12

The next week disappeared out from under me like one of those tablecloths a magician yanks clean. It was there one moment. Then it wasn’t. I can only remember a few things to prove the days went by at all. First, there was the fallout from Forever Friends. Apparently, Elaine had feared the worst when I didn’t turn up for evening fellowship, and within minutes, she sent people out to comb the fields to make sure I wasn’t lying dead in the organic kale. This was according to my father who received an earful via voice mail.

The next day, he got a second dose once Elaine reached my mother in India. I heard him arguing with Mom for an hour, adopting the same exasperated and defeated tone I remembered from their fights in the run-up to the divorce, when suddenly he seemed never to know anything.

“How should I know?” was his catch phrase back then, and it made its glorious return that morning. “How should I know why she came here? Why don’t you ask her?” Then: “How should I know why she’s dropping out of school? Do you think she tells me anything?”

Eventually he called me down to talk to her. I hadn’t spoken to my mom in weeks. In the time since the divorce, she had become almost as odd and walled-off as my father, but in more socially acceptable ways.

Instead of obsessing over death, she chose life! Well, life-affirming exercise anyway. She’d always been a jogger, but once she was husband-free, she started running six miles every morning with her aggressively positive boyfriend, Lars.

Yoga came next. Everyone in her Park Slope neighborhood wore Yoga pants at all times anyway (just in case the need for Downward Dog should arise?) so it was only a matter of time before Mom caught on. Then it was love at first Cobra Pose. And these days she always seemed to be off somewhere without an Internet connection, seeking enlightenment while getting a herbal tea colonic. Or something.

I still remembered a version of her that was twenty pounds heavier and loved eating kettle corn with me on Sunday nights, laughing at bad Rom-Coms. Where had that woman gone?

“I’m in the Panchagiri Hills outside Bangalore!” she yelled now. “Why are you choosing this moment to ruin your life?”

I had been numbly sitting in front of the TV for the last ten hours or so, and I wasn’t really ready for human contact.

“Do you know Dad is burying animals now?” I asked.

I heard her sigh.

“Tessie,” she said. “Please, will you tell me what you are doing?”

I imagined her in a sari, bare at the midriff, trying to pretend she wasn’t from Minnesota. Did she have a bindi on her forehead? She had always been pretty. Probably the whole ashram was in love with her.

“Taking a personal health break,” I told her. “I’m practicing self-care by not moving or speaking all day.”

“What I should have done is bring you to India,” she said. “What’s wrong with your health?”

“Mostly it’s my pesky brain,” I said.

“Your brain?”

“It is filled with darkness.”

More than anything, she hated when I was glib, but I refused to speak her language of enlightenment.

“You have to go back,” she said. “Go back to school and see that counselor. I’ve been talking to her. You can still salvage the term.”

“Not happening.”

“Go back!” she said, as if repetition might be the key. “Go back! Go back! Go back! It’s a mistake to stay with your father right now. He’s not going to help you move forward. You couldn’t set the bar any lower if you tried.”

I didn’t speak.

“I’m worried,” she said in a near-whisper.

“But not worried enough to come home,” I said.

“Tess,” she said.

“I have to go,” I said.

I handed the phone to my father. He stared at me with his hurt child look again. But I walked away and returned to my place on the couch where I proceeded to kill as many hours as I could watching the videotaped lives of B-grade celebrities. This whole situation had left me with two options as far as I could see it. 1) I could think of all the reasons why I had allowed this to happen to me, or 2) I could pretend it wasn’t happening and that I wasn’t actually a person. With most precincts reporting, option number two was winning in a landslide.

For the next three days I nearly absented myself from time. My father was in and out during this time, saying things to me that I barely registered, expressing concern in his detached, awkward way, sighing out of his nose, and delivering food. I went hours without remembering that he was in the house.

Until the morning of the fourth day.

I was on my fifteenth consecutive hour of reality television, and my fourth day in the same sweatpants when he walked into the living room, wearing a pressed black suit. I almost didn’t recognize him at first. His midlife crisis hair was slicked back, and he looked more polished than I’d seen him in years.

“Are you going to an old person prom?” I asked, staring at the screen.

He walked right up to me and straightened his tie.

“Tessie,” he said, “I’m going to need you to go upstairs and put on some real pants.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Real pants?”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Pants pants.”

“Pants pants,” I mouthed to myself.

He grabbed the remote and turned off the television.

“And a nice shirt. Black if you have it.”

“I don’t,” I said.

But he was already walking out of the room. I had the shades pulled, and without the light from the television, the room was completely dark.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

“I’ll wait for you in the car,” he said. “We’re going to a funeral.”

■   ■   ■

An hour later, I was wearing the realest pants I had, standing in the parking lot of Honey Creek Nature Preserve. I didn’t see a creek. Or any honey. But all around us were beautiful trees. Towering jack pines with gray-green needles and a few pale blue spruces—the names came back to me from Girl Scout Camp. I saw no sign of a funeral, though.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now,” said my father, “we hike.”

He set off walking ahead of me, and I followed a few steps behind.

In the car on the way over, he had pretended like nothing had happened in the last few days. He didn’t mention my brooding, or ask me what was going on, and for once, I was thankful for his self-absorption. Instead of prying, he briefed me on his situation. Essentially, he had been double-crossed. He was hired to do a funeral for someone named Maxine Harp, and now the client’s family had pulled out without ever telling him.

“Do you know what a pre-need deal is?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“Basically, you meet with someone before they die and lock in costs for their funeral. The price of funeral real estate is always rising, so if you want to be buried, buying a plot early is a good idea. You can prepay for embalming liquid, mortician’s services, and even your burial gown. It’s a good way to get business ahead of time.”

“So, you had a pre-need deal with Maxine?” I asked.

He nodded.

“But you don’t have the money?”

He avoided my stare.

“They used an insurance company as a buffer. They have the money. We had an unspoken agreement.”

His voice was soft when he said this. It was clear he felt now like an unspoken ass.

“So, what kind of animal is Maxine. A lemur?” I asked.

“What?” said my dad. “She’s a human!”

“Oh,” I said. “Huh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’m just surprised that an actual person wanted you to do a funeral. Did you get her wasted or something?”

My father tightened his grip on the wheel. His face was starting to redden. I tried to backtrack.

“I mean, I’m sure it’s similar to doing animals, right. Just like . . . less hairy.”

“Please stop talking,” said Dad.

I was surprised by the fragile tone of his voice.

“Dad,” I said.

“Enough,” he said.

A bug spattered against the windshield. Dad turned on the wipers, but all it did was smear a streak across the glass. He looked straight ahead.

“You think I want to bury pets for the rest of my life?” he said. “I just kind of fell into that when nothing else was happening. Give me a little credit, Tess.”

He sighed.

“This was supposed to be my first big break.”

We were walking down the trailhead now into some dense woods. The obituary in the paper said that both Maxine’s burial and service would take place here, but still, we saw no evidence of mourners. There were no markers or headstones along the path. No music in the air. Still we kept trudging forward, listening to the whirring of insects and the watery chirps of darting swallows. I watched my father’s disconsolate march, and somewhere in my frosty, shattered heart I felt a small pang of something.

“What were you going to do?” I asked.

“For the funeral?”

I nodded.

“If you’re just going to make fun of me,” he said, “I’d rather not discuss it.”

We tromped onward.

“I’m genuinely curious,” I said. “You’re famous for doing this crazy stuff, right? So lay it on me. What was your plan for Maxine the human?”

I could tell he was still pissed at me, but he smiled in spite of himself.

“It was going to be a marathon.”

He was quiet for a moment, but when he started talking again, it was in a fast, excited voice.

“Maxine Harp was a ninety-year-old runner. She started at the age of seventy, and kept at it. Each year she ran the New York Marathon and then she was interviewed by the Today Show. She always said she wanted to die in her running shoes. So, her service was going to be an honorary run.”

His eyes widened.

“I’m talking torches. Engraved medals. T-shirts. Starting pistols. And chauffeurs for people who wanted to watch from a limo. Then, at the end: another marathon. Of food this time. All her favorites to replace the calories burned in her honor! It was going to be epic! A trek to honor her life’s journey in the . . .”

He tripped suddenly and went stumbling shoulder-first into the dirt of the trail.

“Ow,” he said. “Dammit.”

“Whoa, Dad. Are you okay?”

He got up, wincing. The entire left side of his suit was wet and dirty. He tried his best to dust himself clean.

“What happened?” I asked.

Instead of answering, he just knelt down and pushed aside some brush from the side of the trail. Underneath it was a cream-colored stone with something engraved on it. I knelt beside him. It read, Ella Olson, 1965–2012. A gravestone. Beneath Ella’s name it read: “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

“Edvard Munch,” I said right away.

My dad looked at me, surprised.

“I studied him in art class.”

He got up and started walking again.

“I guess this is a cemetery after all,” he said.

Now that we were looking down, we spotted stones in other places. They were flat and unobtrusive, scattered here and there like the last remains of an old civilization.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

My dad broke his stare at the ground.

“For what?” he said, his voice a little shaky.

“Your funeral. It sounded cool. I’m sure it would have been great.”

He took a long breath and then nodded.

“Thanks,” he said.

And as we made our way through the grass, and over a small dribbling creek, we eventually caught the sound of a voice coming from the top of a hill. When we looked up, there were a few wisps of white smoke in the air. We could just make out a sparse crowd, their heads all cocked in the same direction. My dad looked at me with a “what now?” kind of glance.

“Now we hike,” I said.