What Comes After

I was never supposed to end up in North Carolina.

I was supposed to stay in Maine instead. I was supposed to live with my best friend, Beatrice, and her family. Go back to my old high school for junior year. Play on the softball team where Beatrice pitched and I played center field with standing orders from Coach to go after every ball hit to the outfield.

If I’d stayed in Maine, we would have gone riding on Beatrice’s horse down pine trails to the bluffs overlooking the Atlantic. We would have gone sea kayaking and shared her bedroom and made fun of her little brother, Sean, who had his hair in a rat tail — a style nobody had worn since the 1980s.

We would have made fun of Coach, too, who told us he used to play for a Red Sox farm team, which we doubted. We looked him up one time on the Internet and couldn’t find him on any farm team rosters.

If I’d stayed in Maine, I would have done all that, and would have gone by my old house sometimes, and the barn and Dad’s vet clinic, and maybe I would have gotten a job with the new vet who took over from Dad back in the spring when his cough got so bad that he couldn’t work. I would have visited the cemetery where Grandma and Grandpa were buried, and now Dad, too. I would have weeded all their plots and planted flowers.

But life doesn’t turn out the way you expect. Ever. I didn’t expect Dad to die, not even at his sickest, not even when he didn’t know who I was anymore. Not even in those last hours at the hospital, when the
click
and
hush
of the oxygen were the only sounds in that dark, awful room, and Reverend Harding hugged me and prayed with me, and said the Twenty-third Psalm — “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

When he finished, he whispered, “Iris, I’m so, so sorry. It’s time we let him go.”

I hadn’t expected that, either. I’d thought we were praying for God to let Dad live.

Beatrice had been my best friend since elementary school, and her parents promised Dad that they would take care of me. It was the thing he worried about most in his last weeks.

But things changed not long after he died. Beatrice’s parents started arguing, usually late at night. And they kept arguing — in their bedroom, with the door shut and the sound muffled. We could hear their voices, even if we couldn’t make out what they were saying. Beatrice put on her iPod and turned up the music. I didn’t have an iPod. Sometimes I left the house and rode my bike down to the batting cages. Sometimes, after Beatrice fell asleep, I sat up in my bed until the arguing stopped, as terrified then by the silence as I had been earlier by her parents’ harsh voices.

Mr. Stone spoke to me first. It was a month after the funeral. “We’re very sorry, Iris,” he said. “Things have gotten difficult for Mrs. Stone and me. I know we promised your father, but that was before —”

He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. I knew what it meant, and it hit me like a line drive to my stomach. He tried to smile. “This doesn’t mean we won’t have you back for a visit,” he added. “Would you like that? Would you like to come back for a visit sometime?”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at Beatrice. Or at Mrs. Stone. My heart sank.

Mrs. Stone said she was sorry, too. “I wish we could keep you with us, Iris,” she said. “There are just these things in the way. . . .”

Her voice trailed off, too. She brushed some hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ears. They were red. Her whole face was red — either from crying or because she was about to. Then she wandered off, the way she often did in the middle of conversations.

“That’s OK, Mrs. Stone,” I said, knowing Dad would want me to be polite no matter what. But it wasn’t OK. I should have screamed at her instead. I should have screamed at all of them.

Aunt Sue was the next of kin.

She was my mom’s older sister. I had only seen her once before, but I didn’t remember because it was when I was a baby. She drove up from North Carolina right after I was born. Dad told me about it. She had a son named Book, who was two then. I never heard about Book having a father. Aunt Sue didn’t want to stay in our house, so the night they arrived, she and Book slept under the camper shell in the back of their truck, even though it was February. They only stayed part of the next day. Aunt Sue looked at me but wouldn’t hold me, got in a fight with my mom about some things that had happened a long time ago, then climbed back in the truck with Book and drove home.

I didn’t know what to expect from her now, all these years later. When I called her from Beatrice’s, she was smoking the whole time. I heard her light a cigarette, and every time she spoke, I heard her exhale first. She said she was sorry about Dad but didn’t sound as if she meant it. She said Book was looking forward to having me live with them, but that didn’t sound sincere, either. She didn’t say much else.

I asked if she ever heard from my mom, and there was a long silence.

Then she said, “No.”

Then she said, “And I don’t ever expect to, either.”

I handed the phone off to Beatrice’s dad. I hadn’t really expected my mom to be an option. She left when I was five, and no one knew where she was — not even Aunt Sue, apparently. No one had heard from her in years.

I went back to the batting cages after getting off the phone, my face burning from anger and frustration, and I swung at high, hard fastballs for an hour until I was too tired to lift the bat.

Beatrice and I stayed up late the night before I left, packing and repacking my stuff. She kept wanting to add more, trying to make me take clothes that were hers: socks and T-shirts, sweaters and mittens and scarves — as if that would make up for her family abandoning me. I didn’t want any of it.

“You’re going to come back for Christmas, right?” she asked at one point. It was well after midnight.

“Yeah,” I said, though I really wasn’t sure of that, or of anything. “If I have the money.”

“I’ll get you the money,” Beatrice said. “I bet my parents will pay for the whole thing. It’s the least they can do.”

“Yeah,” I said again, suddenly doubting there would be any Christmas visit. “Maybe.”

Beatrice’s boyfriend called — his name was Collie — and they spent half an hour whispering, which gave me time to finally finish packing. I had an old hat that Dad used to wear, a green fishing cap. I ran my fingers over the frayed edges and traced the curve of the bill. I pressed it to my face and imagined it smelled like Dad, but probably it didn’t. Probably it had been too long since he’d worn it.

I put it on, thinking it would be too big, but it fit me just right.

At three in the morning, Beatrice and I climbed out her window and wandered around town one last time. Nobody was awake but us. We didn’t talk; we didn’t do anything. We just walked down the middle of the street, east toward the harbor. The wind had picked up, blowing in off the Atlantic; it was threatening to storm.

Our reflections, distorted in the darkened storefront windows as we walked past a row of shops, magnified what a funny-looking pair we were — Beatrice tall, with her black hair and high cheekbones and perfect smile and model’s legs; me short and skinny, with a sharp face and freckles and chopped hair and middle-school boobs; both of us in practice Ts, gym shorts, floppy socks, dirty New Balances. It was about all either of us wore in the summer.