The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [58]
“You’ll feel better.” With his heel, he grinds the cigarette he’d tossed away and then he puts his arms around me. “You’ll feel better,” he repeats into my hair, and he kisses the top of my head.
“I gotta go,” he says. “My parents are waiting.”
“Okay.” I’m distracted now, thinking about my mother, about what I have to ask her now. Then I realize I should be thinking about him, at least somewhat. “Call me if you need anything. And give your family my love, and—”
“I know. You too.”
Jeremy smiles and heads inside through the back entrance, and I walk back out to the front to find my mother.
“Come on, let’s go,” I say.
“You don’t want to wait to see the Coles again?”
“Another time. We’ll go to shiva tomorrow or something.” “Shiva” is a new word to me, another thing my mother taught me. I knew that it meant prayers for the dead, but I never knew it meant visiting someone’s home, eating catered bagels, sitting on the couch and keeping the mourners company.
She doesn’t argue, and together we walk home.
20
At home, I experience a phenomenon that someday, years later, when I have been to more funerals and have experienced it after every single one, I will call the post-funeral jitters: when almost anything can make you explode into a fit of giggles because you’ve been holding in all this nervousness—you’ve literally just cried yourself silly. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone else experiences the post-funeral jitters, but when we walk in the door, my mother asks me what I want to eat and I think she’s said that the funeral was neat and we can’t stop laughing. The thing that finally makes me stop is the thought that maybe she broke down giggling after my father’s funeral. And I think that the thing that makes her stop is when she realizes that I’m not laughing anymore.
We’ve just walked in the door; we’d been hanging our coats in the hall closet when she’d asked. She closes the closet door and turns back to me.
“Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” I say, and then I walk into the living room. I’m scared. She thinks I’m acting strangely because of Kate. She doesn’t know what I’m about to do. I think I should work up to it somehow, use Kate as a segue. But I don’t want to use Kate like that, and subtlety has gotten me nowhere so far.
I turn around to face her, and then I say, “Mom, how did my dad die?”
She doesn’t say anything. She sits at the table and I sit across the room, on the sofa. She takes off her shoes and turns in her chair to face me.
“What?”
I repeat the plain question: “How did my dad die?”
“Your father died when you were two.”
“I know.” That’s not the answer to my question. “And I was too young to remember much of anything about it or anything about him.”
My mom sighs. Maybe she thinks that it’s only Kate’s death that has brought this on; maybe she thinks she can still avoid telling me. “What do you want to know?”
My hands are still cold, so I sit on them to warm them. I speak slowly and softly. “Mom, please. How did my dad die?” It’s the third time I’ve said it. Every time, it’s gotten a little easier, like learning a new language.
“You were too young to know.”
“I’m older now.”
“No. You were too young.”
“Mom, look at me, please. We’re not talking about when it happened; that was fourteen years ago. It’s been fourteen years. You can tell me now.” I pause. She is looking at her feet, resting them on top of the shoes she just took off. “You have to tell me now,” I say.
“He was sick,” she says.
“I know; he had cancer.”
She looks up at me, surprised. “I didn’t know you knew that.”
I know she wants me to explain how I knew; I know she’s racking her mind for the ways I might have found out, planning angry phone calls to my grandparents. But I know I have to keep her focused or I will lose this chance.
“But it wasn’t the cancer that killed him, right?”
“He was sick,” she says again.
“How sick?”
“Very sick,” she almost whispers.
“Not just the cancer?”
“No,” she says, staring past me to the window behind me. “Not just the cancer. They thought he would survive the cancer.”
“It was