She shook her head. “I’ll bring Marcus Sarandon in. He’ll do a great job”
Chris looked at Angel. “What will you tell him?”
She sighed. “I don’t know.”
Like all funerals, it was unbearable.
The funeral home was a palatial white brick building, complete with pillars and manicured lawns and young trees that would someday age into hundred-year-old oaks and give the new construction an air of old-fashioned elegance. It was, like so many of its kind, an edifice carefully contrived to evoke a common American fiction—the perfect family home, a sprawling southern mansion that harkened back to another time, when one generation turned into another and then another, when the circle of life was accepted and understood. You could almost imagine a small, well-tended family graveyard out back, its perimeter hemmed by white picket fence lines.
But of course, that was the greatest fiction of all. Behind the building lay acres and acres of green lawn, lawn that dipped and swelled and evened out in places like a golf course. Maple and alder trees dotted the various hillsides, spilling their multicolored leaves across the grassy quilt.
Madelaine and Lina stood side by side among the throng of grieving strangers. One by one the cars arrived, parking in an endless row along the driveway and down on the side of the road. People dressed in somber black clothing spilled from the cars, gathering together, murmuring among themselves. Women dabbed at their eyes and told stories of Father Francis. Men shook their heads and stared at the ground, patting their wives’ and mothers’ shoulders.
The mourners walked in a steady black line up the walkway toward the grave-site portion of the service. She recognized several faces—friends of Francis’s from the nursing home.
She watched them file past her, seeing her own grief reflected in many eyes. Each face reminded her of Francis, made her realize how many lives he had touched, how much difference he had made in this world. He’d been gone for two days, and already it felt like a lifetime.
She looked at the sky above her, clutching the slim white memorial album in her cold hands. Did you know that, Francis, did we tell you?
“I don’t want to go up there,” Lina said quietly beside her.
Madelaine looked at her daughter, noticed the pallor of her cheeks, the haunted darkness in her blue eyes. She wondered suddenly what to say to this girl who wasn’t a girl and wasn’t a woman, either. She didn’t know whether to force a bright smile and pretend that everything would be okay, or to be honest and show her own pain. She didn’t know what would help Lina right now. If anything could.
Tentatively she reached out and caressed her daughter’s moist cheek. “There’s this place I go sometimes….”
Lina sniffed hard and looked up at her. “Yeah?”
“Maybe we could go there and sort of … say goodbye to Francis in our own way.”
Lina’s lower lip started to quiver. Tears filled her eyes. “That’s just it,” she said softly. “I don’t want to say good-bye.”
Madelaine didn’t know what to say to that, so instead of speaking, she slipped her hand around her daughter’s waist and drew her close. Lina resisted for a heartbeat, maybe not even that long, then slid in close to Madelaine’s side. Together, silently, they walked down the long black driveway, ignoring the cars that prowled past them in clouds of carbon-scented smoke and the headlights that shone in their eyes.
They climbed into the Volvo and slammed the doors shut, and for a split second Madelaine felt as if they were shutting the funeral away. But on the long drive out to her old neighborhood, she felt it coming back, flashing across her mind in bits and pieces—the sniffling sound that filled the church, the smell of hothouse lilies and smoke from a thousand votive candles. The archbishop’s low, droning voice talking about a man Madelaine barely knew—Father Francis. Pious, serious, always ready to lend a hand, the archbishop said.
The whole time, all she could think about was that eighteen-year-old boy who’d come to her rescue. Who’d heard her small, pathetic Help me, and answered softly, Forever, Maddy-girl Forever.
Shutting off the engine, she sat there for a minute, watching the first splashing raindrops hit the windshield. Through the blurred glass she saw her father’s house, sitting there against the gray clouds, amidst the bare trees, its windows as dark as they’d been in the long years since his death. The lawn was too long and brown and covered with dying leaves.
Finally she sighed. “Let’s go.”
Madelaine led the way past her father’s empty house—now her house, though she could never think of it that way. Her father had disinherited her in life and left her everything in death. The last grasping move of a sick man—leaving her saddled with the house and money that represented everything she despised about her childhood.
She strode up the brick steps, down the walkway, around the dead rose garden that once had been her mother’s pride and joy, and onto the brown carpet of the backyard.
The lawn led to a low-banked waterfront, where the sea spit across the gray rocks in gentle spurts. Madelaine’s high heels sank into the dead grass as she walked to the end of the creaking old dock and sat down.
Lina sat beside her, letting her bare legs swing over the edge.
They stayed that way for an eternity, both staring out at the clouds collecting above the tree line on the opposite shore. The rain picked up, splattered on the surface of the water.
“This is where my dad took me after my mom passed away,” Madelaine said at last.
“That’s your house, isn’t it, the one where you grew up?”
Madelaine shivered and drew her coat more tightly around her body. “Yes, it is.”
“There are bars on the upstairs window.”
The urge came swiftly to lie, to cover up. She forced it away and nodded. “That was my bedroom.”
“He locked you in?”
Madelaine gave a small laugh. “See? You don’t have the worst parent in the history of the world.”
Lina fell silent and turned to stare out at the sound. After a while she said quietly, “I keep… reaching for the phone to call him and then I have to stop myself.”
Madelaine slipped an arm around Lina’s shoulder and pulled her close. Rain fell all around them, slashed across their faces and pattered their clothing. “I talk to him every day, just like he was still beside me. Sometimes I think he’s going to answer….”
Lina nodded. “I want it to mean something, but…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just miss him so much.”
Madelaine stared at her daughter’s profile, so pale and fragile-looking. She ached for Lina, and wanted to help her through the pain, to give her something to believe in that would make it all a little easier to bear.
Angel.
The word came to her so suddenly, she straightened and looked around. She thought, crazily, she’d heard Francis’s voice. Then she realized it was only her own subconscious and she slumped again, staring down at the sea foaming beneath them.
The thought came again, Give her a father. That was what Francis would have said.
She turned to Lina, stared at her so long and so hard that Lina finally turned.
“What, Mom?”
Madelaine wet her lips and tasted rainwater. She felt a fluttering in her chest and knew it was fear. The easy thing to do right now was to turn away, laugh, and say it was nothing. But since Francis’s death, she’d seen how fragile life was, how the wrong choices were sometimes permanent. How all you regretted was the words you didn’t say …
It was time for her to stop being the doormat her father had raised her to be. She needed to stand up for herself, for Lina, for all of them. Maybe Lina would run away with Angel, maybe Angel would break her daughter’s heart—The possibilities were endless and everything could go wrong.
But for years she’d done nothing, and things had gone wrong anyway.
She tried to think of how best to say it, but in the end there was no softness, no blurring, no lead-in for so
mething like this. There was only the truth, and she knew it would hit Lina like a blow. “I spoke with your father.”
“Yeah, right.”
Madelaine swallowed hard. “I did.”
Very slowly Lina lifted her head and looked dully at her mother.
Madelaine waited for Lina to say something, but the silence between them lengthened. Finally Madelaine said, “He’s very sick right now, and he can’t see you, but soon—”
“You mean he won’t see me.” Lina lurched backward and shot to her feet. “Yeah, I’ll bet he’s sick as a dog to find out he’s got a daughter. I can’t believe you,” she hissed, shaking her head.
Madelaine scrambled to get to her feet and reached for her daughter. “Lina—”
Lina smacked her hand away. “Don’t touch me. I can’t believe you, Mom. I’m sitting out here in the rain, after Francis’s funeral, and you tell me—finally—that you’ve talked to my father….” She laughed, and it was a shrill, hysterical sound. “So today—today—I get to find out that I have a father, but he doesn’t care about me and doesn’t want to see me. Perfect timing, Mom.”
“Baby, please—”
Lina’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe you thought this would make me feel better.”
“Lina, please …”
“Just do me a favor, Mom. Don’t try to cheer me up anymore, okay?” She gave Madelaine one last hurting look and spun away, running down the planked dock.
Madelaine stood there, watching helplessly. Defeated, she bent down and picked up her purse, then walked slowly down the dock, up the hillside, and to the car.
When she got inside, she looked at Lina, who sat pressed against the window, her arms crossed mutinously, her eyes slammed shut. She thought of a dozen things she could say right now, but they all sounded trite and stupid in light of her obvious error in judgment. Finally she said the only thing that made sense. “I’m sorry, Lina. I guess I shouldn’t have told you. I wasn’t thinking clearly….” Her words faded into the silence and went unanswered. She couldn’t think of anything to add, so she started the car’s engine.
In silence they drove home.
I’m sorry, she’d said.
She should have known after this weekend how meaningless those little words were, how they dropped into an ocean of pain and didn’t even leave a ripple behind.
Angel came awake slowly, listening to the sound of her voice. It took him a second to focus. She was reading to him—Anne Rice’s Tale of the Body Thief, if he wasn’t mistaken.
He forced his eyes open. “A rather macabre choice,” he said, grinning weakly. “I hope it’s not your way of telling me I need to drink blood from now on.”
He could tell that beneath the