The Funeral Singer (2 page)

Mick’s urn was being buried in the cemetery’s cremation garden. On my way up the hill toward the garden, I stopped at a fresh grave, Louella Martinson’s. I’d sung at her funeral two weeks ago. Her pink granite headstone was shaped like a heart.

Louella May Martinson

Beloved Wife, Mother and Grandmother

Seriously? That was all they had to say about her? I saw this all the time—people whose entire lives were defined by their relationships to other people. Hadn’t poor Louella done a single thing she could call her own? Nothing at all worth noting, worth remembering?

Lana appeared next to me. “Did you know her?”

I shook my head. “No, and with an epitaph like that I guess I never will. No one ever will.” I looked up at her. “Can I put you in charge of my memorial site when I die?”

“What?”

“My website. I want videos of me singing, and interviews of my family and friends talking about how much they miss me, and an obituary listing all of my life’s achievements, and—”

“Let’s not talk about this right now, okay?” Lana grabbed my arm and led me up the hill. “I swear, you are the only girl I know who spends more time fantasizing about her funeral than her wedding. It’s like you can’t wait to die. Anyway, who knows? By then, the web could be totally passé. There could be some whole new technology.”

I stopped and gasped. “Holograms!”

“Holograms?”

“Yeah. What if you could push a button and the person appeared in front of you? Imagine me singing ‘In the Arms of the Angel,’ or maybe ‘Keep Me in Your Heart.’ How cool would that be?”

“Cool? No. Creepy? Very.”

Lana was half right. I did spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about my own funeral, but it wasn’t because I wanted to die. In fact, just the opposite. I wanted to create something that would live forever.

I’d seen so many services where people had nothing remotely interesting to say about the deceased. Like poor Louella back there. Like most of the people under our feet, in fact. Not me. I was determined to be remembered, and not just as someone else’s “loving fill-in-the-blank.” No, sir. Melanie Martin was going to leave an impression, make a real mark.

***

The crowd at Mick’s gravesite was thick, but we weaved our way through it toward the front. Two girls in stilettos were posing for a photo next to the grave opening, but it had been a rainy March, and their heels kept sinking into the mud.

“This is disgusting,” one said as she grasped her friend’s arm for balance. Her friend squealed as they both nearly toppled over.

Mick’s grandmother sat nearby clutching a bouquet of red roses—twenty-one of them, one for each year of his life. I looked around for the band, but they were nowhere to be seen. According to the program, they were supposed to perform one more song as the urn vault was lowered into the ground, an acoustic tune Bruno was rumored to have written the night Mick OD’ed called “Into the Void.” The lyrics were printed on the back of the program.

Too much hate. Too much fear.

You say it’s a new day

But I can’t hear.

I’m falling, crawling

Into the void.

I’m falling, crawling

Falling.

Dad read a few verses from Psalm 23 and signaled a pair of cemetery workers to step forward. Dad’s eyes searched the crowd, and he turned to my mom. “Where’s Bruno? Where’s the band?”

Mom shook her head. “I haven’t seen them.”

“Their car pulled in ahead of mine. I know they’re here somewhere.”

Mick’s grandmother stepped forward and stared at my dad expectantly.

“We can’t keep her waiting,” he muttered. “We’ll need to go ahead without the music.” He nodded to the cemetery workers. As the vault slowly descended, Mick’s grandmother dropped the roses onto it, one by one.

The Stiletto Chicks stood a few feet behind her, scrolling through their photos and giggling. Next to me, a cell phone rang, and a guy answered, practically shouting into it, “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” A group of guys halfway down the hill cracked open a cooler and began passing around beers.

Meanwhile, Mick’s grandmother stood tiny and alone, the bouquet growing smaller and smaller.

This was all wrong. Mick’s “Celebration of Life” had been perfect for me and the rest of his fans, but what about her? The whole service was so loud, so irreverent, so …
untraditional.

I stepped up onto the small stage and approached the mic. The crowd stretched out as far as I could see. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands. My legs shook so bad I thought I might collapse, and I grabbed the mic stand to steady myself. Everything suddenly seemed to grow still. I glanced over at my father, who gave me a questioning look but then offered a slow, solemn nod. I took a deep breath and began to sing.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

The nerves melted away. The song was easy, comfortable, and I slipped into it as though it were an old t-shirt. As I sang, a couple toward the back held their hands in the air and started swaying together, and soon all the people around them joined in, and the swaying spread and spread until it seemed as though the whole cemetery was one big wave of arms and bodies. A weird tingling spread through my chest. This was nothing like being perched up in the chapel balcony.

For the final verse, I turned toward Mick’s grandmother as she dropped the last of the roses. Instead of belting it out as I usually did, I brought it down and kept it
pianissimo
, soft.

When we've been here ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,

We've no less days to sing God's praise than when we’d first begun.

As the last flower fell, the old woman straightened and turned toward me, her eyes brimming with tears. For a moment it was just the two of us. Everyone else faded into the scenery, like so many tombstones and trees. I watched as the first tear fell to her cheek, and then, just as quickly, the moment ended.

The crowd erupted in hoots and applause. Startled, I glanced over at Lana, who smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

Dad placed his hand on my back. “That was lovely, Mel,” he said. “Thank you.”

I made my way over to Lana, who gave me a huge hug. “That was so cool,” she said. I felt her body tense. “Uh, oh. Incoming.”

I turned and followed her gaze.

Oh, no. Mick’s grandmother was walking toward us.

I braced myself. What had I done? I had no business locking eyes with her like that, not out here with no balcony railing to separate us, no side door for me to escape through.

My chest grew tight, and I heard a tinny ringing in my ears as she drew closer. I tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t. Oh, please, God. Not again. Don’t let me pass out in front of all these people. I bit my lip, hard. As long as I could feel pain, at least knew I was conscious.

I grabbed Lana’s hand and squeezed. This was it. I’d broken my own rule and now I was about to pay. Only just before Mrs. Nolan reached me, my mother stepped between us. “Excuse me, Ruth, I wanted to remind you that Martin’s service doesn’t end at the cemetery. Please know that I am available if you ever want to talk.” Mercifully, the elderly woman stopped and gave my mom a long hug.

Lana and I exchanged a glance and then set off through the crowd toward the parking lot. The hearse had tinted windows. If we could make it there without Mick’s grandmother spotting us, we could hide in it.

As we ran down the hill and past the cemetery office, Andrea Little from Channel 4 came skittering toward us. “Excuse me, dear. I need to get your name.”

When neither of us answered, she called after us. “You, with the black dress. What’s your name?”

“Melanie,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Melanie Martin.”

I didn’t know why she wanted my name, and at that moment, I didn’t care. All I wanted was to get into the hearse and away from the crowd.

Finally I made it to the car, but as I reached for the door, my left heel snapped. Shoot. These shoes were practically new. I reached down and slipped them off, struggling briefly with the straps. As I straightened, something on the other side of the cemetery caught my eye. There, barely visible through the trees, was a sleek black limo with shiny chrome wheels.

CHAPTER THREE

“Well, if it isn’t Melody.” Pete Sanderson peered at me over his sheet music as I walked into chorus Monday afternoon.

“Very funny.” I climbed onto the stool next to him. “At least I know you’re kidding. I’m pretty sure most of these kids think that’s really my name.”

“The power of YouTube,” Pete said.

Over the weekend, Channel 4 had run an eight-second clip of me singing as part of their coverage of Mick’s funeral, and by now it seemed as though half the school had seen it. The good news: The sunlight hit me just right, so you could totally see the highlights in my dark brown hair. The bad news: They screwed up my name.

“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “Hannah Massey even called me Melody. I mean, really? After sitting behind me in homeroom for three years, she hasn’t picked up on the fact that my name is Melanie?”

Pete shrugged. “Yeah, well, Hannah Massey isn’t exactly in the running for class valedictorian.”

That was true. Hannah got by on her Homecoming-princess face, hair and body.

“So why didn’t you come to the funeral?” I asked. “It was nice. And huge. The most people we’ve ever had.” I pulled out my phone and showed him a shot of the crowd from the balcony. “The place was packed.”

I scrolled to the next photo, a full shot of Lana in her miniskirt, and a blush crossed Pete’s red-freckled face. I smiled. Pete was tall and skinny, with light reddish-brown hair sticking out at odd angles. He tended to be awkward and nervous around girls, but especially around Lana. The two of them were my best friends in the world, they would make an awesome couple, and they would probably never hook up. Lana was into the bad-boy type. And while Pete was funny, smart, and had a tenor voice that could melt a polar icecap, he was not bad. At all.

I found a shot of the band and pointed out Mick’s keyboard, front and center with the urn on top. “You should have heard ‘Altogether Blue,’” I said. “Gave me the chills. Gave everyone the chills. You know that part toward the end where it goes, ‘Altogether you, altogether new, when the haze clears away, it’s—”

I stopped. Pete’s face was a total blank.

“You don’t know ‘Altogether Blue’?”

He shook his head.

I sighed. “Well, they played ‘Medium Well,’ too. At the very end.”

Still blank.

“No way.” I said. “You don’t know ‘Medium Well’? I thought everyone and his grandmother knew that song.”

Then again, if there were one person in the world who wouldn’t know it, it would be Pete. Unless it was classical, jazz, or maybe some obscure indie jam band, he wasn’t interested.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know ‘Medium Well’ or any other Slime songs.”

“Grime,” I corrected him.

“Slime, Grime, whatever. Why do you and Lana go so crazy over these pop bands?”

“The Grime isn’t just a pop band. They’re talented musicians. Artists. Plus, they’re really hot.”

Pete laughed. “Finally, the truth. So how did you end up singing? I thought you’d said the band was taking care of all the music for the service.”

I shrugged. “Must have been some kind of mix up, because they never showed up at the grave site.” I didn’t tell him about seeing the limo in the cemetery. I hadn’t told anyone about that. Not my dad. Not even Lana. “Anyway, it was … crazy. And kind of cool.” I closed my eyes and remembered the feeling I’d had as the crowd swayed before me, everyone caught up in the song and the moment.

“Hey, Mel, cool vid.” Sophomore Sadie Landon interrupted my reverie. Her eyeliner was painted on so thick she looked like a perpetually surprised lemur. “I especially liked that old mausoleum in the background. The one with the cracked stone near the top. Very Buffy.”

“Um. Thanks.” It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. Most kids at Edison thought of me as a bit of a freak. They were wary of me, as though my very presence might bring on their untimely demise. But then there were the Sadie Landons of the school—goths, emos and vampire wannabes who thought it would be cool to live in a funeral home. I hated to break it to them, but death wasn’t some sort of romantic fantasy. It was real, it was permanent and it usually wasn’t pretty.

“Yeah, look who’s a big star,” chimed in Maria Lopez, our lead soprano. “Miss ‘I Sing for Dead People.’” A few of Maria’s protégés tittered.

To my relief, our chorus instructor, Ms. Jensen, breezed into the room at that moment, fingers snapping. “Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. All State is in six weeks and we have a long way to go to get ready.”

As I scurried over to the alto section, a nervous tension filled the air. Ms. Jensen was going to announce the solos today. I’d auditioned to sing “The New Moon,” a choral adaptation of a Sara Teasdale poem about a woman who was near despair but who salvaged a feeling of hope when she saw the sliver of a new moon in the sky. The song had a timeless, ethereal quality.

Ms. Jensen stood at the front of the room sorting through a thick stack of papers. If she was trying to build the suspense, it was working. Finally, she looked up and smiled. “This week’s tryouts were impressive. I had some difficult decisions to make, but I have selected two students for solos.”

Only two? I held my breath.

“Pete Sanderson will perform a full solo: Josh Groban’s ‘Awake.’”

No surprise there. Pete was our best shot at winning All State.

After what had to be the longest pause known to mankind, Ms. Jensen turned toward me. “And Melanie Martin, you will sing a partial solo, from the third verse of ‘The New Moon.’” She picked up a sheet and read: “A wisp of beauty all alone / In a world as hard and gray as stone.”

I forced a smile. Two lines? That was it? I’d had a full solo at last year’s All State. Even as a freshman I’d sung a whole verse. I looked down at my hands. I should be grateful. After all, I was the only girl with a solo. Still, somehow this felt like a demotion.