting
a diner my grandfather remembered from his days traveling up and down the East Coast on business. It had gotten seedier in
the fifty intervening years and after taking stock we left. But in the instant I turned away, I saw him: Mr. Harvey coming
out of the doors of a Greyhound bus.
He went into the diner and ordered a cup of coffee at the counter. To the uninitiated, he still looked every bit as ordinary
as he could, except around the eyes, but he no longer wore his contacts and no one took the time to look past his thick lenses
anymore.
As an older waitress passed him a Styrofoam cup full of boiling coffee, he heard a bell over the door behind him tinkle and
felt a cold blast of air.
It was a teenage girl who had sat a few rows ahead of him for the last few hours, playing her Walkman and humming along with
the songs. He sat at the counter until she was done using the bathroom, and then he followed her out.
I watched him trail her in the dirty snow along the side of the diner and out to the back of the bus station, where she would
be out of the wind for a smoke. While she stood there, he joined her. She wasn’t even startled. He was another boring old
man in bad clothes.
He calculated his business in his mind. The snow and cold. The pitched ravine that dropped off immediately in front of them.
The blind woods on the other side. And he engaged her in conversation.
“Long ride,” he said.
She looked at him at first as if she couldn’t believe he was talking to her.
“Um hmmm,” she said.
“Are you traveling alone?”
It was then that I noticed them, hanging above their heads in a long and plentiful row. Icicles.
The girl put out her cigarette on the heel of her shoe and turned to go.
“Creep,” she said, and walked fast.
A moment later, the icicle fell. The heavy coldness of it threw him off balance just enough for him to stumble and pitch forward.
It would be weeks before the snow in the ravine melted enough to uncover him.
But now let me tell you about someone special:
Out in her yard, Lindsey made a garden. I watched her weed the long thick flower bed. Her fingers twisted inside the gloves
as she thought about the clients she saw in her practice each day—how to help them make sense of the cards life had dealt
them, how to ease their pain. I remembered that the simplest things were the ones that often eluded what I thought of as her
big brain. It took her forever to figure out that I always volunteered to clip the grass inside the fence so I could play with
Holiday while we did yard work. She remembered Holiday then, and I followed her thoughts. How in a few years it would be time
to get her child a dog, once the house was settled and fenced-in. Then she thought about how there were now machines with
whipcords that could trim a fence post to post in minutes—what it had taken us hours of grumbling to achieve.
Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen
years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey,
left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.
* * *
And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.
“Look what I found at the old industrial park,” he said. “A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They’re
afraid of more sinkholes like that one that swallowed the cars.”
His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble.
He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass.