I shouted, “Please go home! My mother is sick and is having a baby. Please go home. She has to rest.”
The TV reporters rushed on me then, just like you see in movies. Veronica, they said, we heard you tried to shoot the man before he killed the kids. Veronica, do you think Scott Early should get the death penalty if he’s convicted? Do you think you could have killed him? Has this changed your life forever? Will you ever be able to . . .
I began to cry, then scream. I picked up the wooden apples my mother had carved and painted, that we kept in an old bowl on a shelf by the door, and began to throw them at the people with the cameras. My uncle Bryce took hold of both my arms, but I fought him, kicking and trying to bite him (although I later apologized). This was all on film. I looked like a hyena, with my teeth clenched and my hair sticking out of its braids. SISTER’S RAGE AT MOURNERS SHOCKS COMMUNITY.
My father came back then, and right away he drove to Dr. Pratt’s house, nearly all the way to town. He almost drove over camera equipment, and the press people hollered. Dr. Pratt gave Papa pills. When my father got back, I was still screaming, “They’re ours! They’re ours!” I don’t remember a whole lot of this. Papa made me take two of the pills, with milk. The pills tasted like the astringent I put on my face so I wouldn’t get pimples. But in a few minutes, they made me feel calm. Then they made the room begin to revolve slowly. Then I fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was one o’clock the next afternoon.
My sisters’ funeral was at three.
Chapter Five
As far as I was concerned, my uncle Pierce spent way too much time at my sisters’ funeral trying to get all of us to commit ourselves to being good and honoring the Doctrine and Covenants and way too little time on the little girls. “Brothers and sisters, we will miss with all our hearts the sweet ways of Ruth Elizabeth Swan and Rebecca Rowena Swan, my nieces, my brother’s children. But they are the fortunate among us because we know the truth. We know what has been revealed to us by the Prophet, the word we live every day, and so we can rest in the truth that they already know the joys of the most exalted celestial realm. But we, left behind, must struggle with our sin. . . .”
I didn’t listen. I didn’t like Uncle Pierce then.
Uncle Bryce spoke, too, about the importance of family being like a body that helps heal the part that is wounded. That was better, but it still was about us, not about my sisters.
We sang.
A former bishop spoke.
Already, there was black rain inside me.
I stared at the plain little polished boxes with their golden hinges and thought of being in the little room outside the chapel in the funeral place where they let us look at Ruthie and Becky.
I had picked out their clothes.
Aunt Gerry had put out their best dresses on the beds the previous afternoon, before all the idiot singers came. She tried to do it so no one would notice what she was doing. But I did. When I came in, after talking to Mama, I told her as gently as I could, “I’m sorry, Aunt Gerry. But those particular clothes were clothes they hated. I wouldn’t want them to have to wear them . . . now.”
My aunt didn’t argue with me, the way some adults might. Aunt Gerry was young, the wife of my father’s youngest brother. She had short hair in a shag, and she liked to dance and have tickle fights with us. She had only one baby, baby Alex, who was four months old. He was asleep between two rolled-up quilts on Ruthie’s bed. Ruthie’s pillow was already gone. “What do you think would be better, Ronnie?” she asked me.
I went to their closets and got out Ruthie’s plaid kilt and her red-and-black “silky sweater”—the one that used to be mine when I was little but still didn’t have any pills or snags on it, probably because I hardly ever wore it unless I was forced to. I got out her black tights and I took off my own ID bracelet of silver beads with my initials, RS, for her to wear. My friend Jenna from the basketball team gave it to me when I was named Rookie of the Year; and though they weren’t my real initials, which would have been VS, they were Ruthie’s. For Becky, I found, folded on her shelf with the stuffed bear she called Blueberry, her Cinderella dress. This wasn’t appropriate. But I had made that dress for her, and she tried to wear it almost every day. It was just a plain, modest dress with a white top and puffed sleeves, one little ribbon of gold rickrack on the neck, and a sky blue skirt so full that it would accommodate her little tummy so she could twirl. It wasn’t that clean. With all of my heart, I wanted to keep that dress. It smelled like Becky—of cocoa and her soapy little head she never quite got rinsed because of the thickness of her curls. But I knew she would want to twirl and twirl and play dress-up in heaven. A little goddess should be able to wear a princess dress. With it, I placed her socks printed with black kittens on them. The colors were all washed out and the elastic stretched so when she wore them, she had to keep pulling them up. They were not her best, but why should she have to give them up now? She loved them because they reminded her of our cat, Sable. Every time my mother tried to put them in the rag bag, Becky got them out and put them back into her sock drawer. When I was finished, I brought all these things to Aunt Gerry. “Maybe the Cinderella dress isn’t—” I began.
“I think you’re right,” my aunt Gerry said. “These are better than the ones I picked.”
“I don’t know if Uncle Pierce would think it was . . . like, sacrilegious or something,” I said.
“Well,” Aunt Gerry said, “I don’t know of any rules about anything like that. I think we should just do what we think is right.” She folded the clothes and put them in a box to take to the funeral place. At the last moment, I ran after her and gave Blueberry bear to her. That was even harder than the dress. I would have their books and their drawings.
But not Blueberry bear.
It had rained overnight. Papa had bagged up all those candles and wreaths and teddy bears and taken them to the Lutheran church out past the mall, off the highway. Our yard was our normal yard again. The rain had washed away the chalk marks and tattered the yellow tape. Uncle Bryce tore down the last of it just before we left, because our family would come back to our house and he didn’t want them to see crime scene tape the first thing.
When we drove, I was in the backseat alone. I could see the Emorys’ car in front of us the whole way.
The only thing Mama said, and just once, was, “The baby’s moving.”
My sisters’ names were on this little board outside the funeral parlor, where they usually would put a Bible verse or something if it were a church. It was as if this were a movie about Becky and Ruthie—which is exactly how I felt, as if I were going to a movie that would be over soon. Papa had on a tie and his good black cashmere jacket, the one he wore to his brother Bryce’s wedding and to services the day Uncle Pierce’s sons left for mission; and Mama was wearing the long, loose purple velvet dress she wore to art galleries. Though I didn’t know this, as she lay in bed, she had drawn charcoal sketches of Becky and Ruthie.
Ruthie was running away up the ridge, looking back and grinning. Becky was sitting in a circle of sunlight, holding her bowl filled with berries. Mama had stretched the sketches on little stick frames Papa must have brought to her. With my father holding one of her arms, she carried the sketches under the other arm as we walked in. All our relatives filled the place to overflowing, but they stopped hugging and touching me when the funeral man asked if we wanted our private visit.
Just the three of us.
It was cold in there, in the little room with soft pale blue curtains and recessed lights that I saw, when I looked up, were pink. The coffins were on little white stands, painted, but basically just like Mr. Emory’s sawhorses. My older cousins would carry them into the chapel room when the time came.
When I saw my sisters wearing those clothes, with their flannel blankets tucked up over their shoulders under their arms and their pillows under their heads, I wanted to agree with the Arizona newspaper lady: I did want to die. There was no way to tolerate it. There was n
o way to lean on God. I wanted to get down on the floor and hit my head until I passed out, or scream and scream. I wanted to make it thunder. But I could do nothing that was big enough. It wouldn’t be right. Later, when I looked up ways of grief, like you’d look up ways of celebrating Christmas around the world, I discovered that if I were a Muslim or an Irish girl, I’d have been allowed to scream and cut my hair and clothes. I think I should have. Seeing Becky and Ruthie with gloomy little motionless smiles, with their very same fingers that I’d had to wash jelly off of two days before holding little white roses, Becky’s bear with its head on the pillow next to her, I couldn’t stop crying, and not crying like a twelve-year-old, crying like I did when I was a little kid and broke my elbow wiping out on my bike. I cried so hard that I had to go into the little bathroom and throw up. When I came out, Mama was swaying as if she were going to fall, but Papa held her up. He said, “I love you, Cressie. I love our children.” His mouth was squeezed tight, though, and his voice sounded like it did when he argued with Uncle Pierce. I know he was angry. I was angry, like him, but also sad, like Mama.
Mama turned down Ruthie’s collar and saw how they’d sewed up the cut. It was sewn with pink-flesh-colored thread.
“It’s so small now,” she said to me. “It looks like such a little cut.” She reached for the corner of the blanket around Becky’s neck, but Papa held her hand back. We knelt down. Papa blessed Ruthie and Becky for the last time, just as he had every night of their lives and every morning before he left for school, and then he blessed Mama and me.
The funeral guy asked if we wished to kiss them or take a photograph. Mama put her fingers to her lips and touched each of my sisters’ lips. “I don’t want to feel them . . . not be warm,” she said. The man nodded. Papa kissed the tops of their heads. I asked for a pair of scissors. The man hurried out of the room, and Mama and Papa looked at me, at first strangely, then accepting.
That Christmas, during the long days of the holiday tournament I had been so excited to play—but now couldn’t because I was in mourning and in the newspaper—I wove together the lengths of Ruthie’s auburn hair and Becky’s dark brown hair into braids so tiny and tight that it was easy to form them into a ring. When I wore it on a chain, people thought it was made of some kind of exotic reed, and I never corrected them. I never told anyone, and I never wore it around my parents. I could have put it in a locket, but over time it grew as hard as deer horn. I felt that this was their wish for me, to keep. Once, on a picnic, the chain broke and I was practically hysterical until this boy I was friends with found it. People had looked for it for an hour. I still wear it when I need courage. The only time I was ever in the hospital, the nurses even taped over it so I could keep it on. I used the jewelry set I’d been given at my birthday to make a chain and I soldered the links.
That day, when I was finished cutting a lock of their hair, which still felt just as soft and real as my sisters had felt, I walked out of the room while the funeral director closed the boxes in front of my mother. I heard my mama’s little shriek. I knew Papa would place the sketches on top of each coffin. I kept on walking, out to where my cousins were.
Normally, when we got together, we couldn’t stop talking. Allie, Bridget, Sandrine, Bree and Tonya, Conor, Mark, Joel, and I were all the same age. Our parents usually had to scold us to go to sleep at the camp-out, and we still didn’t stop, not until the stars were faint in the sky. But today, Bree and Bridgie just took my hands and led me into the room where the service would be, and they sat next to me on a big sofa. My friend Emma came and stood beside us. Bridget moved over so she could sit down, too. My parents sat up in front.
Clare got up to sing the hymn. But she didn’t sing a hymn, or not right away. She bit her lip and looked at my mother and at my uncle Pierce.
Then she sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”
Everyone was shocked at first, but then everyone except my aunt Adair cried. The birthmark on her neck got redder, the way it did when she was mad. But my aunt Gerry cried so hard, she had to get up and leave the room. Aunt Adair looked even more furious. Clare then sang the children’s hymn “I Will Go Wherever You Lead Me,” I think it was. Everyone sang, I think. I’m not sure. I always think of her singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” and knowing it was for Becky and Ruthie and me, that we would meet somewhere, where all the clouds would be far behind us. This might have been okay at a Gentile funeral, but not at an LDS funeral. On the other hand, no one was going to stop her.
Papa and Mama didn’t seem to notice I wasn’t with them.
This turned out to be how it would be in general.
When our relatives finally went home, Papa wasn’t even around the house to say good-bye.
He’d taken a leave of absence until the end of the Christmas break, and all he did was walk. He walked in the rain and in the snow and in the night. He lost twenty pounds in three weeks. Mama, as out of it as she was, said thank-yous to everyone for him. Everyone said they understood. Papa walked in the woods and over the tops of the hills until dawn that first night. And the night after that. Sometimes he’d come in at two or three in the morning. Some nights I would find him asleep in his clothes and boots on the couch. He and Mama had a little bed, for adults, that is—what you call a full-size bed. Most people’s parents have queen-size or king-size. It was because they liked to remind themselves to sleep close together. But Mama was so big by then that Papa had been sleeping on a blow-up bed on the floor next to her. He would sleep there after the baby came, for a little while, until the baby was ready for a cradle in their room. On the nights he walked, even if it was cold and the wind was screaming around the house, he would come into my room, and I would almost wake when he put his hand on me and blessed me. But when I’d open my eyes, he’d be gone.
What I did was, I cooked.
That is, I thawed out things Sister Emory and Sister Finn and the others brought and put them in the oven at 350 degrees until they looked more or less done. I cut up three portions, which I put on plates. We ate whatever was in the freezer. I was glad we had a chest freezer in the barn, although I had to ask Papa to carry things out there for me or make a dozen trips. Cornbread and venison casserole. Wild rice soup. Tamales and scalloped ham, and cake, cake, cake. We had cakes enough for a hundred birthdays. Pineapple and caramel and six kinds of chocolate cake. There were ladyfingers and raspberry angel food. It got like the Jell-O. When I was in school later and craved something, it would always be salty. I ate cake in those weeks as if it were bread because there was no bread, and I couldn’t drive and I didn’t know how to make bread yet. I didn’t like to ask Mrs. Emory, because she’d done so much.
Some nights, when Mama was asleep—she slept most of the time after taking her shower—I would climb out my back window and meet Clare at the willow fort. We’d have on our coats and mittens and wrap ourselves in blankets. Sometimes we’d break branches, and Clare would bring a log and we’d start a fire in the fire pit. Emma was sending her love but couldn’t bear to talk to me, Clare told me. She was afraid she’d say something stupid. The girls from the team had sent me a ball with things written on it: “Impossible Is Only a Word.” “Be Strong.” “We Love You.” Clare asked me if it helped. I said that it did, but it was like the singing of the strangers outside our door. I thought that they felt if you just did something nice, you got to be part of it, plus it let you off the hook. They got to give me a ball, and Coach sent a plaque that said a star had been named Rebecca Ruth by the International Star Code. A couple of times Clare and I tried to see it. The documents said it was in Orion’s belt. We could never find it.
“Can we ever be friends like we were before?” Clare asked me one night. I thought about it. We were making a big fire that night in the fire pit because it was cold and we had sleeping bags, with the intention of sleeping out.
We didn’t make it all night, for obvious reasons.
“Not like before,” I said. “You’ll always be my best friend. I don’t
mean that. But right now, I don’t know if I can ever have fun again like we did. Where you just do what you’re doing right then.”
“You mean like a kid,” Clare said. That was exactly what I meant. Clare always understood.
“Right now, I think I left that fun back there,” I said, pointing back toward our yard, “but I’m not sure. I’ve never been through anything like this. Maybe you get better.”
“Do you miss them?”
“I can’t say I miss them. It’s like they’re not gone. Their clothes and toys are still there, all messed up, in our room. Every time I pick something up, I find a doll shoe or a barrette. Maybe I have to let them go before I miss them. Maybe I don’t want to miss them, because once that starts, that’s how it’ll be for my whole life.”
“My mother had a brother who died.”
“She did?”
“Yes, but he was a baby. He had whooping cough, before they had the good vaccine. She doesn’t remember.” Clare wasn’t saying something. We knew each other that well. I nudged her. “She said her mother was . . .”
“Never the same. Was she truly strange? Was she nuts?”
Clare said slowly, “No.”
“She was like my mother is now.”
“Yes. But she was like that forever.”
“I don’t think my mother will be like this forever. In the fifteenth century, when a knight died, his lady had to go to bed immediately, for six weeks.”
“Neither do I,” said Clare. “Your mother is the strongest—”
“The knight’s lady didn’t even go to the funeral. She was considered too delicate. And my mother, though she is a strong person, anyone . . .”
“Anyone . . .”
“This is beyond anything—”
“And she’s pregnant . . . and if she loses the baby . . .”
“She won’t lose the baby. It’s too late to lose the baby.”
“Does she wish she weren’t having the baby?”
“She doesn’t talk.”