The Beginning of After (2 page)

Chapter Two

M
y cell phone rang an hour later, just as I was finishing my French homework at the kitchen table.

“Can you talk?” whispered my best friend, Megan Dill, who lived one street over.

“Yeah, I came back early and nobody’s here. Sweet freedom.”

“How was it?” she asked.

“Awkward but survivable. David barely talked to anyone during the whole dinner.”

“He’s such a freak.”

I heard meowing and turned around to see our cats, Elliot and Selina, sitting anxiously at the back door, waiting to go outside.

“I know,” I said, getting up. “It’s like, once he decided to be friends with the Railroads, they gave him an instruction manual. Rule one, be grumpy and brooding at all times.”

I opened the door and the cats scrambled past my legs, apparently late for some appointment in the woods across the street. Elliot paused for a second to look back at me with half-closed “Don’t wait up” eyes, and then they were gone.

“Rule two,” continued Meg, “you may only smoke Marlboro Reds, wear high-top sneakers, and carry all combs in your right back pocket. They’re such a joke. They want to be rebels, but they’re obsessed with fitting in with each other just like anyone else.”

“You’re the one who had a crush him,” I said, noticing a pot roast glob on the kitchen counter. I wiped it with my thumb and sucked the sauce off, knowing how completely gross that was.

“Like a hundred years ago, when he was still partially human.”
He’s alterna-hot
, Meg used to say. I preferred not to go there at all with David; I’d known him for too long, and it was weird to think some girls considered him good-looking.

“Speaking of guys, how is Will these days?” I asked, ready to change the subject.

“I think it’s safe to say he’s not going to ask me to the prom.”

“Why not?”

“Apparently he started going out with Georgia Marinese last week.”

“Oh, Meg, I’m sorry.”

“Eh, it’s kind of a relief that he doesn’t like me anymore. I would have gone to the prom with him just to go, you know.”

“You can do better.”

“We’ll both do better.”

The prom was more than a month away but the frenzy was already building, and I wasn’t sure I wanted any part of it. As juniors we were eligible to go, but there was nobody I liked enough. There had never been anybody I liked enough. Meg was the one who clicked with every boy she ever met, with her easy wit and striking black Irish beauty. I was the runner-up version of her; the quieter brunette with straight, thin hair that could only sometimes inspire a ponytail or braid.

As a pair, we were not popular but not outcasts. Not gorgeous but not ugly, not fat but not thin. I was best known for getting As, starting the Tutoring Club, and painting scenery for the drama productions. Meg was in the show choir, and while she never got the lead in plays and musicals, she usually nabbed a juicy supporting role. Mostly people just didn’t think about us, which Mom always said was a good thing, but I never got why.

“If we don’t do better,” Meg added, “we won’t go at all.”

Good
, I thought.
That would make my life easier.

Suddenly, I heard something near the front of the house.

“Meg, hang on,” I said. “I think someone’s at the door.”

We sat silent for a few seconds, and I could hear my breathing sync up with Meg’s on the other end of the line.

There it was again, two short knocks. Insistent. But I wasn’t supposed to answer the door if I was the only one home.

“I’m walking you into the living room,” I said to Meg, shifting the phone to my other ear. “If it’s an ax murderer, you’ll be able to hear the whole thing.”

There was a big window adjacent to our front door, and I slowly drew aside the curtain, just a few inches, to see who it was.

A police officer, holding his hat in his hands, looking down at his feet.

That was it. The end of Before, and the beginning of After.

Now I had a new mental image for
unyoke
.

There weren’t many details about the accident for Lieutenant Roy Davis to explain to me. Things were said and things were asked, and suddenly I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, pushed down there by the weight of new information.

My mother, father, and someone they assumed was my brother had been pronounced dead on arrival at Phillips Memorial Hospital.

So had Mrs. Kaufman.

Mr. Kaufman was in the emergency room. Not dead on arrival. More like pretty seriously messed up on arrival.

Somehow, the new SUV had gone off the road, tumbled into a steep ditch, and caught fire. They didn’t know how, and they didn’t know why.

These were simply facts with nowhere to go. Leaves fallen on the water, floating in clumps, too light to break the surface.

And now, things just stopped, hard. Like the air; I couldn’t feel it moving around me anymore. Or my ability to swallow; I was sure that if I tried it, my throat would freeze up and get stuck like that forever. It was as if I was suddenly sealed up in a bubble where everything was completely and totally wrong, wrong, wrong and I had to get out.

How do I get out? Can I take one big step and be on the other side of it? Maybe if I say something,
anything
, the whole thing will just POP.

So I blurted the first thing that came to mind: “What should I do now?”

Lieutenant Davis started to answer but stopped himself, biting his lip. Then I realized the scale of my question.

“I mean, do I need to go to a morgue or someplace?” I said. “Do I need to sign something?”

His face softened into a real sadness. “We do need someone to identify the . . . them . . . but it doesn’t have to be you. Is there a relative you’d like us to contact?”

Nana. I thought of her getting home from dinner at her friend Sylvia’s house. Combing the hairspray out of her hair, wiping the Clinique off her lips. There was no way I was making that phone call.

I gave Lieutenant Davis my grandmother’s number and handed him the phone.

An hour later, I lay on the white couch in the living room, the one we used only when guests came over, with my head in Meg’s lap. Mrs. Dill, Meg’s mom, sat on the floor holding one of my hands. Theirs was the second number I had given Lieutenant Davis. Mr. Dill and Megan’s sister, Mary, were on their way north, a three-hour drive, to get my grandmother.

“Just close your eyes and breathe,” said Mrs. Dill. “Just breathe.”

All I could think was,
Mrs. Dill smells a little like cranberry bread
.

Suzie Sirico showed up shortly after midnight. I hadn’t asked for her. I didn’t even know who she was. Lieutenant Davis said she was a grief counselor who sometimes worked with the police department. I tilted my head in Meg’s lap and looked at the woman sideways. She was short, with large features.

“Hi, Laurel,” she said slowly. “I’m Suzie.”

Mrs. Dill got up from the floor. “Can I get you some coffee?” she offered.

“That would be wonderful, thanks.”

They passed each other right then, switching positions like some careful team maneuver. Suzie squatted on the floor so we were at eye level.

“I know we’ve never met,” said Suzie, pressing her lips together with seriousness, “but I’m hoping you’ll let me help you with whatever you need right now.”

“There is something you can help me with right now,” I told her. “The cats are probably at the back door. Can you let them in?”

Suzie Sirico cocked her head to one side and raised an eyebrow. Probably making a note on a mental pad. I didn’t care.

“I’ll do it,” said Meg, and a second later she was gone into the kitchen.

If this woman touches me
, I thought,
I will barf right here on the white couch
.

“Laurel, you’re clearly in shock, and that’s normal,” said Suzie, reaching for my hand but trying to balance in that squat position at the same time. “We don’t need to talk. I’m really just here to meet you and let you know that I’ll be available to you, for any reason, over the next days and weeks as you deal with what has happened to your family.”

My family.

The word hit me in the chest, a real punch that knocked the wind out of my lungs. I looked at Suzie Sirico the way, in a movie, someone looks at the person who just stabbed them, that moment of surprise before the pain kicks in and the blood starts gushing.

I heard the back door open, then close. Elliot and Selina came running into the room, their tails pointing straight up into the air, ready to get warm and dry and curled up for the night.

I made a noise like a whimper, but loud. It felt like it came not from me but something half-human, crouched at the base of my spine.

I was in bed when Nana got there, sometime before dawn. Mrs. Dill had given me two of the pills she always had on hand for her panic attacks. The medication was having fun with me, making me believe one thing was real, then another. In my mind, I was talking to someone at the Athens Theater ticket counter, begging them to let me in even though the movie had already started. “But everyone I know is in there!” I was yelling.

I felt my grandmother put her hand on my head, smoothing my eyebrow with her thumb. “I’m here, Laurel,” she was saying.

Now the popcorn machine behind the ticket counter smelled like Chanel No. 5.

The hallway outside my bedroom door was buzzing slightly with echoed voices from the living room. Somebody blew their nose.

Back inside my head, I wasn’t trying to get into the movie anymore. I’d given up and moved on, wandering down the street toward a supermarket, suddenly starving.

Chapter Three

P
retty much everyone came to the funeral, which was held on a day so beautiful, normally everyone would be walking around saying cliché stuff like, “Spring has sprung!” The air smelled fresh and sweet, and the slight breeze was the kind that tickles a little.

Our whole neighborhood showed up. Relatives I hadn’t seen in years, and my parents’ friends from college, and people from my dad’s office. Toby’s friends and his whole soccer team came with their parents, and all his teachers. Two of them had been my teachers too, just a few years back. Some kids from school who I was friendly with and their families, plus dozens of people I either didn’t know or couldn’t remember the names of. It was standing room only in the funeral home.

Nana and I sat up front, where almost nobody could see us, and she held my hand tight while people spoke. I knew I was supposed to listen and nod and cry like everyone else, but I was busy composing a letter in my head:

At the burial, Nana sprinkled dirt into the graves with her hands shaking, walking gingerly around them like a garden she’d just planted. The rabbi offered me the shovel, but I shook my head no.

That was when I saw David.

He was hanging back, hovering near some stranger’s headstone, wearing a black blazer over a black T-shirt and black jeans. People kept turning around to look at him and whisper. Almost gawking, like some rock star had made an appearance at my family’s funeral. But he didn’t look back at them. He just watched the three caskets intently and ignored anyone who was alive.

Earlier, I’d heard someone say that they were leaving the tent up and just moving it down the hill a bit, because Mrs. Kaufman’s funeral was the next day.

When it was time for us to stand up and leave, I glanced back to where I’d seen David, but he was gone.

Mr. Kaufman was in a coma. He was in ICU, and the hospital was making a very special exception by letting David stay there in an empty room.

That’s what I heard at the reception back at the house. I was planted in a chair in the den, a great spot for hearing snippets of conversation as they floated by me. Megan sat next to me, eating a sesame bagel, not talking but occasionally rubbing my back.

Some people came to me. They’d lean in to talk closer to my ear or squat down so they were looking up at my face. At times I felt like a queen on her throne, and at others like a four-year-old kid. I knew they were just trying to be nice, the neighbors and friends and classmates and all the rest. They were just doing what they thought they were supposed to, which was exactly what I was doing too.

I was in the bathroom when I heard Mrs. Dill and the Dills’ next-door neighbor, Mrs. Franco, talking in low tones on the other side of the door.

“Do they know anything more about what happened?” asked Mrs. Franco.

“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Dill. “They might be putting out a call for witnesses, to see if other drivers may have seen something.”

“What do
you
think it was?”

A pause. I sat still on the toilet, leaning in.

“Probably Gabe,” whispered Mrs. Dill. “I bet he had a little too much to drink at dinner. Don’t you remember the Christmas party last year?”

“I remember,” said Mrs. Franco sadly. “Betsy had to force him to let her drive them home.”

I thought of Mr. Kaufman on his cell phone that night, with his drink in his hands. And then I thought of wrapping my fingers around his throat and squeezing hard, which was not something I wanted to be thinking in the bathroom at my family’s funeral with a house full of people on the other side of the door. I wiped the image away, out of my head with a mental eraser.

I waited three minutes and then peeked my head out of the bathroom. Mrs. Franco and Mrs. Dill were gone, and the coast was clear.

My grandmother, June Meisner, had class. Everyone said so. She wore crisp linen skirt-suits and well-made pumps and never left the house without makeup. She got her hair done twice a week at Marcella’s Salon and kept it dyed dark brown. Nana volunteered at a local nursing home filled with what she called her “old ladies,” even though many of them were younger than she was.

I guess it was because she had so much class that she made me get back into my mother’s black dress and go to Mrs. Kaufman’s funeral the next day.

Nana looked so small in the big, boxy driver’s seat of our Volvo station wagon, her hands correctly positioned at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, her nails perfectly manicured. As we drove to the cemetery she turned to look at me, her eyes still red from the crying she did at night when she thought I couldn’t hear her.

“I thank God every hour that you weren’t in that car.”

I pressed my nose to the window, not able to look back. “Nana, don’t.”

“You know me. I like to count the blessings I have.”

“If you need to thank something, thank all the French homework Mrs. Messing gave us.” I looked at my grandmother now, to let her know I wasn’t just being a smart-ass.

“What if you’d gone with them and I’d lost all of you?”

“I’m not having this conversation.”

She and my mom were experts at this tactic: Bring up serious stuff when driving in the car, so the child you are mortifying with your particular conversation has nowhere to go, no bedroom to retreat into; they were stuck.

I didn’t want to tell her the truth, something that sat red-hot in the pit of my stomach and weighed me down, heavier each day. If I’d gone with them, if I had maybe finished my homework earlier or just blown it off to do in the morning, it would have been one more person to try to squeeze into the Kaufmans’ SUV. Maybe my dad would have insisted on taking separate cars. Maybe I’d be driving with my parents and Toby right now, to bury Mrs. Kaufman. One funeral, one person, the way everyone’s used to doing it.

I couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t think about it. If I did, I felt that fireball again, dragging me that much farther into the ground. It seemed like the only way to keep breathing was to focus on the here and now, moment by moment, keeping my mind frozen cold to anything else.

Mrs. Kaufman didn’t have quite the same turnout my family had, and those who went both days were looking a little more haggard at having to do the whole thing over again. I found myself glad that they’d done my family first, while people were still fresh to their grief. Even the rabbi seemed weary. It made me happy, for a second, and not ashamed about it.
Our funeral was better.

David wore the emo-goth outfit I’d seen the day before, and this time I noticed his black army boots. He was surrounded by relatives. His grandparents were staying at the house, I heard from one whisper. They were encouraging him to come back from the hospital and sleep in his own bed, but David wouldn’t do it.

I watched him as the rabbi gave the cue, and David stood up to throw the first bit of dirt on his mother’s grave. As he did this, someone in the crowd burst out with a sharp sob. David looked up for a moment, the shovel in his hands, to see where it had come from. It was the first time that day I’d seen his face full-on, unshrouded by his shaggy hair now combed back, his bright eyes moving. He kept scanning the guests as the rabbi started talking again and an uncle put an arm around his shoulders.

Those eyes landed on me, flickering with some kind of new energy and purpose. David raised his head a little more now, really registering me with an acknowledgment. I looked back, held his gaze for a few moments, but that was all.

It felt like enough.