Chapter 11
C
hristopher stood like the floor felt too slick, like he might slide and fall if he moved too fast. Sunny knew that feeling. She stood beside him, still. Quiet. The coroner spoke in a quiet voice. Respectful. He seemed to think there should be tears from at least one of them, and Sunny couldn’t tell if it offended the man that there were none.
“This is your mother, Patricia Bomberger?” The coroner twitched the sheet to reveal a fall of blond hair streaked with silver.
Christopher took a step back.
“You okay?” the coroner asked, as if he was ready to catch Christopher if he fell.
Christopher nodded. “Fine. Sure.”
Sunny looked at the woman on the table. Same hair. Same face. The same mouth that had smiled at her so many times, now gone slack. It was only her mother’s vessel; the important part of her mama went through the gates. But that wasn’t what the man was asking. She looked at the coroner. “I didn’t know that was her last name.”
“It was Albright,” Christopher said hoarsely. “We were married. Her last name was Albright.”
The coroner raised his bushy white eyebrows in Christopher’s direction, but Christopher had nothing for the guy. No sympathetic shrug. No understanding smile. Christopher looked almost as blank and loose as the empty vessel on the table.
“All I know is what was in the letter she left behind,” the coroner said. “Look, Mr. Albright. I know the circumstances were a little…unusual. I just need to make sure she’s identified correctly.”
Christopher had already signed all the paperwork guaranteeing he’d take care of the burial arrangements. Sunny had been adamant the body be buried in a plain pine box with no restoration and minimal preservation. That there be no ceremony. Christopher hadn’t argued about any of that.
“Yes. That’s my mother’s vessel.” Sunny looked at it again. She felt the weight of both men staring at her. She looked at Christopher. “Is that it? Can we go now?”
The coroner shook his head as he tugged the sheet back up over her mother’s face. He cleared his throat. “Just to let you know, in cases like this, we always do an autopsy to determine the cause of death.”
“What difference does it make?” Christopher asked in a low voice. “She’s dead. They’re all dead. Right?”
“We do it anyway,” the coroner said. “There has to be an investigation.”
“I can tell you how she did it,” Sunny told him. “They dissolved the rainbow in the juice, and she drank it. They all did. That’s how she left her vessel.”
It was more important to understand why, not how. That it wasn’t death, which was involuntary, something that happened to people who weren’t ready to go through the gates. Her mother and all the others had left. There was a difference between leaving and simple death, but the coroner was blemished. He wouldn’t understand. Sunny stared at him until he looked away.
“There’s an investigation,” the coroner said again. “To make sure that it was…voluntary.”
Christopher let out another low sound, like a groan. He turned and took two shambling steps away from the gurney before stopping to put both hands on the countertop by the sink. His shoulders hunched.
“The others,” Christopher asked without turning around. “What about them?”
“We were able to get positive IDs from their family members.” The coroner cleared his throat again. Sunny wished he’d just cough already, instead of trying to talk around whatever was caught there. “It seems they were all extremely…organized. Left notifications for their next of kin. Specific instructions for the burials.”
“They’ll all want the same thing,” Sunny said in a flat voice. “They’ve left their vessels, it’s important they be used to nourish the earth as best they can.”
Christopher and the coroner exchanged a look she didn’t miss.
In the hall outside, Christopher tried to touch her, but his fingers skated along her sleeve without grabbing hold. Before he could say whatever it was his brain had convinced him was necessary, a tall man stepped in their way.
“Chris.”
She hadn’t thought he might like to be called Chris instead of his full name. Liesel called him Christopher. He still wasn’t “Dad.”
Chris sighed. “Hi, Mr. Bomberger.”
The men stared at each other, Sunny between them. Not like a prize to be fought over, but something else. She paused and looked at Chris. Then the older man.
“This is your mom’s father,” Chris told her. “He’d be your—”
“So. It’s true?” Mr. Bomberger didn’t even look at her. Not a glance. Not a shift of his eyes. Nothing. “She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said.
The other man’s gaze went dark. “She died for us a long time ago. I just wanted… I had to know for sure. My wife wanted to know.”
“This is Trish’s daughter, Sunshine,” Chris said quietly. “Mine, too.”
But Mr. Bomberger kept his gaze fixed firmly on Chris’s face. “She died for us a long time ago,” he repeated.
He turned on his heel and stalked away down the long, echoing corridor while Sunny and Chris stood watching without saying a word.
“I need to use the restroom.” Chris didn’t wait for her to reply, just left her standing there as he ducked into a bathroom smelling strongly of some caustic chemical.
Sunny waited for a few minutes, but the grinding, desperate sound of sobs echoing off the tiles was too much to stand. She hurried down the hall, seeking daylight. Needing fresh air.
She found her mother’s father just outside the doors to the parking lot. The smell of smoke clung to him in a cloud she could actually see as he exhaled a wreath of it. The cigarette in his fingers made more. She stepped back until her rear hit a metal handrail, one foot going down a step but the other staying put.
“Smoking’s bad for you,” she said after a long minute had passed without him saying a word.
Mr. Bomberger looked at her with narrowed eyes and lifted the cigarette to his lips again. He drew the smoke in. Let it out. “Your mother used to say the same thing to me.”
“She was right.” Sunny looked up at the gray sky. Maybe rain. Maybe just clouds.
“You look like her.”
She looked at him. “I do?”
She’d never thought so. Her mother was pretty. Petite, blonde, graceful. Her mother was a good woman. Quiet and respectful. Good with her hands; she could make things. She could sing.
He nodded. Smoked some more, then tossed the cigarette onto the concrete step and ground it out with his toe. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” Sunny told him.
His shoulders bent. He was an old man, she realized. Not as old as Papa had been when he died, but he had the same kind of wrinkles in his face. He looked faded.
“For what? Did you kill her?”
Sunny looked again at the sky. “Nobody killed her. She didn’t die. She left, to go through the gates. It’s a good thing. You should be happy about it.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m not. Are you? Really?”
“No,” Sunny whispered without looking at him.
He started down the stairs. Sunny went after him. He turned to look at her, one hand held up as though she’d tried to grab him, when she hadn’t even made a move to touch him at all.
“Don’t.”
“You should tell your wife not to be sad,” Sunny said.
“I won’t tell her anything. All of this is bad enough, I won’t tell her any sort of crazy talk.” The old man’s lip curled. His eyes opened wide. He stabbed a finger at her. “And don’t go getting any ideas, either. About coming around. We don’t know you. You’re nothing, you hear me? You’re not anything to us! So don’t you think you can come around and stir up a lot of old memories.”
This time when he walked away, Sunny didn’t go after him. The door opened behind her. Chris, eyes and nose red, jerked his chin toward the old man getting in his car across the parking lot.
“What did he want?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I was trying to tell him not to be sad, but he didn’t want to listen.”
“He never liked me very much,” Chris said. “I’m not surprised he wasn’t nice to you. He should’ve been, though. I’m sorry, Sunny.”
She looked at him, surprised that he could take blame for something that had nothing to do with him. “Why?”
Chris looked surprised, too. “Because…he’s your grandfather. He’s your family. He should be happy you’re here.”
“Are you happy that I’m here?”
“Of course I am.” He put a hand on her shoulder, strong fingers squeezing. Sunny thought he would pull her close for a hug, but he didn’t. He released her with a sharp nod, as though they’d shared something significant.
Maybe they had.
Chapter 12
T
he doll’s name is Baby-Wets-a-Lot. Grammy sent it for Liesel’s birthday. Mom laughs at the bright pink package, and when Liesel pulls out the pack of special diapers, she makes a face.
“Just what we need, right? More pee-pee and poo-poo? Hey, Liesel, Mommy has a real Baby-Wets-a-Lot right here.” She hikes baby Robbie higher on her hip. “Any time you want to change a diaper—”
“These are special diapers,” Liesel says.
“Believe me,” Mom says, “your brother’s are pretty darned special, too.”
Robbie needs feeding and a nap, so Mom leaves Liesel and Gretchen to coo over Baby-Wets-a-Lot’s cute little outfits and her special bottle that you fill with water to feed her so she pees. Gretchen has lots of doll babies, but Liesel grew out of them a couple years ago. At least, she thought she did, but faced with the excitement of a doll with real bodily functions, she discovers a newly maternal desire.
“Let’s put her in my carriage,” Gretchen suggests. “We can take Baby for a walk in the yard!”
Liesel shakes her head. “Her name’s not Baby.”
“It is! Mommy said so!”
“Nope.” Liesel really likes to tease Gretchen, who’s only two years younger but still acts like worse of a baby than Robbie sometimes. “Her name’s…Prunella.”
Gretchen wrinkles her nose. “That’s a bad name.”
Liesel makes a shocked face and cradles Prunella against her. “Shh! Don’t hurt her feelings!”
It’s just a silly doll, but Gretchen will believe it has feelings. She still talks to her stuffed animals and arranges them every morning on her bed. She pets them, or in the case of the plastic ponies, brushes their hair while she sings to them. Grammy really should’ve sent Gretchen the doll.
But she didn’t. Prunella belongs to Liesel. Gretchen frowns and crosses her arms, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Liesel takes Prunella out into the yard anyway, under the big shady tree. There she takes off the doll’s dress. She and Gretchen marvel at the doll’s plastic nipples. Then at the small hole between the doll’s legs.
“That’s where the pee comes out.” Gretchen sounds amazed.
Liesel already filled the bottle with water. They take turns feeding Prunella, until a minute or two later, the diaper gets wet and soggy. Then they change it. That’s fun for about another minute, but then Liesel’s bored. They go inside the house to get some lemonade, because that will make the pee yellow.
“I think we should make her poop.” Liesel whispers this with glee, but Gretchen looks horrified.
It doesn’t really matter, because Liesel can get Gretchen to do anything she wants her to. That’s how Liesel makes her sister climb up into the cupboard to get the box of chocolate pudding. They mix it up together in Liesel’s bedroom while Mommy is taking a nap with Robbie.
The “poop” goes in, but it doesn’t come out.
“Maybe she needs more to drink.” Gretchen fills the bottle with more lemonade. They force it into Prunella’s mouth.
They wait.
And then…
“Poooooop!”
It dribbles out of the tiny hole in Prunella’s butt and into the diaper. Gretchen and Liesel dare each other to taste it, and Liesel sticks a finger in it. She chases Gretchen down the hall, both of them screaming, until Mommy comes out of her bedroom with that face on. The one that means they’re in trouble.
Liesel doesn’t find the doll again until a few weeks later, under her bed, and only then because of the smell. She sneaks it into the garbage when her mother is busy with Robbie. Prunella’s ruined, and even though Liesel doesn’t like dolls very much anymore, she cries when she stuffs stinky, moldy Prunella under the banana peels and eggshells and coffee grounds. It was the last time she’d played with a doll or changed a diaper until Becka’s kids came along.
Now, Liesel held a squirming, sobbing infant who refused to be soothed no matter what she did. She’d changed Bliss’s diaper, rocked her, tried to give her water, since that was all she had. Sunny had agreed to leave the baby behind when she went with Christopher to the morgue, but had seemed appalled at the suggestion Liesel give Bliss some formula while she was gone. Liesel understood breast-feeding was natural and everything, but it didn’t do her much good with Bliss red-faced and furious from hunger. The other two kids had settled happily enough in front of the television in the den with bowls of dry cereal, but the baby was inconsolable.
“Shh,” Liesel said. “Shh, shh.”
She tried to remember a lullaby her mom had sung to her, but all she came up with was a slowed-down and way less falsetto version of Prince’s “Kiss.”
The wailing didn’t even turn Happy’s or Peace’s little heads, but it was starting to set Liesel’s jaw on edge. She sang under her breath as she paced in front of the living room window, bouncing the baby in her arms until, finally, Bliss collapsed in exhaustion against her. Then she pressed her lips to the baby’s soft head and breathed in. She expected the sweet baby smell of powder and wipes, but coughed instead on the sour stink of a dirty diaper and unappeased fury.
It reminded her of that long-ago doll she’d tossed aside under the bed in favor of other games. Liesel gathered the boneless, sleeping baby closer instinctively, though she’d never told anyone what she’d done with that doll and there wasn’t anyone here to judge her anyway.
Christopher pulled into the driveway. Minutes later, Sunny came into the kitchen, then through to the living room. Liesel wouldn’t have thought the girl would have many smiles after identifying her dead mother, but Sunny’s face beamed when she held out her hands for her daughter.
“How was everything?” she asked.
Liesel’s bruises still ached, and the unaccustomed weight of a twelve-pound infant in her arms for hours had exacerbated the pinching warmth in her neck, shoulders and back. Her belly still griped with cramps. Still, she smiled. “Great. Everything was great.”
Christopher’s face showed it hadn’t been as great for him, and when Sunny took Bliss upstairs, Liesel followed him into the den with a cold bottle of beer. He’d already poured himself a glass of whiskey from the decanter they hardly ever used. When she slid onto his lap, he shifted to hold the glass out of the way.
“Hey,” Liesel said. “How was it?”
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. He drank first. The smell of the whiskey, thick and peaty, reminded her of their wedding night. Christopher’s kiss had tasted of liquor and they’d laughed and laughed about sneaking away early from the reception to get into their suite.
“How do you think it was?”
His answer made her feel stupid and like the weight of her on his lap was too much, so she got off to prop herself on the arm of the chair instead. She sipped at the beer she’d brought for him, though she didn’t care for the taste.
“She’s dead,” he added, though she hadn’t said anything else. “That’s it, it’s done. That’s all there is to it.”
“What about the funeral?”
“No funeral,” he said. “She left a letter. They all left letters. Christ, Liesel, it was like something out of a horror movie. I recognized her handwriting. She always made this little half circle instead of a dot over the
i
in her name. She knew what she was doing.”
Liesel rubbed his shoulder and after a hesitation, Christopher leaned against her. She kissed the top of his head. “I’m sorry.”
But she wasn’t, not really. She was sad for him and for Sunny, and those three children, but only because they’d all lost someone who’d meant something to them. She was sad in a vague way and sick to her stomach at the thought that a group of people could be so easily led into taking their own lives for some reason she couldn’t begin to process. But sorry about Trish specifically? Not really.
Still, she tried. “Do you want to…talk about her?”
“Nothing to say.” Christopher got up, shaking the chair and making it feel so unsteady beneath her that Liesel got up, too. He poured himself another measure of whiskey, though this time he swirled it in the glass, holding it to the light, and didn’t actually drink.
“Do you want to talk at all about any of this?”
He scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. He drew in a breath, then another. And another, his shoulders lifting. She’d never seen him off balance about anything—she was the one who freaked out about fender benders and giant spiders, while Christopher dealt with whatever life pitched at him by hitting it out of the park.
Christopher sighed and held out an arm. She went to him for a hug and warmed herself in his embrace. In silence, he rested his chin on top of her head.
“This could turn out to be a good thing, Christopher.” When he didn’t answer, she took his hand. Squeezed it reassuringly. “A really good thing.”