The Girl Below(103)

Almost instantly, her groans became softer, less anguished, as if someone had turned down the volume. No more than five minutes later she skipped an inhalation, and her mouth froze open in an expression of surprise—her pupils fixed upward, staring at a view she didn’t much seem to like.

Pippa climbed onto the bed and cradled her mother, weeping. Ari moved to his wife’s side and stroked her arm, tight mouthed but blinking. Harold looked at the doctor, who gave him a benign smile and said, “Yes,” very quietly, as though someone in the room was asleep and he didn’t want to wake them. Timidly, Harold went to the bed and leaned over Peggy’s rib cage. His back shuddered, but he made no sound, and when Pippa looked up and saw him standing across the bed from her, quaking, she leaned over to pat his shoulder. Her touch released a series of violent spasms, and he flailed for his sister’s hand and pulled it to his face. Mumbling to themselves but not to each other, they voiced pet names and regrets, while the priest and doctor discreetly left the room.

After a short interval, Elena slipped between the siblings and popped up next to Peggy’s head, where her busy hands closed the old woman’s eyes and mouth. Peggy looked more serene after that, like people in death are supposed to look, and I tried to un-remember a little of the horror she had gone through to get there.

On the other side of the bed, I noticed Caleb sitting on his hands, staring at his feet, his face pinched in a scowl. To get his attention, I had to say his name twice, and when he finally looked up, I nodded toward Pippa. He didn’t understand at first, but then he rushed forward and wrapped his arms around her and burst into childish tears. Seconds later, a surge of such strong emotion hit me that I had to steady myself against the bed rail. Some long-buried canister of unshed tears had burst, and out they all came. Tears for my mother, pure grief, and hot, angry tears for my father, who had been such a jerk. For Caleb, tears of shame and regret. I cried for the bottle-top girl who’d found a hand in the cupboard that nobody else believed in, and for the loser that she had turned into. I cried because I hated her, hated myself, but did not know how to change. A few tears were even for Peggy, who would never host charades in a Kabuki gown again.

For about an hour, I let it all hang out, and so did everyone else. Then I blew my nose once, twice, three times for good measure, and went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea, the first of dozens that I would brew, pour, and sip with others in the ensuing days. While I was waiting for the stovetop kettle to boil, it struck me that I hadn’t missed the moment of my mother’s death because I was unfeeling or unobservant, but because there probably hadn’t been one. She hadn’t fought it like Peggy; one minute she had been breathing very quietly with her eyes shut and then a few minutes later not breathing at all. It had been a gradual fading out and nothing to feel ashamed of for missing, yet that was still the emotion I associated with her death—along with remorse that I had lied about losing her locket.

So much of what I remembered about my mother was like that, obscured by my own preoccupations. I thought of her constantly, but the image I had was only a sketch, its lines drawn from the self-centered perspective of my eighteen-year-old self. I wished I could have seen her, just once, as an adult, to take in everything about her I had missed.

At lunchtime the family assembled at the large outdoor dining table and failed to make a dent in the dozen moussakas dropped off by relatives and neighbors. Around the table, we were all cried out and had arrived at a plateau of hyperaware silence. Our skins were thinner, our hearing more receptive, and each time anyone so much as sighed, a ripple of emotions passed among us. The small wire-spectacled man who had joined us to discuss funeral arrangements was treated like an interloper. He passed around a folder of coffin styles and prices, and each of us flicked through it before passing it on to the next person, until it had been round the circle three or four times without anyone taking in a thing. The man chatted on, a fresh pot of tea was made, and it wasn’t until he suggested their top-selling model—basic pine with a matte varnish—that anyone seemed to realize a decision was expected. “Basic pine?” exclaimed Harold, actually standing up from his chair. “Mummy would never consent to that!”

He had spoken so forcefully that Pippa looked quite shocked. “What do you suggest?” she said.

Harold turned to the bespectacled man. “Do you have anything vintage—an antique perhaps?”

“A secondhand coffin?” The undertaker shook his head. “Only new,” and Harold cringed at the battiness of his request.