Prologue
Tuesday really would be the perfect day to die.
I tick through the other days as warmth spreads toward my knees and elbows, out to my fingers and toes like sunlight dancing on the river where I played as a child. It’s the feeling I used to get listening to “Here Comes the Sun.”
Saturday and Sunday, I never considered—why ruin anyone’s weekend? Mondays are bad enough already. On Thursdays, my mother plays bridge, always has, a respite she’ll need, especially this week, so that’s out. Wednesdays—blah—something about the middle of the week, and that’s when the band practices.
My life’s most significant events seem, by default, to occur on Tuesdays. My own birth. My sister’s. Several other happenings, less positive.
The record scratches and silences its melody. Bad timing—a problem I’m doomed to repeat in death as I have since birth, when I knocked on the world’s door during an epic hailstorm that flooded Atlanta, only to draw out the labor, as my mother always liked to remind me, more than twenty-four hours. Maybe I was waiting for the Tuesday. Today, too, the Tuesdayness made me linger, gave this cosmic game of chicken more weight, and I stared too long at the pill bottle.
When I woke up from “the game” these past few times, I wasn’t sure if I’d won or lost, but now God has handed me this answer, this sign. I reach into my shirt pocket, retrieve another pill, and swallow it with what is now gin-flavored, half-melted ice.
I flick my eyes to the record player spinning silently, and it makes me want to cry, just thinking of how, even with YouTube and the internet where anyone can make a record like this one, we still haven’t found another Queen or Nirvana or David Bowie.
My hand grips the glass where it rests on the chair’s arm. The condensation will leave a stain on the leather. Sorry, Lila. I smile, in case this Tuesday really is as significant as it feels. I don’t need another thing to apologize for. If today she finds this worn-down body, I want her to see me smiling, without a tear streak on my face.
Pulsing starts in my chest, edging out the warmth. The tempo enters slowly, like “Hotel California,” then progresses to “Beat It.” When the banging in my chest hits Metallica range, I know. This is it.
A wave of anxiety rises in my throat—or is that something else? Is this what winning feels like? I swallow it down, along with the fear.
I look back to where I know the letters are and sing Nirvana’s “All Apologies” in my head, the song that would be playing were it not for my shitty timing. The shitty timing that will no longer scar anyone I love. Not anymore.
I picture my letters, floating into the universe, down the streets I’ve walked so many times, into the nooks and crannies of my childhood. I picture the black ink of my words finding them, all the people I’ve let down, all the apologies I need to make, all the wrongs I need to make right.
But most of all, her.
Alice.
My life doesn’t qualify me for a last wish or request, I know. But if it did, I would ask that those letters surround her like a shield, that she’d feel that protection, like I can feel her presence now.
She’s calling me.
She says it’s okay to go. She doesn’t blame me for leaving. Not this time.
So I close my eyes,
and let go.
Summer 2007
The Funeral
Chapter One
Alice studied her brother’s mourners through the window of the church. The large Gothic structure in the middle of Atlanta cast a shadow over them as they shuffled in their shined shoes, their black kitten heels framing hosiery that disappeared under tasteful black dresses despite the thick summer heat. Tears pooled at the corners of Alice’s eyes while she watched them chatting with one another on the way to the door, as if they were heading into any other church service, rather than a funeral. None of them cared about her brother. Alice doubted they remembered his name. She blinked rapidly to stop tears from falling.
“Alice,” her mother said. “Put it—”
“In a box in your mind,” she finished.
Her mother nodded, pleased.
“Maura, give her a break,” her father said. “I mean, look at her.”
Alice removed her hand from her pregnant belly and accepted his offer of a handkerchief. She wiped her eyes.
“Now is not the time,” her mother said.
She was right. Alice had allowed herself seventy-two hours to mourn her brother, and those hours were up—she glanced at the blue plastic sports watch her mother had asked her not to wear—two hours ago, conveniently timed to end before the funeral, so she could smile at all her mother’s friends. The ones who hadn’t considered the existence of Maura’s runaway son in decades, who were only here to build up a type of social capital, so they could ensure that the same people would brave the downtown chaos when the ghost of death came for them. It was time to get the funeral over with, to say a final goodbye to the person she’d already spent a lifetime saying goodbye to, and then to move on with her life.
“Showtime!” said Jamie, in a faded gray suit and a cheerful purple tie. Her father’s best friend helped Alice up from the window ledge, and she trudged over to where her mother had positioned herself in a type of receiving line by the door, ready for the sea of supposed mourners.
* * *
Before the first stranger entered the church, Alice rubbed her neck and prepared to straighten up into a posture her mother had forced her to perfect during her teenage years with a knuckle to her vertebrae. Lack of sleep wasn’t helping her meet her mother’s standards for looking presentable. Instead of sleeping, Alice had spent the previous nights cycling through familiar dreams of her brother, which all ended the same: “Please,” she would beg. “Don’t go.” But he always did, slinging his guitar and duffel over his shoulder, the way he had the last time she saw him, and taking her childhood with him.
Closest to the door, Maura hugged the first couple. “Most people don’t know how pretty a hand-cut diamond can look,” she said, still holding the woman’s wrist. “Have you lost weight?” she said to a man with a salt-and-pepper mustache.
Alice’s father, Richard, offered each man, woman, and child a handshake. To his only living cousin, he volunteered “Harold” and a nod before his eyes returned to his shoes.
Jamie lingered behind, waiting for Maura to invite him into the family’s line. Though he was close enough to the family that everyone at the church had forgotten he wasn’t actually Richard’s younger brother, Maura turned her cheek in refusal to his silent question. Instead, he trapped men in a conversation about his latest hobby—online gaming—as they finished talking to Alice. “These kids, you would not believe,” he said, lifting his arms. He curled his fingers and darted his thumbs up and down in demonstration.