Lilia did not believe in that nonsense about keeping the dead alive through love, but she wouldn’t mind having someone to keep her from being generally and generically dead. Family members you might be able to trust for a short time. A year, perhaps two years at most. Then what? Sometimes it’s the unexpected people, those you’ve forgotten or those you’ve never met, who keep you from oblivion. Look at Roland. And Sidelle. Were it not for Lilia, they would not have survived their deaths. (Sidelle wouldn’t have cared, but Roland would’ve suffered in his grave.)
After Lilia’s death, who would do that for her? And for them all?
If there was one thing Lilia had been unwilling to leave to her offspring, it was her own life story. They knew bits and pieces, from being parts of it, but what she had not intended for them to know would never become their possession. Let her past remain unknown and burned to ashes with her. Let her offspring gather on a rented boat and scatter the ashes into the Pacific. When Lilia had first let her children know that this was her wish, they had questioned her. Her two latter husbands were buried next to their first wives. She could see that her children thought it appropriate that she be buried next to Gilbert. They didn’t understand that Lilia had only her own heart’s orders to follow, but then she couldn’t really blame them. She never cared for her heart to be known. Every time Lilia heard the phrase “the key to my heart” she laughed. A lock only invites a burglar.
Understanding or not, her children would do their best to send her off, Will calling his pals to arrange a discount for a boat, Tim dragging his family back from Tacoma, Carol and Molly making everything look as sentimental as in a movie. Katherine and Iola? They would look out of place among the family, but they were the two people who would miss Lilia the most. She would miss those two, too, if a dead person could miss the people left behind.
Halt, halt, easy now. Better not to go down that path.
Lilia would not mind ending up landlocked in the backyard of 23 Roosevelt Road. Gilbert and she had bought the house in 1956. Orinda, separated from San Francisco by the Bay and further by the Caldecott Tunnel, was hardly a town then. His parents mourned as if their son was to move to another country. Lilia was disappointed about leaving the city, though this she did not show; and what she decided not to show, Gilbert would never have guessed. He had set his heart on a three-story house with a large backyard. He wanted something concrete and affordable, so why not let him have it. She herself could make a life anywhere.
Lilia never liked the phrase “rest in peace,” a saying, she believed, invented to make death sound both ordinary and rewarding. What about “rest in oblivion”? Less pressure for both the living and the dead! Still, if she wanted to give an RIP version of her life, that house would tell her stories. There she and Gilbert had raised five children, a granddaughter, plus three puppies and generations of hamsters. She had made a garden, where the dogs and hamsters had been buried. They had received the policemen in the living room when they had come with the news of Lucy’s death, insisting that everyone sit down, as though that would have made any difference. In the last months of Gilbert’s life he had slept in the living room, but when he was near death he asked to be removed to the hospice. It would be good, he said, that he died elsewhere so as not to dent the house’s value. Who cares about the house’s value now? Lilia argued. He said the house was the only thing he could leave her, and he wanted it to be in its best possible condition.
Gilbert, Lilia knew, wouldn’t have minded that she remained his widow, but she had not liked to live as a widow. She had held on to the house when she remarried, and true to Gilbert’s wish, the house, sold in the summer of 2007, would sustain Lilia as long as she didn’t live forever. In an ideal world it would make sense for her ashes to return to that place, but Lilia could not insist on nourishing a stranger’s garden after this life. People there might think of her as an intrusive ghost. The truth was, her ghost would have zero interest in them. But put a ghost in any story and you’ll get many volunteers to be haunted!
Ah well, off she’ll go, to the water.
“What are you doing?” Nancy said.
The door, which Lilia had kept ajar so one of the girls could come in and change her sheets, had been pushed open. Nancy was harmless, and Lilia had nothing against her except that Nancy thought of herself as a darling Shirley Temple. Lilia had always resented that dimpled starlet with her shiny shoes and saccharine smile. She had once told Nancy that, as a child, she used to fantasize about cutting the curls off the little dolly. It was not true, but Lilia had wanted to hear Nancy gasp. And Nancy more than gasped. She told Lilia that her older sister, who was not as pretty as she was, had once sheared all the curls off Nancy’s head when she was taking a nap. Even my mother cried, Nancy had said.
Lilia looked at Nancy, waiting to hear what she wanted from her. “Why were you flapping your hands like a bird?” Nancy asked. “I was invited to watch a documentary the other day and they said that was a sign of autism.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in science.”
“Dale invited me. You know how he’s always into these things.”
“I don’t know,” Lilia said. “And I’m too old to have autism.”
“Then why were you doing this?” Nancy asked, turning her own arms into a pair of undulating wings.
“Pretending to scatter ashes,” Lilia said. “Cremains.”
“Whose cremains?”
Lilia took on a thoughtful look, prolonging the moment before Nancy’s gasp. “Mine,” she replied finally.
Nancy gasped. “That’s morbid, Lilia! Besides, you can’t scatter your own ashes.”
“Why else would I be pretending? Do you pretend to be your husband’s wife? Do you pretend to eat your food at breakfast? Do you pretend to sleep in your own bed? You can, however, pretend that you sleep in a coffin.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nancy said.
“Pretending is a way to do things that otherwise you don’t get to do.”
“Including things we could do in the past but no longer can?” Nancy said, looking coy as though she were blushing. She was not, Lilia decided. It was just the rouge she wore. “Oh, Lilia, I need your advice. Should I say yes to Dale?”
“Did he propose to you?”
“No, but he asked if we could spend more time by ourselves.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We can watch some programs he likes. Take walks. Do you know he has ten siblings? The only one who didn’t live to ninety was their littlest brother.”
“How old is Dale?”
“Not that old. He has good genes. Do you know he was a policeman before he became a private detective? I thought the lady who used to visit him was his wife. Turned out she was only a neighbor. Peggy Horn. When her husband was alive, he and Dale were not on speaking terms.”