Lexie and I spent the long drive from home to Sparrow Crest in the backseat playing the License Plate Game or Twenty Questions, but then, as we got closer to Gram’s and the landscape turned more green and mountainous, we’d start making plans—trips to the store for candy and root beer, who was going to jump in the pool first, if Ryan would be there at Sparrow Crest waiting for us or if we’d have to ride down to the bakery to find him.
Diane followed the exit ramp off the highway, and I remembered the little jolt I felt at the beginning of each summer when we got off at the same exit: the promise of great adventures to come. This time, instead of the happy rush, a weight in my chest sank deep down into my stomach.
Air-conditioning blasted out of the vents, turning the car into an icebox. A stack of business cards in the console read: Diane Harkness Real Estate.
“I spoke to your father,” Diane said as she put on the left-turn signal and checked for oncoming traffic. Her large-framed sunglasses and light application of bronzing powder couldn’t hide the fact that she was exhausted.
We turned onto the little two-lane road that would take us past farmhouses, fields, long stretches of woods, and the occasional gas station. “He’ll be here Tuesday morning. I’ll send a car to pick him up.”
I nodded. Diane and Ted had an interesting relationship. They’d always been close and remained in touch. But Diane made it clear, both to him and to the rest of the world, that she felt like he’d failed our mother and Lexie and me; like he should have tried harder, should have been a better father.
“Thank you,” I said, “for dealing with that. How did Ted sound?”
Our father had never been “Dad.” Jax started calling him Ted when she learned to talk, parroting what she heard our mother call him. When I came along, I copied Lexie, calling our parents Mom and Ted. Maybe calling him Ted was a way we both had of setting him apart, distancing him somehow because we both understood, on some subconscious level, that he wasn’t going to be part of our little family forever.
“He was sober enough to be making sense. I can’t promise he’ll be that way when he gets off the plane, though.”
Growing up, my dad was one of those guys who always had a beer in his hand. Sometimes he drank to bring himself up, and sometimes to bring himself down.
It wasn’t until my first psychology class at the University of Washington that I realized my father drank to self-medicate. That was also when I began to believe he was bipolar (though he’d never been officially diagnosed, and he’s always denied it). His mood swings aren’t nearly as bad as Lexie’s, but he gets himself into some serious funks and some serious periods of what he calls “creative energy”: no sleep for days, drawing and painting, playing music. His manic periods were fun to be around when we were kids—he’d take us out for late-night ice cream, or roller-skating, or out to the mall to watch two movies in a row, then fill a cart with art supplies. One time, we went into the music store and he bought us all ukuleles.
The last time I’d seen my father was a little over a year ago, when we moved Lexie into Sparrow Crest. The two of them were laughing, feeding off each other’s mania. They were drawing ridiculous pictures on the boxes instead of labeling them, overloading the rented hand truck and dancing around with it so that all the mislabeled boxes fell off. I took on the role of the taskmaster, made lists and tried to keep things somewhat organized so we could get it done quickly and I could go back home. I was exhausted from seething with resentment and pretending not to be.
My father and I called each other every month for obligatory check-ins—how’s work, how’s the weather, what’s new? It was like a careful dance we did, keeping everything easy and surface level, never prodding too deep. Unlike my relationship with Lexie, I had no problem establishing clear boundaries with my father.
“We’ll all have to make some decisions, of course.” Diane’s voice faltered. “About what we think Lexie would have wanted.”
“I know she didn’t want to be buried,” I said, remembering Lexie’s horror when we were picking a casket out for Mom three years ago. “Stuck in a box for all eternity?” she’d said as we walked along the display row at the funeral home, the tops so shiny we could see our own distorted reflections in them. “No thanks.”
I shivered at the memory. Diane reached over and turned down the AC.
“Cremation it is, then.” Gram had been cremated and had her ashes buried in the rose garden at Sparrow Crest.
“Maybe we can bring the ashes out to Lake Wilmore,” I suggested, remembering all the hours we’d spent swimming there as kids. The lake water felt downright warm compared with the ice water in Gram’s pool, and we spent many summer days going back and forth between the two. The lake was on the other side of town, a fifteen-minute bike ride away. Lake Wilmore was lined with summer houses and cabins, and there was a big public swimming beach with a snack bar that served fried fish and clams. Often Ryan would tag along on his bike, the basket stuffed full of rolls and muffins his mother, Terri, had made; she and her husband, Randy, owned the Blue Heron Bakery. She did all the baking, and Ryan’s dad handled the business side: the orders, the books, hiring and firing employees.
Sometimes Lexie and I would bring our blue-and-yellow inflatable raft down to the lake. Lexie called it the Titanic II. I’d accompany her on cross-lake swims—paddling along beside her in case she got tired, but she never did. I never attempted to swim across the lake with her; I knew I didn’t have the stamina and could never keep up with Lexie’s speed. Even when I tried my hardest, I wasn’t half the swimmer my sister was.
She never spoke to me or acknowledged my presence during those cross-lake swims. It was just her and the water.
Those summers in Brandenburg had started Lexie’s love affair with swimming; it was the one thing that would quiet her mind, drown out everything else. When we weren’t at the lake, she’d practice in the pool at Sparrow Crest, doing endless laps, learning new strokes. My sister, restless and ill at ease on land, was quick and graceful in the water.
“I reserved the Lily Room for the service; it’s the largest one,” Aunt Diane continued. “It should hold everyone.”
As far as family, only myself, Diane, and my father remained. Everyone else was gone. I pictured us, Terri and Ryan maybe. But who else might come? “You really think that many people will show up?” I asked.
“Your sister had a lot of friends in town.”
I had a hard time picturing it. In my experience, she could be the life of the party but had few real friendships. She was just too difficult. She’d pull people to her one minute and do all she could to push them away the next. We were in Brandenburg now, driving past the fire station, Four Corners Store, bakery, and the Methodist Church, which had hung a big sign: PICNIC AFTER SERVICES TODAY! I nodded and looked out the window at the people gathered on the church lawn, spread out on blankets with their sandwiches and bottles of soda. “A service at the funeral home sounds good. Lexie hated churches.”
She was suspicious of all religions, though she’d tried her fair share of them. She was a Buddhist for a few weeks, spent a summer at an ashram in upstate New York, went to silent meetings with the Quakers. She’d been searching for something, for the missing piece that might make her feel whole.