28. Dancing with the Dead
28
Dancing with the Dead
I HAD BEEN to plenty of wakes before, but never one like this.
As I slipped on my kitten heels on the front porch and made my way down Main Street toward the Days Gone Funeral Home, the townsfolk, wearing blacks and reds, began to close up their stores, carrying platters of cheese and crackers and lasagna and fried chicken and collard greens and various oven bakes.
For an hour, Mairmont had paused, all save for the lone Victorian house with black shutters and wrought iron fencing on the parapets. The closer I got, the more people there were. A sea of people, spilling out of the front door and down the sidewalk.
Seaburn was standing at the front gate in a brown suit, an orchid in his pocket. He saw me as I crossed the road, and pulled me into a tight hug. “Why’re they all outside?” I asked.
“Well”—Seaburn extended a hand toward the front door—“see for yourself.”
I walked up the pathway to the front steps, and hesitantly opened the front door—and stopped dead in my tracks. Because
two of the three parlor rooms were full of flowers. Not just any flowers—
wildflowers
. All separated by color in clear glass vases. There must have been . . . there must have been a
thousand
of them.
I was baffled. “How . . . how did . . .”
Mom came out of the red parlor room, where Dad’s casket sat. “Oh, Florence! Aren’t all these flowers
lovely
?”
“Who . . . how did . . . when—”
Then Heather stepped out of one of the parlor rooms, wiping her hands off on a handkerchief. What was
she
doing here? I began to ask that exact thing when she outstretched her hand to me and said, “Your dad was a good man. We will always want to help when we can. And you were right. But people change. Even me.”
I looked down at her hand, then at her again. “You . . . did this?”
“Dana helped me,” Heather replied, not retracting her hand, waiting. “We organized donations last night and this morning to buy and deliver the flowers needed. I’m sorry,” she added.
I didn’t know if she was telling the truth, or if she had some ulterior motives—to look better if word got out about our confrontation? To paint me as the spoiled woman who never grew up? See? Heather
did
change, it was Florence who couldn’t let the past die!
Or . . . maybe that was my brain being cold and bitter. Thinking everyone had an ulterior motive when maybe, this was just what it looked like.
I took her hand. “Thank you,” I said.
We shook.
Then she took the vase of blue wildflowers and disappeared into the blue parlor room. Mom motioned for me to come into the viewing room when I was ready.
Seaburn elbowed me in the side. “Go see your old man so we can open up the house.”
“Yeah, I should.”
I breathed out a long breath, steeling my shoulders. One step at a time. Carver and Alice were waiting inside the red parlor room—Dad’s favorite room—and outstretched their hands to me. I took them, and squeezed them tightly, and together we walked up to the dark mahogany casket decorated in wildflowers of blues and reds and yellows and pinks, to begin to figure out how to say goodbye.
The afternoon was a blur of people drifting in and out of the funeral home, shaking my hand and giving me their condolences. Casseroles began to pile up in the refrigerator in the kitchen, and more than one bottle of champagne was spilled on the hardwood floors. The entire town was here, crowded into the old Victorian house and across the lawn, in their best black clothes. They paid their respects to Dad one at a time, and the three Day siblings stood off to the side, our hands clasping one another’s, keeping ourselves upright. Mom was stalwart, sipping on a glass of champagne, so gracious to everyone who came to say their goodbyes.
“Of course he’d be buried in that god-awful red suit,” Karen said, dabbing her eyes so her makeup wouldn’t run. “Of course he would.”
“Alice did a great job,” John said, in his best black boater shorts, black shirt, and pizza hat. “Looks like he’s still kickin’.”
Someone else said, “He was so proud of you.”
And everyone else just went by in a blur. I barely registered their faces.
“You three are the best kids an undertaker could have.”
“So proud.”
“Great guy.”
“He was so proud.”
“Such a good man.”
My bottom lip wobbled, but I bit it to keep myself firm.
Whenever I felt myself giving way, Carver would squeeze my hand tightly, as if to ask,
Do you need a moment?
And I would squeeze back that I was okay, and tighten my grip on Alice’s hand, too. The world spun on, and we were still here.
When the last of the visitors finally left, including Mrs. Elizabeth in a pretty pink suit because, she said, “Black isn’t my color,” with her ghostly husband in tow, I closed the front door and locked it. The smell of the wildflowers was so overpowering, we elected to keep some of the windows cracked to air the place out. But even with them open, the funeral home felt so quiet, I almost couldn’t stand it. Mom busied herself in the red parlor room, picking up the dried flowers off the ground and situating the wildflower vases. The arrangements wouldn’t be moved until tomorrow, when we had the graveside service, and I had to wonder how we’d get all of these damn flowers hauled over to the cemetery.
I leaned back against the front door and breathed out a long breath.
“Everything okay?”
I glanced up toward the voice. Ben was standing awkwardly in the middle of the foyer, his hands again in his pockets. I hadn’t seen him since he disappeared on the Ridge, and I felt instantly better just
seeing
him. His presence was a balm.
“You missed all the fun,” I said in greeting, wiping the edges of my eyes. Thankfully I’d worn waterproof eyeliner today.
He glanced around. “The wake . . . is over already? How long was I gone?”
“A few hours,” I replied. The Ridge felt like an elephant in the room. What had he been about to say? What would he have wished for?
“Are you okay?” he asked, worried. “I mean—that’s the wrong question. Is . . . is there anything I can do?”
Even though he couldn’t interact with the world, even though no one else could see him, even though I was the one who was supposed to be helping him . . . “You’re very thoughtful.”
“You’re hurting. It’s hard to see.”
“Am I
that
ugly a crier?”
“No—I mean yes, but no—I mean . . .” He pursed his lips. “I wish I could do something. Anything. Take you in my arms and hug you and tell you that things are going to hurt for a while, but it gets better.”
A knot formed in my throat. The grooves on the front door pressed into my back, I leaned so hard against it. Isn’t that what I had wanted to tell him, what felt like eons ago? “Does it? Get better?”
He nodded. “Bit by bit. I lost my parents at thirteen in a car accident, and my grandmother adopted me. This is my dad’s ring,” he said as he took off his necklace, felt the ring between his fingers. “I keep it with me so I don’t feel so alone. She told me that you don’t ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you’ll pick yourself back up and you’ll find that you’re okay. That you’re
going
to be okay. And eventually, it’ll be true.”
“Your grandma sounds like my dad,” I said, and sniffed, wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands.
He curled his fingers around his ring and put it in his pocket. “I’m sorry, Florence. I know you’ve heard those words a lot today, but . . .”
“Thank you,” I replied. “You’ve been really great.” And then I couldn’t help it—I laughed. “Oh, god—I just realized. Ben and been, get it? Your name? It’s a play on—I’m sorry, you’re trying to have a serious moment and I’m . . . a mess.” I scrubbed my face with my hands, mortified.
“You’ve Ben waiting to make that joke, haven’t you?” he commented wryly.
“I’ve Ben resisting, honestly.”
He sighed, and then gave the smallest chuckle. It cracked the sides of his face, and there was a smile. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. I bent toward him to get a better look. “What?” he asked.
“I wanted to see if you were actually smiling, or if I was hallucinating.”
“You’re so strange.”
“Absolutely. Don’t you wish you’d never let me walk out of your office?” I joked.
“Yes.” He said it so resolutely, it made me blush.
Was that your wish? The one from the Ridge?
I wanted to ask, but it wouldn’t do any good. I was here to help him move on, and he was here to leave.
Ghost stories never had happy endings.
“Well, you got off lucky, then,” I replied, grabbing the tiny trash can from beside the door, and I started picking up trash the guests left behind. Plastic champagne glasses and napkins from the finger foods outside. It was like people forgot trash cans existed.
For the next twenty minutes, I walked around the funeral home in the silence, righting everything, cleaning the tables, closing the guest book.
When I rounded to the red room where Carver stood, looking down at Dad in the coffin, I paused. He was muttering quietly under his breath, and slowly reached out a hand to Dad’s, folded so neatly over his chest, and rested it there for a moment.
Quietly, I backed out of the room.
Ben leaned against the doorway, looking into the room with my dad’s coffin. He said, “I like your Dad’s style. Great tux.”
“It was his favorite,” I replied.
Carver gently closed the lid of the coffin. For the last time. Then he moved out of the red parlor room where Dad was and gathered up the cups from the end table. I lugged the trash can with me, and held it out for Carver to dump the cups into.
A stereo sat atop the table, usually reserved for some sort of somber organ music during wakes and visitations. I couldn’t remember if we had it playing today.
My brother gave a sad sort of smile as his fingers skimmed across the stereo buttons. “Remember when Dad played music while we cleaned up?”
I groaned. “He had Bruce Springsteen on
repeat.
”
He chuckled. “Remember that time he pulled his back out wailing on an air guitar to ‘Born to Run’?” His eyes squeezed at the edges, prickling in the only way he knew how to cry. His voice was thick as he said, “God, Florence, I wish he was here.”
“Me, too. And—I do need help. With the will thing. Mostly the crows. And your . . . cherrywood birdcage.”
He gave a mock gasp. “Oh. My. God. Is Florence Day actually asking for
help
?”
“Please don’t make this a big deal—”
“Al!” he called to our youngest sister, in the blue room. “Florence actually asked for our
help
!”
Alice poked her head out of the doorway. “Fuck that,” she replied.
“So that’s a yes?” I rebutted, and my sister stuck out her tongue and withdrew into the blue room again.
Carver bumped his shoulder against mine. “
Always
a yes.” Then Mom called him from the third parlor to help her move some vases, and he scrubbed me on the head as he went. I smoothed down my hair again, muttering to myself.
“Question,” Ben said, coming back to me as I finished cleaning the table with the stereo. “Did Lee get anything right?”
“Hmm?”
“In his book.”
I tilted my head. “He wrote that we listened to Beethoven’s
Für Elise
—Carver went through a classical music kick—and that Dad danced with skeletons. Which he did,” I added, “but only on Halloween.”
He snorted a laugh. “I bet it was terrifying.”
“Oh, absolutely
not
. He’d do this thing where he’d throw his voice and move Skelly’s jaw—it was funny! He was funny. And maybe a little funny looking,” I conceded, and absently ran my fingers across the stereo’s buttons. “I think the worst part is that Lee thought my childhood was something sad and lonely. And maybe sometimes it was. And it wasn’t always great—but god, Ben, it was good. It was broken a little, and banged up, but it was good.” I pulled open the drawer beneath the stereo to show Ben the CDs we had, the ones Dad played. “It was so good.”
Because Dad collected songs and danced Mom around the parlor—and together they taught us how to say goodbye. They taught us a lot of things that most kids rarely even thought of. They taught us how to grieve with widows, and how to console young kids who didn’t quite know death yet. They taught us how to put makeup on corpses and drain out the blood to replace it with formaldehyde, how to arrange clothes so the hospital bruises from the IVs and shock paddles and stickers weren’t quite as prominent. How to frame flowers on a casket to disguise how few some people received. Mom and Dad taught us so many things, and all of it led to this.
They gave us the tools to figure out what to do when they were gone.
And now Dad was.
I took out the topmost CD. A burned silver disc with Dad’s scratching scrawl on it.
Good Goodbyes
.
I couldn’t remember how many times, after long viewings and sad wakes, Dad would call us to the funeral home to help clean up—just like this. Just like now. The Days Gone Funeral Home was small, and Dad didn’t like overworking his employees if he didn’t have to, so he worked
us
instead. I always made like I hated it, the too-clean smell of disinfectant and floral bouquets, the bright rooms, the dead people in the basement, but I had a secret:
I never hated it as much as I said I did.
By the time Mom had dragged me and Carver and Alice to the funeral home, usually on school nights, Dad had already shrugged out of his coat, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, exposing the tattoos he’d acquired in his youth (that most of Mairmont would gasp at if they knew). He’d put on this CD, and beckon us into the house of death with a smile and a good song.
“Want a listen?” I asked Ben, showing him the disc like it was a secret.
“What is it?”
I put the CD into the stereo, and pressed play.
The hiss of the speakers sighed through the parlor, and I closed my eyes, and the music started. The antiquated bop hopped from room to room, the shake of the tambourine, happy and joyful and light, and finally—
finally
—I felt like I was home. The song settled into my bones as if it wanted me to move, like it wanted me to throw my arms up, to twirl, to jump.
I didn’t need to see where I was going. Every corner of this funeral home was my childhood, every inch seared into my soul like a long-lost treasure map.
I remembered Dad standing by the stereo. I remembered the snap of his feet. Pointing to Mom, beckoning her close with an orchid in his mouth and the shake of his hips.
“I didn’t expect this,” Ben remarked, surprised.
“We are full of wonders, Benji Andor.” I mimed the tambourine as I bopped down the hallway.
Carver, putting the guest book away in the office, looked at me like I’d lost my mind as Mom poked her head out of the smallest parlor room. A smile tugged at the edges of her rose-red lips.
“What’s that music, babe?” asked Nicki, fixing his rolled-up sleeves. He must’ve been the one helping Mom situate the flowers for tomorrow.
“Dad,” Carver replied, and he was fighting a smile as I wiggled the invisible tambourine.
I undid my hair from its tight bun and shook it out, because the wake was over, and began to sing along to the Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup
.
” Dad used to turn up the stereo as loud as it would go, so loud I was sure the corpses rattled in the basement, and take Mom by the hand, mouthing the words, and she’d laugh as they danced through parlors so accustomed to death, and they looked like home.
They were home.
This
was home.
Because Dad left us things—little things—so that we wouldn’t be alone. So
Mom
wouldn’t be alone. So he could still be with us, even if just in the melody of a song. Any song. Every song. Not just the Foundations, or Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi or Fleetwood Mac or Earth, Wind & Fire or Taylor Swift.
Whatever song, whatever made us feel
alive.
Carver grabbed his partner by the hand, and pulled him into the hall to dance.
The good goodbyes.
I always thought the CD was meant for the people laid up in coffins, with floral arrangements and bouquets and guest books—and maybe it was.
But maybe it was for the living, too.
To keep us moving forward.
Ben watched with a baffled look, so misplaced in a funeral home filled with light and sound, and before I could stop myself I reached out to try to take his hand, to get him to dance with us—when my hand fell through his.
He gave a sad sort of smile, and outstretched his hand. “We can pretend.”
“I like pretend,” I replied, and reached out my hand again, hovering it over his. Then I mimed taking his other hand and he played along—
And suddenly we were all moving and singing. He twirled me out, and back in, and I laughed in a way I hadn’t in years. And Ben was smiling. Really, truly smiling. It sent a shock straight through my core because he’d never smiled like that before. At least not for me.
He was beautiful.
It made my heart skip at the thought, and then the music, rattling in my bones so brightly, and I recognized—quite suddenly—this feeling. It was the kind I wrote about years ago, the kind he talked about, the kind that itched just beneath my fingers, lost on the doorstep of some Brooklyn brownstone—or so I thought.
It was the answer to a question, soft and subtle, but it was there—the kind of feeling, this hope, that had just been hiding, waiting for some specter to take my hand and dance me across the floorboards.
It felt, for a moment in time, like happiness.