I said the only thing I could think in the moment. “I’ll come back.”
I rushed from the funeral home after that, not even remembering my sweater, where it was slung on a chair in the front row. I drove to our old house and cried.
I never went back. I never even drove past the funeral home again. A promise made to flowers, to wooden boxes. Sometimes I let myself believe the funeral director never put their bodies inside the caskets to begin with. And so, they could have been anyplace. I imagined one day I would open my bedroom door and their bodies would be laid out side by side upon my bed—oh, here they are, misplaced after all this time. My grief then felt like waiting, like it was just a matter of time before I found what had been lost.
I imagined Jessica telling the other supermarket cashiers about our jaunt through the basement of the funeral parlor, how weird it had been. I never returned to work there. I imagined my old teacher rooting through her white purse for a mint, telling people on a bus how strange it was that the coffins had been closed. Yes, how strange.
* * *
—
I WAS TERRIFIED someone would find out that I was living in the house alone. My parents didn’t have a will. Maybe they thought they didn’t need one because it was just us. I was eighteen. I didn’t know if I would be considered an adult or a child, and I didn’t trust anyone enough to ask. I lied to the neighbors. I said I had family taking care of me. I grew secretive about everything so I could keep living in the house.
I had their bodies cremated. Two weeks later, the director’s secretary came by my house with the urns tucked under her arms. As I struggled with bills and sold off more and more, I feared I’d soon be homeless and left carrying these heavy urns with me, that I’d never be free of their weight, that weight so great, heavier than I ever thought, not furniture, not comfort.
After the accident, people in the town started to talk about our house, about how it was starting to look disheveled. I heard they said, “It was a shame about those people, but the woman used to plant annuals, do you remember? It just brightened up the whole corner.” So I started planting my mother’s old palette of flowers, clouds and clouds of them. I painted the porch and repaired the gutter, which had been leaning from the house ever since a bad storm, when we lost power and a swarm of stinkbugs flew through the house like they were charged with lightning.
I started dating to fill the house. I hung a set of wind chimes that one man, so tall, walked into on the porch. They never sounded right again. Another sat in my father’s favorite chair and broke it, just like that.
Annie couldn’t stand the men. I would put her outside my bedroom, but she would just bark and bark. When they went through the hall to use the bathroom, she nipped at their feet. They would leave articles behind so often—a cap, a matchbook, a comb—and in the mornings, I’d go about looking for them, for if I saw them later in the day, if they caught me off guard, a man’s sock in Annie’s mouth, my heart would race with the panic of having been burglarized.
I had a game I always played with men. Tell me the first memory you think of when I say the word (blank). We’d go back and forth, trading words, sharing stories, and sooner or later they’d hit on a word that opened up a door in me and I’d be telling them something about my childhood. Never the accident. Never that I had no family now, but a release of small, honest pieces. And it would catch me off guard, how badly I wanted to be known.
A word can be like a cellar door. Just a few steps and you’re in a dark place. Some men quickly thought they loved me. I would start to care about them, too, but I knew I was engineering these bonds, and I felt guilty about it, weak and needy and dishonest. I wanted someone to hold me and to touch me, but so often I’d find myself frightened, in up to my neck with someone I hardly knew. They were often the ones who would not leave.
At night my hometown felt so large, so many people, so many men I’d never seen before, such a very good chance that this one, finally, hadn’t heard of the old people who’d drowned at Port Llewelyn, and maybe he’d just see me as a cool, kind girl. But during the day, the town felt oppressively small, the neighbors like zombies standing on my lawn, watching my house.
* * *
—
IT WENT ON that way for about a year. Then I found a Realtor to help me sell the house. I’d just sold my mother’s pretty copper pans, and the outlines of where they’d hung my entire life patterned the kitchen walls around us. She wanted to talk about nothing but the accident, and each time my answers to her questions were briefer, quieter, until the spool I was turning, turning, turning gathered up all the words into a tight, compact thing that I stuck away. She sold the house and some of its furnishings for me. I felt both grateful and unmoored.
When I finally went away to college, advisors asked how they could best support me, and I told them that I wanted to move into the family housing they reserved for graduate students. They all nodded and said, “Of course, of course,” like they would understand that I’d want to—what? Be close to any family? Even families that were not my own? I just wanted a place I could keep Annie with me. She and I moved onto the campus in what felt like a permanent way.
It was the sale of the house that made college possible. I went to the same school I had planned to attend before my parents’ accident, as though they could someday visit me there. I remember telling them how I had heard there were wind tunnels between the buildings and girls could just get whisked up by a gust.
Finally there, I would walk the campus longing to be caught adrift and sail away. But grief is a weight belt. I dedicated myself to my studies, taking summer sessions, multiple internships, extra jobs. I never went anywhere for holidays. I didn’t have any close friends then. I read so much.
I saw a psychologist at school. I knew I needed help. He said he was working on his thesis and had this idea that helping others could soothe one’s own grief, and he asked if I was open to meeting with people who had been in my situation. I said okay, and I had this private wish that the people he found for me would turn into friends. But when I went back, he said he couldn’t find anyone like me. He said, well, what good advice would you have given, if there had been someone else like you? He sat there staring at me with his fingers on his computer keys.
You leave the television on all the time to keep the ghosts from talking to you; you all stare at the set. You give things away and live in the smallest space possible to prevent memories from taking over. Whatever you do, don’t have a funeral. The people who come will remember the other people who came and assume that one of them is taking care of you, when they’re not. Everyone will remember the people in that room as close, when they’re not. They’re somewhere else tonight; their life has gone on, and yours has not. When holidays come, you date or you drink.
Before I left for school, I tried to open my parents’ urns. I banged on their lids like they were pickle jars, ran them under hot water, looked for seams in the brass. They were sealed shut.