The ocean was a thief. A murderer. A soul-snatcher.
Too petrified to move, I cried myself to sleep on the kitchen floor with the faucet still running and the computer clock still ticking. I stayed there until the next day, until I was awakened by my mother knocking and yelling at my door.
“Shit,” I whispered. “Who the fuck called her?”
FIFTY-THREE
“Beatrice, open up this door right now,” my mother cried. She had obviously been out there for a while. It sounded like she was mad at me.
I heard Kat’s voice in the background. “Do you think anyone else has a key?” she said.
“Jacob,” I said quietly. “Jacob had a key.”
They pounded harder.
“Go away,” I pleaded. “Please just go away.”
My eyes were dry and burning from all the tears, and my body was stiff from the ten-hour siesta on the kitchen floor. I was barely able to get up, and found it almost impossible to blink.
“We’re not leaving until you let us in,” my mother said.
“I have clothes for you, Blanca.”
They continued to clamor while I shut off the tap.
“All right. I’m coming.” It took forever to walk the eight short steps to the door. Another minute went by before I got it open.
My mother stood in the hall, her mouth forming the shape of a perfect circle. She raised her sun-spotted hand, along with the charm bracelet that hung on her wrist, to cover it. I focused on the bangles: a cable car, a yacht, a tennis racquet, a high-heeled shoe. My mother was a walking, twenty-four-carat Monopoly game. Her eyes were wide and they welled up with tears when she saw me. I wondered if she was crying for Jacob, or if she was crying because I undoubtedly looked like I’d been raped and mugged. Maybe she was crying for some other reason only she knew. Whatever it was, I didn’t want her in my apartment. I didn’t want either of them in my apartment.
My mother came toward me and I stepped backward. Eventually she sped up, arms outstretched, jingling like a tambourine. She grabbed me. I wasn’t used to being so close to her and I had an almost overwhelming urge to push her off, to see her fall to the floor. Then I remembered what Jacob used to say.
“Don’t be so hard on her, Trixie.”
No one was ever going to call me Trixie again. Trixie had ceased to exist the exact moment Jacob had.
Kat was still standing in the doorway. I looked at her over my mother’s shoulder and, upon eye-contact, she burst into tears. Between the two of them, it was like having a couple of rain clouds in the house.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I said.
Once clean, I dressed in Jacob’s clothes. I wore the shorts he’d left on the floor—I had to belt them so they didn’t slide off of me—and his blue shirt, the one with the squiggly, sperm-like design.
My mother was in the kitchen making sandwiches. When I walked past her she took a double-take at my ensemble but she didn’t say anything.
Kat was doing her best to get the lights on in the living room. She tried the switch, then the button on the lamp. Nothing worked.
“Did you forget to pay your electric bill?” Kat mumbled through her sniffles. She also pretended not to notice my attire.
I listened for the ticking of Jacob’s computer clock. Silence. Time had stopped.
“What day is it?” I said.
“Monday.”
“Jacob had most of our utilities shut off today.”
“That explains why your phone was—” Kat caught herself. “—Why your phone wasn’t working.” I’m pretty sure she was going to say dead. It would have been the first time I’d heard the word uttered since before the party. I was glad she had enough sense to refrain. I wasn’t ready for that.
I know Kat wondered why Jacob had our utilities shut off two days before we were supposed to leave, but she didn’t ask, and I didn’t feel like explaining his logic to her anyway. I didn’t feel like telling her that he did it for me, to get me ready for the great outdoors; that he thought it would be fun to live without modern conveniences for a few days. Except for water. He let the water stay because, he said, “I can’t dig you a hole in the apartment.”
Kat pulled out the clothes she bought for the memorial service. “It’s the best I could do on such short notice,” she said. “Everything was either fall leftovers or cruise wear.”
She had two options for me to choose from. The first one was a long, black, A-line skirt with a cream-colored silk shirt. It looked like basic, puritanical funeral garb. She knew there was no way I’d ever wear it. I couldn’t say good-bye to Jacob dressed like a dowdy fucking housewife.
“I told you it was slim pickings,” Kat said.
The second choice was a straight, almost geometrical black suit with a black mock-turtleneck to go underneath. I looked at the label—Calvin Klein.
“How much did this cost?” I said.
“For God’s sake, Blanca, don’t be frugal at a time like this,” Kat said, and began sobbing again.
I sighed. “Please stop that.” I couldn’t take any more tears. “I’m only going to wear the damn thing once. It’s a complete waste of money.”
“Your mother paid for it,” she said. “Shut-up and try it on. Make sure it fits.” Kat wiped her nose with a soggy pink tissue that she pulled out from under her sleeve. One more wad of snot and I was sure it would disintegrate in her palm.
The suit was nice. It was simple and mod. Jacob liked when I dressed that way. He said I looked like the girls who used to hang out in Montmartre, drinking Absinthe and discussing Jean-Paul Sarte and the nonexistent meaning of life.
My mother came out of the kitchen to offer her invaluable fashion opinion. She liked the skirt outfit.
“I’ll wear the suit,” I said.
“Honey, your stove doesn’t work,” my mother said. She obviously missed the conversation about the power being shut off. “Eat something, please. You’re too skinny.” She set a tuna sandwich down in front of me, and one in front of Kat.
I didn’t think I wanted any food, but after the first bite I realized how hungry I was. I scarfed down the whole sandwich, plus the four baby carrot sticks that were also on the plate.
Kat sat next to me on the couch and picked at her lunch in silence. My mother, meanwhile, stood hypnotized by the photograph that sat on top of the TV. It was the picture I took of Jacob on our way to San Francisco. He had a piece of red licorice hanging from his mouth and he was smiling like a king. My mother stared at that picture for a long time, like she was going to miss him.
“You know, I still have a copy of the family portrait for you. I keep forgetting to mail it,” she said. “With Jacob in that silly shirt.”
“Mom,” I said, “why did you let Jacob be in that picture with us?”
She didn’t answer me; she just shrugged.
“I mean it, I need to know. Why did you like him so much?”
Her back was to me and she kept it that way. “Because he liked you so much,” she said, wiping dust from the glass inside the frame. She was gentle when she cleared it from Jacob’s face, as if he could feel it or something ridiculous like that.
“How do you know how much he liked me?” I said.
She put the photo back down in the exact same spot she found it, nervously straightening her skirt. My mother hated to talk about personal things, even if they weren’t necessarily personal to her. It made her fidgety to discuss anything she kept hidden below the surface of her collagen-injected facade. I guess she felt just enough pity to humor me a little.
“He told me,” she said. “Remember the day I met him? The day he was moving in? He was so sweet to me. He took me into the kitchen and made me coffee, and he told me all about how wonderful he thought you were. Then he thanked me.”
“What do you mean he thanked you?”
??
?He thanked me. For creating you, or something like that. I can’t remember the exact word he used, but he gave me at least half the credit for how you turned out.” My mother paused. “I don’t usually get much credit for anything, you know.”
At that, Kat started to gush again.
I looked out the window and shook my head.
Jacob sure knew how to butter a girl up.
FIFTY-FOUR
The memorial service sailed by me like a blurry ship in some strange, Impressionistic movie. I caught vague pieces of words and phrases, but nothing concrete ever really materialized.
Joanna called the event “a celebration of Jacob’s life,” not a funeral. She said that sounded happier and, for some reason, she thought the whole thing was supposed to be a joyful experience. She held the festivities in a little wooden church in Pasadena; one that had hand-painted cherubs on the ceiling; a rustic crucifix with a handsome, emaciated Jesus behind the altar; and a different station-of-the-cross covering each stained-glass window. No actual mass took place, Joanna knew that’s not what Jacob would have wanted. Instead she invited the people who cared the most about him to talk. Everyone who spoke gave their own weepy interpretation of what made Jacob so special.
I remember Uncle Don. He read a passage from Whitman.
Pete started off with an impressive speech on what it meant to be a friend. He said Jacob was the epitome of the word. Then he told everyone about the time Jacob made him a birthday cake. Jacob had used olive oil instead of vegetable oil as a joke. He wanted to see how long we would go on eating it before we told him it sucked. I only swallowed one bite before I put my fork down. Sara did the same. Pete followed each mouthful with a gulp of gin and ate three-quarters of his piece, until Jacob started laughing and brought out the real cake. Pete said the reason he told that story was because it was easy to think of Jacob as this really soulful, moody guy, and he wanted people to remember that Jacob knew how to have a good laugh, too.
Joanna was last to speak. She rambled on for twenty minutes with an entire overview of Jacob’s life, but I never got the gist of what she said because by then I’d started to zone out. I heard Joanna mention my name a few times at the end. Apparently she said a lot of nice things about me. I wish I’d paid more attention, but it was too painful to listen closely to all the memories, especially if I wasn’t in them. I resented the time other people had with Jacob. In most cases, it was more time than I got, and I knew, deep in my heart, that meant something in the universe had gone seriously awry. The earth was off-kilter. The fates had royally screwed up. I remember thinking, over and over, This isn’t the way it was supposed to turn out.
Thank God Joanna didn’t make me talk. She asked me if I wanted to, but I politely declined. The way I saw it, Jacob’s life amounted to much more than any sugar-coated sentences I could have put together. He was more than the sum of the parts I observed looking around the church: the grieving faces, the lachrymose anecdotes, the jar of ashes he’d been reduced to. I didn’t know how to be poignant and moving and clever on the face of that, when all I felt was hollow. I was still trying to reason it all out. People lose loved ones all the time. It happens everyday. It’s just a part of life. That’s what I tried to tell myself. The difference was, everybody didn’t lose someone like Jacob. They lost uncles they didn’t particularly like all that much, or a friend of a friend they hardly knew, or an elderly grandparent who’d already had their chance at this big joke called life. What’s more, I could have easily named a hundred people the world would be better off without. Jacob wasn’t one of them. And it wasn’t just my selfish sense of loss, or simply a loss to every person in that church. The way I saw it, the permanent absence of Jacob Grace was a cruel, savage blow to the whole goddamn planet.
Once the service ended, a hairy ape of a guy in a dark cloak, who Joanna called Father Joe, led us to an old brick building behind the church. It smelled like moth balls inside, and there were signs advertising Sunday Night Bingo on the walls. A buffet was set up in the middle of the room and a dozen stainless-steel food-warmers, filled with various kinds of meats and vegetables, lay sprawled across the long table. Everything edible was covered in either tomato sauce or brown gravy, with a layer of butter floating on top. The whole scene made my stomach turn. To make matters worse, nobody would leave me alone. Everyone in attendance, even Joanna’s friends, and other people I’d never met, came over to touch me and offer their condolences. They whispered stupid comments about me as they walked away, comments they thought I couldn’t hear.
“The poor thing.”
“She looks lost.”
“And such a pretty girl.”
“Oh, she’s young, she’ll be okay, it’s Joanna I’m worried about.”
“What did she say her name was?”
“I think she’s wearing Armani.”
I wanted to shout, Calvin Klein, you shallow L.A. nimrod!
I was the little widow in the cool outfit. Nothing more, nothing less.
Adrenaline was the first mourner to grab me when I walked in to the reception hall. She was already in line for food, and she blew her nose so loudly she practically cracked the windows. She held me by the shoulders and, with tears in her eyes and saliva bubbling in the corners of her mouth, told me that Hallelujah would be released in the spring exactly as planned.
“I’ll make Jacob Grace a legend,” she said. “You have my word on that.”
Yeah, sure. If her fabulous word was good for anything, Jacob and I would have been long gone and he’d be safe. Or, at the very least, he’d be.
“If the book does well,” Adrenaline said, “we should think about maybe publishing some of Jacob’s journals.”
In your dreams, I thought. I ventured a guess that Adrenaline had already discussed the whole thing with an editor and a marketing department. No doubt books by a dead guy are a PR dream come true.
I was pretty sure that the day I walked into a bookstore and saw Hallelujah staring back at me was going to feel a lot like making it to the summit of Mt. Everest and then being stabbed in the heart with an ice axe.
As if all the strangers weren’t bad enough, Jacob’s memorial service was like a Jordan family reunion. My mother came. Chip and Elise came. Toren couldn’t get off work, but Cole flew in all the way from Montgomery. My father and Tara had shown up too, but they had to hide behind the Weekly staff. I never saw them.
“Dad wanted me to tell you he was thinking about you,” Cole said. “He just didn’t want to run into Mom.”
“Damn,” I said. “I would’ve liked to have seen that, actually.”
Nina was there. I hadn’t noticed her during the service, Sara said she was on the other side of the aisle about five rows back, but she came over to talk to me while I was eating. In a slow, pharmaceutical-induced rhythm, she told me how sorry she was. She had on a floral-printed dress, glasses, and an old cardigan sweater that made her look more like a school teacher than an ex-dope fiend.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, along with a few other trite phrases that I let go over my head.
Nina didn’t look sick but I envied her anyway. Odds are she’s going to die before I do, I thought. That means if there is life after death, she’ll see Jacob again first.
“Do you think you can have sex in the hereafter?” I said to Kat.
Her eyes widened and she stared at me. She didn’t know how to respond to a question like that.
“I don’t want Jacob and Nina to get back together in paradise,” I said.
I wanted to trade places with Nina and suffer with her disease. I wanted to be with Jacob. And I’m absolutely certain that if I weren’t so fucking afraid of what lay in wait for me on the other side, I would have tried to follow him to wherever he’d gone.
All day long, during the service and then later on at the brunch, I kept having a dreamy sensation that I was plummeting off a tall building, but, as
if I’d just fallen asleep, the feeling would be followed by a quick jerk back into consciousness.
“Let’s take a walk,” Cole said. “You look like you could use some fresh air.”
“There is no fresh air in Pasadena.”
Cole took my hand. On our way outside we heard Chip and Elise chatting in the foyer. They were talking about Jacob. Chip must have asked Elise if she’d managed to dig up any details about the accident.
“He was just swimming, I guess,” Elise said. “They think he got caught under a wave and because it was dark, he got disoriented and didn’t know which way was up or something.”
Chip was glancing at the program that Joanna had made for the service. There was a photo on the cover. In it, Jacob was looking straight into the camera, his head was tilted slightly to the side, he had a transcendent gaze in his eyes and just the slightest trace of a smile on his lips. He was wearing an old flannel shirt, and something that looked like keys around his neck. The dates of his birth and death were under the picture. Below that it said: We’ll miss you.
“It was midnight, for Christ’s sake,” Chip said, attempting to whisper. “What kind of idiot goes swimming at midnight? And with all those clothes on? It was reckless, that’s all. Just stupid and reckless. Or who knows, maybe the guy was trying to off himself.”
Cole saw me sour. He squeezed my hand. “Let it go. It doesn’t matter,” he said.
But it did matter. In the name of everything Jacob was, it mattered.