ONE
RIP

She looks good for a corpse. Except she never wore green eye shadow, was never this still. Her rib cage has been cracked open—you can’t see anything, it’s all been cleaned up, but I can imagine them beneath her dress, the tracks of stitches that will never heal. Some doctor thrust his hand inside her chest, reached in and touched her heart. It must affect your view of love. It didn’t work, of course—her heart refused to obey his hands. Bit senseless, my dad reckoned, breaking her open when there was no longer a chance. But it’s worth it, isn’t it?

Her face is the wrong color, too pink, like she’s stepped out of the bath, and the coffin’s not her style. Especially the handles. She wore silver, not gold. Nobody else seems to have noticed—nobody’s seeing anything; it’s as if they’re wading through syrup. Have forgotten how to be real.

I was hanging out with my friend Seb while it was happening, all that wrestling to save a life. Four days ago, that’s all it’s been. We were listening to music. Radiohead. Could’ve been worse, I guess, more disrespectful—could’ve been watching reality TV, or downloading porn. The problem is, I didn’t feel it. I’ve tried, these last few days, to imagine that I sensed something, anything, the moment she left: a stab of pain, some kind of vision. But I didn’t. I felt nothing last Thursday afternoon, September 1st, at 4:27, the instant that Anna Ellis, my mother, died.

 

Body lowered into the ground. Vigilant sparrows. Spring rain. Mud.

 

I feel nothing, taste nothing, not even these chocolate éclairs. Aunty Rachel, my mom’s sister, made them because she knows they’re my favorite, but the icing’s a paste sticking my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Aunty Rachel’s standing over by the open window in our living room, leaning into her brother, my uncle Carl, the curtains billowing around them like protective sails.

An old woman’s staring at me but I don’t know who she is. She frowns as I spit the éclair into my hand and take a look at it—hey, if people can tell fortunes from cats’ guts—and thrusts a napkin in my face.

This is not right. There are people I don’t know at my mother’s wake.

“Hello, Will,” she says. Her hair is the color of smokers’ fingers. “I’m your great-aunt,” she whispers too close.

“Joy,” she’s saying in my face, like an insult, and I want to say, Fuck off, Joy, what a stupid name to have at a wake. But Dad’s not far away, leaning into the living room wall like it’s the only thing that will hold him up, his suit all corrugated with grief.

“Joy,” she says once more to test me, and “The Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

I step back, but there’s someone behind, hedging me in. “This is Faith,” says Joy. “She’s your great-aunt too.”

Faith grips my arm. Her hair has the same kind of stain. “My, haven’t you grown. You must be at least eighteen.”

“Seventeen,” I correct.

Fingertips in my bicep, she murmurs, “Anna’s safe now.”

I jerk away from her—it’s easy, she’s so small; they both are, these witches. They’re the kind of sad old ladies who skulk around other people’s deaths in preparation for their own.

“Safe now?” I ask, full of jagged rib cages and last thoughts, as a car steered by a drunk driver smashes into her life. Safe as houses? Safe as death?

God, Mom, where are you? Are you disappointed I’m crap at all this? You never told me what to do when you died, but you should’ve, because it’s the only thing we can be sure of. Death gets all of us in the end. And then I see her, this girl, in the light by the window, long hair, eternal legs, generous smile she’s trying to hold on to as she talks to my dad. She looks about my age and she’s in a white dress—didn’t anyone tell her you’re meant to wear black to a wake? She touches her fingers to her lips and suddenly, I can taste chocolate, like a betrayal. I am the king of bad timing. Only a monster could think of love.

 

Dream.

Hags around a cauldron. One drops in eye of newt and hemlock as the other one stirs. Steam rises from the potion and forms question marks in the sky. The witches are wearing black T-shirts, one saying Joy, the other Faith. They have hair the color of a bruise and they’re pointing at an angel, its wings in full flight. An angel with that girl’s face. The one who wore white to a wake.

* * *

“Will?”

It’s Adam. He’s looming over me, smelling of airports. I stretch my legs against the sheet, and my feet touch the end of the bed.

“Hey,” I say, my eyes struggling to meet the world and my brother’s face. He’s tanned and his hair is even shorter than when I saw him last. Must have been six months ago—he was standing next to Mom, waving as he climbed into her car, heading for the airport to fly to Malaysia, and now he’s sitting on the edge of my bed. “You didn’t make it.”

“I tried, but I couldn’t get a flight.”

My mouth tastes of doubt. Adam always gets what he wants, including seats on fully booked flights. His phone rings, the theme to the X-Men—he digs it out of his jacket and turns it off. “So, how was it?”

“Weird.” I close my eyes again. All I can see is that girl, white wings and her white dress.

“I spoke to Dad on the phone. He said Nan organized the whole thing, wake and all, bloody Catholics. How’s Dad anyway? Is he all right?”

“How can you tell?”

“Good point.”

Dad leaned against our living room wall all yesterday after-noon at the wake and let people come to him. He never said a word to me the whole frigging time except Your mom would’ve liked those flowers. Twenty-four years they were married—was that the best he could do?

As Adam leans on my bed, his hand lands on the open copy of Macbeth, which I’m studying in Lit. “Are you okay?”

“I’m in love,” I hear myself saying, the words spilling into the gap between us. He looks at me sideways, and there’s something about the curve of his jaw, the hazel of his eyes—I get a jolt of Mom in that casket, green eye shadow, leering great-aunts, a sensation of shrinking away from my skin. I swallow hard. “Anyway, how’s okay meant to feel?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Keep expecting her to walk in that door and ask me how my flight was.”

“How was your flight?”

“Smart-ass.” He’s shaking his head, like a fly’s trying to land on it. “Long. Boring. I kept thinking about …”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

He slumps forward, all six feet of him, and stares at the floor, at a stack of books, or...