struggling to adjust the weight. The package began to slip off her hip. She slid it up again. The contents sloshed around inside. Joey heard Jeanette make a little whimper of disgust, and saw her chin tuck in.
“That’s what you’re sad about,” Joey said. “The ashes.”
Jeanette stopped at a crosswalk and said, “I don’t want it. I just wanted to throw it, just fucking pitch it over the bridge— and definitely not watch it burst open on the cars.”
“Might cause some accidents, you could get in trouble for that. Can they run DNA on—”
“Shh. Come on.”
A grimace surfaced on Jeanette’s face, receding into steely resolve immediately. Her jawbone was working furiously to hold her expressions at bay.
Lily warned.
Joey messaged.
“Jean,” she said audibly, “there isn’t going to be a funeral!”
Jeanette frowned and stopped in place. “Yeah? Am I supposed to keep this… on the mantle then? Maybe get a nice decanter and some food dye, make sand art?”
“No, no. I know what I want,” Joey said, finally understanding.
She thought back to their father, what he had been like each of his parents had been lost. She remembered having to wear a lacy dress with hard-soled shoes, twiddling her fingers in a nasty mauve chair in a church basement, she and Jeanette staring at a coffee table with a framed photo of Nana, or Pap-Pap. She remembered a big, shining jar with elaborate etchings on the sides. Resting on the floor of the church lobby, belly-down, facing Jeanette in the same position, a stack of coloring books open between them.
But when she tried to advance the memory forward…Joey got a hospital bed, and a feeding tube, and muscles that were slack as cooked spaghetti, worried grandchildren huddled around her. A white, blonde baby on her lap. The old woman, out of focus but recognizable, mopping Joey’s brow with a damp washcloth. Incontinence. Blinking for yes. Blinking even more for no, god no, please make it stop. Trying to say “love” and hearing it come out as “turnip”. No one should have to attend their own funeral.
“I want to be scattered on mom’s grave,” Joey said. “Do you know where she is?”
Jeanette’s chest rose rapidly. She sucked air in through her teeth.
“Yeah. Of-Of course.”
She tried to keep walking but slowed immensely. Joey tried to re-calculate how long it would take them to get home. The numbers were thrown off yet again when Jeanette stopped under the awning of the CVS, and sat the package down so she could pull Joey to her chest.
“That’s a beautiful idea,” she said, her voice rich with gratitude. “That’s perfect.”
21.
They didn’t know their mother’s exact timeline. What they knew was pieced together from snatches of conversation, comments thrown out over the phone, artifacts she’d left in shoeboxes and at the bottom of shelves, and the hearsay of ex-boyfriends.
She went to college at Antioch in the early 80’s. She moved to St. Louis to take a job pushing paper. There was a man. She’d been tanning on the side of the road, at the edge of a park, her skin glinting and golden, staring into a cloudless sky with her lips parted just so; She had a bicycle identical to the man’s, a sea foam Schwinn Collegiate with a book clamp on the back. His was crammed full with books— Dostoevsky, Ellison, Larsen. Hers held a floppy, water-stained copy of Cosmopolitan.
Their father was dense with such memories. The sisters wondered whether a person was doomed to be an amalgam of their forebears.
He had pulled over to greet her.
“We have the same bike,” he’d said, lamely.
And she’d pulled her glasses from her eyes and read him like an epitaph. The years that followed were harder for the sisters to imagine. Trips to the caves. Trips kayaking. Trips to Montreal, San Francisco, New York. A few grainy photos of their mother slathering cocoa butter on a burgeoning belly alight with painful-looking red stripes.
It didn’t matter that it defied belief — there Jeanette and Joey were, bad ideas made flesh. It had happened exactly as they’d been told. Such different sets of genes could be combined, somehow. Underneath they were made of the same stuff.
After they were born and potty-trained, she ran off. No one could pinpoint a reason, yet no one was surprised. They watched Kramer versus Kramer and imagined their mother feeling the same. They watched Rosemary’s Baby and imagined their mother feeling the same. They watched Six Feet Under, and when Claire got an abortion in season four, they imagined their mother feeling the same. It couldn’t be helped.
Where did she go? Back to Antioch for a while, with a former pottery professor. Then up to Kalamazoo, where she met a fisherman. Then to State College PA, where she pushed more paper and nearly had another child.
She went to Italy for a while, when the sisters were seventeen. She sent them postcards from the catacombs. She became obsessed with the little girl whose body was eerily, perfectly preserved, whose eyes seemed to flutter open at times. She sent them many photos and tried to divine what the girl’s embalmer had known that modern science did not.
Finally, Joey tore the postcards up and threw them in a bin. “It’s just wax,” she said. “Same as the Catholic incorruptibles. Masks made of wax. Peel it back and there’s a rotted corpse underneath.”
Their mother returned to America when the money dried up and she caught a disease, but not before a lengthy pit stop in Gabon. Then she settled in her ancestral home, a little township in the hills outside of Dubois, PA. She married a white-haired man in a simple ceremony in the grass behind an old one-room schoolhouse. Jeanette attended the ceremony; Joey couldn’t make it. A bit more time passed and their mother was gone. The new husband didn’t get any of her money. They were all aghast at how much she had.
She was buried in an old cemetery on a hill crowded with trees, at the back of a church yard. Joey had never been. When Joey tried to remember the last time she’d seen their mother, she saw flashes of a small ranch-style house with bright red carpeting and a wilted-looking Christmas tree. Their mother was smoking and hacking up a storm on her patio. Then the memory ended and was replaced by hazy images of children on swings, an old hound dog with a bum leg and a choke collar. Carlton’s memories.
22.
Jeanette rented an old Kia on the cheap and left work early. The box of ashes was in the back seat, still in the box with a blanket thrown over top. Joey was sitting in the front seat, strapped in like a toddler. They were in western Ohio when Jeanette’s phone rang.
“Shit, it’s Steve. Why is he calling?”
“He’s got a major boner for you,” Joey said. The words sounded unnatural to her as soon as she said them.
“Ugh, but why is he calling and not texting or pinging? Who calls anymore? Unless it’s something serious?”
“Driving and using the phone is still legal here,” Joey offered.
Jeanette answered. “Um, hi?”
“Jeanette, hi there, it’s Steven.”
“Yeah hi, what’s up?”
“Well, I had two things I wanted to ask you about real quick. Sorry for calling, by the way, I just figured it would be faster than typing it all out.”
Jeanette looked over to Joey and rolled her eyes. “Sure. Shoot.”
“Ok. So, one: LifeMedia is having this big conference at The Drake all weekend, and I was wondering if you’d be interested in going to the after party with me.”
She shot another look at Joey, barely consulting the road. “After party?”
“Yep. Free drinks, free appetizers, free…I don’t know, zip drives with the company logo on them? Pens? Whatever people give away now.”
Jeanette chuckled. “That sounds lovely, I could use some cheapo corporate pens. And I would go…but.”
“I’m sorry, I know it’s late notice or whatever.”
“The thing is,” Jeanette leaned her head on the steering wheel and stared at the road. She blew hair from her face. “Joey and I are on a bit of a field trip…to sprinkle her
cremains.”
“Oh. Oh my gosh. I’m sorry.”
She sighed into the receiver. “No, it’s fine. We’ll be okay. It’s just, we’re halfway to Pennsylvania right now. Otherwise we’d totally wanna go.”
“Sure, of course,” Milton said, his voice easing into its professional tone. “I’m sure this is an immensely challenging time for both of you, and I apologize if I came across as flip, or insensitive-“
“Yeah, no. You’re fine. We’re gonna be okay.” Jeanette said. Joey saw her lips turn up. ”So what was thing number two?”
“Oh! Yes, well, I spoke to the other LifeMedia service representatives about your sister’s problems. The visions, the unwanted information, and so on, and I think we’ve devised a solution.”
“Oh yeah?”
“What’s he saying?” Joey said, turning her microphones up.
“We need to re-back her up to an external drive, very temporarily, and reload her to her BrightBox. Run a quick diagnostic, delete any malware on the hard drive. Not her memory or cerebral cortex storage, mind you.”
“Okay,” Jeanette drummed her fingers on the phone and steering wheel. Joey’s cameras could pick up that her pupils were shrinking slightly.
“This will take ten minutes tops. We’d do