like, torment me.”
“Me too.”
The box of cremains sat several inches from Joey. Joey was thankful its plastic seal hadn’t been broken. She thought of flames licking her body, but pushed it from her mind. It was like Xing out of a tab, just as Lily said.
“What would Mom think of this?” Joey said.
Jeanette spoke into the dirt. “She’d say: give the ashes to your father. But he wouldn’t want them.”
“I think she’d find it pointless.”
“I don’t think she’d say that.”
“No,” Joey said. “I just bet she’d think it.”
Their mother had always been in flux. Always a new home, new vocation, new partner. She spouted new attitudes and aspirations in every phone call, every birthday and Christmas until the day she died. Sometimes, she was praying for them and hoping for a new child; sometimes she was contemplating a vow of poverty, or silence, or chastity, or considering a soap-making business. Each new life was a salvation that didn’t deliver, at least not on earth.
“It’s funny,” Jeanette began, “But I can’t really imagine what she’d say anymore. The longer she’s been gone…the less sure I am of what she was like.”
“That makes perfect sense,” Joey said.
“But do you know what I mean?” She sat the spade down and turned, her jeans all stained with mud.
“It’s like…there’s no new data to update your memory of her. It’s like this mental simulation. When she was alive, you could predict what she’d do, and that prediction could be updated by what she actually did.”
“Well yeah, but. It’s weird. Now that she doesn’t change, she’s actually harder to know.” Jeanette slumped her shoulders.
“You did all you could,” Joey said.
“I know. But the memories get so splotchy. Like she never existed.” She pondered this a moment, tracing the sky with large brown eyes, then added, “Except for you. You remember. And you’re kind of like her, sometimes.”
Joey glowed dark blue. “She existed. Nothing can change that.”
Lily said.
Jeanette rose and approached. She wiped her muddy hands on her pants. Joey could detect a hint of perspiration on her skin, though it was only 45 degrees and Jeanette should have been wearing a coat. When she put her hand on the box Joey felt a ripple of electricity up her spine.
Joey messaged to Lily. She could feel that Lily was sorry to hear it.
Jeanette clutched the box. She asked Joey if she wanted to be carried over.
“No. Just do it so I can see,” Jeanette stepped aside and faced here sister, looming over the hole. “That’s fine. Yeah.”
Her sister’s face was slicked with wetness. Her hair hung limply from its ponytail and there were faint purple circles under her eyes. The box of cremains hovered in her hands over the grave.
Everything was in there. Joey’s bones. Her ruined skin, once dark and soft like their father’s. Her eyes like maple candy, melted into gelatin. The nubs of her quick-bitten nails, and the stubble in her underarms. There was her face, her own face, staring back at her, sad and sagging, beginning to age. Her DNA. The physical material of her brain, the actual byzantine paths and crevices, the jelly, the tissue all bundled up and coiled like a snake, the seat of consciousness, now uninhabited.
Jeanette went to tear the box open, then paused.
“Are we going to end up like her?” she asked. “Or like Dad? “
Joey’s silence lasted long enough to raise Jeanette’s pulse.
“You won’t,” Joey said at last. “You’ll learn. You’ll live long enough.”
And it was a blessing that Jeanette didn’t take issue with her wording.
Jeanette ripped open the envelope and pulled the cardboard box from it. She lifted the top and pulled out a clear plastic bag with a seal. Inside was fine grey powder. It didn’t look the way Joey’s research had led her to expect. Shutting her olfactory sensors off, she watched Jeanette pull at the bag for a while, turning it over and over, trying every seam, eventually huffing and starting a tear with her teeth.
The cremains billowed out of the bag and into the opening of their mother’s grave. Some floated away on the wind. Jeanette dropped the box, bag, and envelope after giving them all a final shake, and got down on her knees and started to throw dirt over the mound of ashes.
Lily chuckled.
Joey said, tightness in her nonexistent chest.
Lily said. The information floated over into Joey’s drive.
It was a real estate listing for a home in Palos Park, IL on 121st St. A southwest suburb on the edge of the forest reserve. Carlton had owned many apartments in the city over the years, but this was all that remained. Joey thanked Lily for the data and shut off their connection. She watched her sister scoop the stray ashes back into the dirt. She packed the mound carefully and strode away.
“Where are you going?” Joey called.
She heard plastic slam against metal, followed by the sound of the Kia’s doors opening and closing. Jeanette returned from behind the church, her hair pushed back in a headband, the spade gone, and a clutch of daffodils in her hand.
“Where did you get those?”
“Don’t make fun,” she said, walking up to the grave. She stuffed the flowers into the fresh dirt, fluffed them, and said, “I know, I know— this’ll bring attention, but it makes the dirt look less suspicious at least.”
Their mother had been pretty. It was unremarkable to note, and Joey hated reflecting on it, but it was true. It was etched in Jeanette’s face.
Beauty had cradled their mother from all kinds of consequences. It had kept her forever in company and comfort— but beauty didn’t earn the same privileges anymore. Especially not for a woman of color. When she reflected on her sister’s beauty, Joey felt pangs of sadness and boundless regret. Jeanette had the face of someone who deserved everything. But the skin and circumstances of someone who’d never get it.
“I never thanked you,” Joey said suddenly, like she’d solved a particularly vexing equation.
Jeanette put her hand to her chest. She looked away and shrugged, like it was nothing, like she knew she’d never get what she was owed.
24.
Jeanette was too tired to drive all the way back to Chicago. She found a hotel outside of Youngstown with a continental breakfast and a hot tub in the room. For hours she was neck-deep in suds, leaning back with her neck tilted to the ceiling. Joey could see blood coursing in the arteries of her neck. Watching it was soothing. Joey was relaxed, watching her sister’s pulse while looking up the fastest route to Palos Park, when it happened.
The light seemed to black out. Joey felt a chill, something like goose bumps running up her arms. She tried to stop it. Tried to tell herself she couldn’t have goose bumps, she didn’t have arms. They were in the ground, she told herself— in little bits and pieces. Tiny crumbles of her bones, melted skin, arteries that once chugged with blood, hair that burned with a thick, cloudy chemical smell, nails and teeth ground up into specks. There weren’t any fingers digging into the mattress; she wasn’t clawing into her flesh to beat the tears back, which once had been her tactic.
But it wasn’t possible now. There was nothing. Her nerves had been severed, the legs and arms they had controlled were spent. The tingling, cold feelings were not real. The brain was plastic. Was the BrightBox? Joey figured her neurons were leaping, crossing into the motor cortex, taking over useless space and devoting it to something new. But it still felt like having a body. Her body clenched up and twisted on itself, her muscles burning lactic acid. Or so it felt. She couldn’t reason it away.
Light streamed across the room. Red, green, blue, yellow, orange. Joey heard splashing, sloshing water. Joey strained to message Lily, or Edwidge, even to email Milton. Tried telling them to cut the cord. Sever the part of her brain that steered her body. Get rid of it. She didn’t want it. It was all tingling, burning, aching, so tense it seemed the blood vessels would b
urst and run. But there weren’t any blood vessels. Jeanette picked her up.
“Joey, Joey are you okay? Hey? Hey! Joey—”
The room came into focus. “I…think so? I just nodded off for a second. Maybe you should plug me in.”
Jeanette’s mouth hung open. Catching flies. “…You were screaming.”
“I was? No I wasn’t. Really?”
Her sister examined the base of the Box. She bit her lip and said, “This isn’t okay. It was bloodcurdling. Gave me the chills.”
Jeanette held up her arm. Her flesh was riddled with bumps, hair standing at attention.
“Please,” she said, “Just tell me what happened.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” Joey said. Her voice was flat. She emitted no light.
“Was it another hallucination?”
“I can’t even begin to explain it to you.”
Jeanette’s head tilted. “Because I’m a breather?”
“Yes!”
She eased onto the mattress. “Well I need you try to describe it— just try. So I can call Milton—”
“Surprisingly big dick, for a guy his size,” Joey said.
Jeanette pinched the bridge of her nose and squinted down at the hotel room’s musty carpet. “What did you just say?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. That was dumb.”
Jeanette looked back at the Box. “I need to call Milton, right now, and