“Because?”
“Because I don't want to be dead. Because I have my children to raise, for one thing. What would Sarah and Mark do without me?”
“Okay, so now imagine your kids are grown and you're old and you've been sick and in pain and you are ready to die. You're dead, in fact. You're ninety years old and your children are in their sixties, they can survive without you, and let's say Chip bit the dust with you, you'd turned your home into an old folks' laboratory, and, drat, someone mixed something with something they shouldn't have and blew the whole place up.”
Brett bolted upright, startling us, looking directly at Linda.
“You can't be sitting up when you're dead, just forget about that,” Linda said, setting a hand on Brett's chest, trying to coax her to lie back on the velvet pillow again. “And even if you manage to die with your eyes open, they'll be closed by the time you're where you are now.”
Brett gripped the sides of the coffin, but she did lie back, she did close her eyes. She even folded her hands at her stomach.
I wondered if they would take her gloves off when she was really dead.
“Double funeral here, you and Chip both,” Linda continued. “You don't even have to worry about leaving him behind. So here's the thing.” She closed the bottom half of the coffin so that Brett appeared only from the waist up. “Thirteen brilliant novels blew up with you. All stuck in a drawer along with one remarkable essay about the lunar landing that was never published because you never sent it out.”
The thought of that passed across Brett's thin little freckled face like the shadow of the landing module as it approached the moon. And as Linda closed the other half of the coffin lid, concealing Brett in its darkness, I could see the same shadow passing in her face, and in Ally's, and in Kath's.
“No chance for posthumous publication, even,” I said.
“No daughter finding the manuscripts and sending them off to New York,” Kath said. “No, ma'am.”
“They're gone. That's it. Heavens to Betsy, that's the end of you, the end of everything you might have been, everyone you might have touched with your work.”
I wondered if Brett could hear us, or if the inside of that coffin was as quiet as death.
Linda opened the lid again, finally, and Brett sat up.
“You're brilliant, Brett,” Linda said. “If you can't do this, how are the rest of us supposed to have any hope?” She was talking about Brett's writing, but she meant more than that. She meant How are the rest of us supposed to have any hope of becoming whoever it is we're meant to be?
She pulled a camera from her purse and directed Brett to lie down for another minute. “I'm not letting you forget this moment,” she said.
We all took our turns in the coffin that morning, one by one shedding our shoes and confronting our futures, our mortality, our need. Linda took a photograph of each of us—to remind us when the inevitable forgetting began, she said—and when her turn came, I took a shot of her. We would put the photos someplace where we would see them every day, we agreed.
For me, there was a . . . well, a joy, really, in climbing back out of that soft beige velvet, like being reborn. And I said—I don't even know why I said it—that here we had the camera and this lovely setting. “It's high time we had a photograph of the five of us together,” I said. “And what better occasion than upon our arising from the dead?”
We were all laughing as we knocked on the director's door, all giddy. He changed the music (to something more appropriate to the occasion, he said), and the Lovin' Spoonful's “Do You Believe in Magic” blared from the speakers as if we were in a high school gymnasium, five young girls dancing together at a sock hop before the rest of the school arrived.
Brett was the one who had the idea about climbing back into the coffin. We crowded around her, still with the music blaring—“believe in the magic that can set you free”—and as the director took that shot of us, we felt magical, and we felt young, with our futures ahead of us. Yes, we were young then, but we didn't think we were, we hadn't felt we were until that moment. Hadn't felt we were anything other than ordinary, that we all could and would do whatever we decided to do, that if it would turn out in the end that we'd die without ever achieving our dreams, it wouldn't be because we'd been too afraid to try.
I don't suppose there's a happier funeral photo in all the world.
WHEN THE LIBRARY DOORS opened the next morning, we went straight to the magazine section, and by noon we had a list of twenty publications to which Brett might submit her essay, the addresses and editors' names printed clearly on three-by-five index cards that would become the first entries in a database we keep to this day, though it's computerized now. After peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate milk for our children and ourselves at my house, we headed off to the park, a little submission army with our typewriters side by side on the picnic table. Brett drafted a cover letter, a “query,” while we banged out copies of the essay—in those days, you couldn't just hit your print key again and again, or even photocopy things. Before the post office closed we had ten envelopes stuffed (self-addressed, stamped return envelopes included) and ready to mail.