My past was gone. Days blurred. I tore apart journals, ripped out one page at a time. People came to the house after the funeral and pretended to know me. I heard the words “I’m so sorry” repeated dozens of times as my mother’s friends and distant relatives pushed tubs of food into her arms. Everyone wore black. I ladled out glasses of red punch and tried not to spill any on our white tablecloth. Visitors sat down holding drinks blabbing about the traffic or the weather. Mom talked in a dull monotone. She explained to each new wave of visitors what had happened. I had it memorized.
My father Evan Wachtel had died on May 5th at 10:30 pm from a massive heart attack. He was forty-eight-years-old. No one saw it coming. He was in perfect health. He’d been home after returning from a geological trip to Zimbabwe. That evening, we planned to go to the movies to see “The Next Karate Kid.”
“Evan had chest pains,” Mom told everyone. “He tried to reassure me that it was nothing, teased me about my cooking and bet it was something he ate. I wanted to call an ambulance, but he said no. He hated to make a fuss.” Everyone nodded. “I helped him into the car, and we raced to the hospital. Lucky not to get a ticket. The nurses wheeled him inside. I held his hand and kissed his forehead. Told him I’d see him later. He squeezed my hand.” She stopped.
Friends threw their arms around her neck, “We love you,” as if that could change anything, as though that would bring my father back.
I poured myself a glass of red punch. It tasted awful. Too sweet.
A woman I didn’t know stuffed her mouth with a deviled egg and asked, “How come Susan’s not here? I thought Evan and her were close.”
“That’s Susan for you,” said Uncle Lewis. He was my father’s younger brother, and had flown in from Atlanta. “Susan lives in her own world.” She was my father’s aunt, older than him by a few years. “I tell you, if the Mad Hatter were a woman, it would be her. Fun, but all over the place.”
“Susan and I spoke yesterday,” Mom said. “She’s having problems.”
“What did I tell you?” My uncle said.
No one paid me much attention except when they thanked me for pouring the punch and said I had to be a big girl now and help my mother.
For my tenth birthday, Dad had given me a bracelet of different stones. He said the most special one was a blue chalcedony near the clasp. My bracelet and his tools—rock hammers, hand lenses, and a heavy compass in a silver case—that was all I had left of him. I wore the bracelet around my wrist. He used to tell me how gems were formed inside the earth—turquoise, topaz, amethyst. After years of pressure and mineral deposits, they became beautiful gemstones, which is what happened, he said, to people. “Experience presses us into different shapes.”
“Like cookie cutters?” I asked.
After a few hours, visitors hugged Mom, and said goodbye. “Call if you need anything.”
I was glad when they left.
But Uncle Lewis stayed for a week and slept in the basement apartment where Dad stored his stuff. Dad used to tell me about all the countries and cities he’d visited—the call to prayer in Istanbul, the garnet mines of Brazil, and the wholesale Jewelry District in New York City not too far from Rockefeller Center. I loved listening to his stories.
“I spoke to him a few months before…” Uncle Lewis skipped saying the word died. “Your Dad loved you so much. He talked about you all the time.” After several days, Uncle Lewis flew back to Atlanta. There had always been three of us. No there were only two. I hated waking up every day knowing I wouldn’t see my father anymore.
For the first several weeks, the phone rang constantly. Sometimes I heard my mother whisper and guessed she was talking about me. I hung out in the backyard and played tetherball, watched the cord wrap around the pole until it could go no further. I hunted for snails and tossed them hard against the fence until they exploded into piles of slime.
Mom stayed in her bedroom muffling her sobs. It was hard to talk to her, but shortly after Uncle Lewis left, I asked, “Why did he have to die, momma?”
“Can’t tell you that. I don’t think anyone can.”
Her full name was Genevieve Marie. Everyone called her Genny. She’d taken time off from teaching and spent days filling out paperwork and speaking with people from Social Security and other places that needed a copy of my father’s death certificate. Her fingernails got chipped and dirty as she moved my father’s stuff to the basement, one box after another, his clothing, construction boots, “until I decide what to do with them. I’m not ready to give them away.” Those days she hardly talked, spent most of her time staring at the kitchen table. We were trying to fill the empty space Dad had left.
A week after the funeral, Mom asked, “How would you feel about Aunt Susan coming to live with us?”
“You mean the Aunt Susan everyone was talking about at the house?”
“Your uncle was just joking.”
He sounded serious to me. But why would Mom invite another person to move into our house, especially now? Or if it were so important, why couldn’t she wait a few months?
Mom had stored Dad’s ashes in a brown jar. She said it was a copy of an Egyptian canopic jar he’d brought back from one of his travels. It made me feel yucky anytime I looked at it. Was that what was left of my father—a jar used to store the organs of mummies?
“I wanted to ask you first. Her landlord has sold her building and she needs to move. Dad would want us to help.”
I knew my Aunt Susan mostly from photos, a woman with curly hair and a gap-toothed smile. I’d heard that she’d ran a restaurant in Asbury Park across the country. Mom showed me another picture and pointed. “See, that’s her.” A woman in a bathing suit covered with a flowery top.
“I hope she doesn’t store her teeth in a glass jar.”
“Liana!”
“Carol said that’s what her grandmother does when she visits their house.”
“Aunt Susan’s a few years younger than me. She’s 40 and not ready for false teeth and neither am I!”
I knew Mom had already made up her mind, but she wanted me to feel like I had a say.
“Where will she sleep?” I couldn’t imagine that Aunt Susan would be sleeping on our couch, or even worse, with me.
“Downstairs in the new guest room.”
Outside the room’s window grew lavender plants with purple spiky flowers. Mom said she could show me how to use them to make sachets for our linen cabinet and we could put them under Aunt Susan’s pillow. For the first time in weeks, she smiled.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”