Wake (83 page)

“G’night.”

Then I remember that I meant to ask him something. I stop on the lowest stair and turn back to the living room. “I’m signing out of my afternoon classes tomorrow. Just letting you know.”

“What for?”

“Personal reasons.”

“What for?” Frank repeats in a slower voice, like I’m an idiot.

“A funeral.”

The way Frank looks at me, I’m sure he’s going to say no. “Whose?” he asks.

“Her name’s Meira.” I tell him that I knew her from my volunteer work at the hospital, since Frank is hostile to all things associated with Jem.

“I don’t think you should miss school.”

“This is important to me.”

“So is your education.”

I smile. “Dude, I don’t need your permission to leave school.”

Frank grumbles under his breath, which is the closest thing I’m going to get to agreement.

“Do you miss him? Is that why you’re grumpy?”

Frank gives me a crusty look. “Get some sleep, Will .”

Tuesday It’s not so hard to find something appropriate to wear to the funeral. My closet is wall-to-wall black and grey. Today is different, though, because I walk out of the house without a pair of gloves on. It feels strange and I debate he decision all the way to my car, but by the time I pull onto the road I’ve decided that there’s no going back. Cal it a misguided show of solidarity.

I get questions about the deep scar on my hand all day, but it isn’t until lunch hour that Elwood sees the mark. He gives me a probing look and asks how I hurt my hand.

I extend my left hand toward him with only one finger raised. “None of your business. Just thought I’d show it off before you decided my gloves needed to be ripped off of me.”

Elwood looks like he wants to choke me. “It was a joke.”

“And it was as funny as cancer,” I agree.

*

Elise is going to Meira’s funeral, but Eric declines. Mrs. Harper picks Elise and I up from school after lunch. I lean across the back seat to hug Jem and find that he smells strongly of mint. I don’t want to know what his stomach has been up to today.

“You okay?” I ask. He looks like he hasn’t slept well.

“Sit in the middle seat?” he whispers. I buckle into that narrow space that can hardly be called a seat so that we can be close. Jem lays his head against mine and I encourage him to sleep a little on the drive.

“I’m not tired,” he lies.

“Suit yourself.” I take his hand off my knee and try to relax him with a massage. It worked when he was upset about Emily’s visit. The tension gradually leaves him as I work my thumbs along his palm and stroke the sensitive skin between each finger. I try to avoid tugging on the scars around his knuckles as I rotate his fingers, which seem so long compared to mine. He has the nails of a cell ist.

Jem leans on me more and I look up, expecting to find him angling in for a kiss, but he isn’t. He feels heavier only because he’s inert with sleep. Ivy looks at us in the rearview and smiles privately.

“He didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Nightmares,” Elise adds.

I hate to wake him up when we get to the church, but attending his friend’s funeral is important to him.

“Do you think this is a bad idea?” he says quietly as we head toward the church.

“Why would it be?”

“Her family.” He swallows nervously. “We were in treatment together. She died…and I didn’t.” He’s worried they’ll resent him for surviving. I squeeze his hand and tell him not to worry.

“It’ll mean something that you came to pay your respects.”

Meira’s visitation and funeral are being held back-to-back at the Lutheran church. She’s laid out at the front of the altar, surrounded by flower arrangements, with mourners filing past her family on their way to pay their last respects. The four of us join the line to offer condolences to Meira’s family. Her mom knows all the Harpers by name and thanks them for coming. The boy next to her, young enough to be Meira’s brother, doesn’t say anything. He looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but the name ‘Meira’ sounds so traditional that it doesn’t seem to fit the girl in the casket—which is crimson red and lined with black satin. She’s so small she could pass for twelve years old. I can see the embalmer used dye to make her skin look less yell ow, but the effect isn’t that obvious and she looks really pretty, for a dead girl. She’s sort of goth, with black liner around her lids and deep purple lipstick.

“She hated wigs,” Jem mutters, looking at the blonde curls they’ve put on her.

“She seems kind of badass.” That makes Jem smile.

“You have no idea.”

I always thought cremation was weird, but I still think burial is weirder. I researched it when I looked up corpse disposal after Tessa died—the body is sliced strategically to drain the blood; a giant spike with a vacuum hose attached is used to suck the semi-digested food and fluid out of the abdomen; the mouth is flushed out before being glued shut, and then embalming starts. The formaldehyde comes in a range of colors that the mortician can select to hide the graying flesh and make each individual skin tone look ‘natural.’ In preserving a corpse for however short a time, they have to practically mutilate it and then hide the fact that it was ever touched.

Meira’s fingernails are painted black, probably to hide the jaundiced look of them. I touch her hand and Jem gasps at me like I’ve done something blasphemous.

“What?”

He just turns away and goes to find a seat in the pews. I guess he’s a little weird about death, for understandable reasons.

The funeral mass starts promptly at one. And it is
weird.
Meira recorded a farewell video before she died, and they play it on a projector screen near the pulpit in place of a eulogy. She has a very dry sense of humor, and I start to regret that I never met her while she was alive. Elise and Ivy both tear up, and I’m surprised that Jem isn’t more emotional. He looks very beaten down, like a tired man at the end of his rope, and I remember what that feels like, when it’s all just too damn sad to cry.

Meira is buried in the cemetery behind the church after the service. The funeral directors have covered the pile of displaced with dirt with Astroturf, like that’ll soften the blow. Meira’s red casket is even more vibrant under the grey sky and amid the sea of black clothing. The minister does his ashes-to-ashes bit, and she’s lowered into the ground.

Elise points out her headstone. Under Meira’s name and dates are the words:
In a hundred years,

they’ll say she could have been cured.
I wonder what Meira’s mom thought of her daughter’s headstone design.

It’s morbid, but I wonder what mine will say.

*

Ivy says she’ll take me back to school to get my car from the parking lot, and invites me to drive back to their house for a visit. I ask Jem if he’s up for company, because he doesn’t look like he is.

“No.” Jem shakes his head. “I’m tired. My head is starting to hurt. I’m just going to nap the rest of the afternoon.”

“Okay.” I let him rest his head on my lap for the drive back to the school. Maybe his three-day suspension is a blessing in disguise. It gives him time to deal with his problems and get some proper rest.

“Hey,” I whisper to him. Jem turns his head on my lap to look up at me. “‘A Mil ion Dol ars,’ Joel Plaskett.”

Jem takes the back of my hand and kisses my knuckles. His eyes close with a contented sigh.

“Thanks,” he murmurs so quietly I can barely hear. “You’re exactly what I need, right when I need it.” It’s only when he has to let go of my hand that he notices. “You’re not wearing gloves.”

Jem: June 6 to 7

Tuesday What the hell does one wear to a funeral in the middle of the day? I hate wearing ties, but a dress shirt seems appropriate, given the circumstances. I wear my black toque out of respect. What am I going to say to Meira’s mother?

I’m sorry she was so unlucky.

I need to see Willa. It’s irrational, but she soothes me better than music. I have a whole hour to wait before Mom and I pick her and Elise up from school, and I can barely stand it. Eric has declined to go to the funeral, even though it means an afternoon free of classes. Eric is weird about funerals—my fault.

Mom pokes her head into my room. “Did you eat yet?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t. I tried to eat a Jel -O cup and my stomach wouldn’t let me.

I hope it’s not an open casket. I hate open casket funerals. I don’t want to have to look at Meira like that.

Mom steps into the room and begins to pick at my black button down. She tells me to tuck it in more so it won’t look so baggy. This shirt hangs on me horribly.

“I’ll change.” I have a black sweater I can wear instead. Mom leaves and I shed my shirt. The black sweater was a gift from Elise—obviously, because there’s no way I would ever buy a turtleneck of my own free will . I hate turtlenecks, something I conveniently remember just as I pull it over my head. Putting these things on stirs some latent memory of being squeezed through a vagina. Once was enough.

“Won’t you be too warm?” Mom asks when I come downstairs.

“When am I ever too warm these days?” If everyone is comfortable with the temperature, chances are I’ll be complaining of cold.

“Come on.” She wraps an arm around my waist as we head out to the car. “You look very nice.”

“You too.” I give her a sideways squeeze. She’s done a good job of keeping it together today, but I heard her crying last night when she couldn’t sleep. I know she’s thinking about how easily it could have been me in Meira’s position.

I thought about that when I was at my sickest—what it would do to my family if I died. Some days that was all that kept me going, knowing that it would hurt them if I quit. I don’t want to imagine what Meira’s family is going through right now, because it’s too easy to imagine my parents and Elise and Eric going through the same agony. What am I going to say when I see them?

I’m sorry there was no miracle for her.

*

We pick up Elise and Willa at the school, and my nerves settle for thirty blissfull minutes while I have Willa close to me. I doze off by accident and she wakes me up in the parking lot of the church with a kiss.

I don’t want to go inside. It was a bad idea to come.

“Come on.” Willa takes my hand and leads me out of the car. I shouldn’t have slept on the way here. I haven’t thought of anything to say yet.

I look around the parking lot and see another family I recognize, heading toward the church. It’s Mrs.

Sumner and her two boys. I met her daughter, Rachel, on the ward. I wonder if she’s still there, or maybe she recovered, or maybe she’s dead, too, and I just didn’t hear about it.

These people won’t want to see me. I’ll remind them of what their kids went through and what could have happened if cancer hadn’t killed them.

“Do you think this is a bad idea?” I ask Willa, wanting more than anything for her to talk me out of it.

“Why would it be?”

“Her family. We were in treatment together. She died…and I didn’t.”

Willa squeezes my hand and gives me an understanding smile. “It’ll mean something that you came to pay your respects.” I think I’m squeezing her hand too tightly, but she doesn’t complain. I hold onto it for dear life and try to breathe. This is the right thing to do—to pay my respects to Meira. But funerals aren’t for the dead.

It helps that Willa is so calm. She walks into the church with confidence and holds me in place when I want to bolt. Then I remember that this must be hard for her too. She’s dealt with death too, and if her consistently black wardrobe is any indication, she’s still in mourning. I try to refocus.

Mom goes up to Meira’s family first and shakes her mother’s hand.

“Ivy. Elise.” I’m surprised she still remembers their names. “Thank you for coming.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Is that all I have to say? Or should I say something…more? I shake her mother’s trembling hand and murmur, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m glad you’re well ,” she says, and I’m surprised by her sincerity. I thought she would hate the sight of me.

We move out of the way to let the next mourners greet the family and make our way up the aisle to approach Meira’s body. Evidence of Meira’s personality is all over the church, from the purple call a lily arrangements to the color of the casket. She clearly had this well planned.

At first I think it can’t be Meira, with the makeup and the blonde curls. That girl looks beautiful, and I’m used to seeing Meira at her physical worst.

“She hated wigs.” I wonder if it was Meira’s or her mom’s idea to bury her with china dol hair. The wig fits well , so maybe she bought it while she was still alive and asked to be made presentable for the visitation.

“She seems kind of badass,” Willa says. That’s one way to describe her, and I can’t help but smile.

“You have no idea.”

It’s her still ness that makes her so strange. There’s a complete absence of small movements—the rise and fall of breath, the subtle twitches of skin and pulse. She’s not Meira, the person; she’s Meira, the thing.

Willa reaches out and touches her hand. Jesus Christ. Just imagining the cold, lifeless feel of her skin makes mine crawl, and I have to look away. Willa takes a minute to follow me to the pew. I don’t want to look over my shoulder and see her hand lingering on Meira’s dead one. It’s creepy, and part of me is unreasonably upset that Willa would even think to do that. She has no right to touch the body of someone she never even met.

The opening hymn is “How Great Thou Art,” which seems distinctly un-Meira. Maybe the minister wouldn’t let anything other than traditional hymns be played for the service. The minister gets up and welcomes everyone to the church, and announces that Meira will be saying her own parting words.

I reach over to take Willa’s hand, wondering too late if it’s the same hand she used to touch Meira.

The video eulogy is beyond uncomfortable. The girl lying up at the front of the room, inanimate and cold, speaks on a projector screen. She never lost her wicked sense of humor, right till the end. “Don’t spend too much time mourning, okay?” she says. “I
know
you have better things to do, like salivate over the next Apple product release.” Typical Meira. This was clearly filmed just a short time before her death.