Washing the Dead (40 page)

Mindy smiled at Lili across the roof of the car. “She’s gorgeous,”
she told me.

I said to Lili, a little belatedly, “You remember Mrs. Hecht, don’t you?”

“I think I met you here once. Nice to see you again,” Lili answered respectfully.

“I had a third child just to be a part of your mom’s classroom again. She’s the guru!” Mindy glanced at her watch. “Oops, gotta run.”

We were pushing our cart down the cereal aisle when Lili said, “Mrs. Hecht is like stalker into you.”

“Lili, she’s not a stalker.”

“Is she your friend, then?” Lili tossed a box of Pepperidge Farm Lido cookies into the basket.

“We’re friendly.” I ignored the bag of potato chips she grabbed.

Lili limped along through the produce section and put a four-dollar box of raspberries in the cart.

“Would you please ask first?” I snapped. “These are out of season.” I put them back.

“Well, like what does friendly mean? Do you like have lunch or go shoe shopping?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“I’m just trying to figure out who your friends are.”

“You don’t think I have any friends?” And then I flashed on Dawn and her high school buddies yukking it up at Oktoberfest. “I do. Your aunt Jenny, Sheri Jacobstein, and the 4th of July gang—”

“Your sister-in-law and Mrs. Jacobstein, who’s, no offense, way more into you than you are into her, don’t count. Neither do your teacher friends and Dad’s business friends,” she said officiously.

“They are my friends, Lili, and then there’s Mira.”

“Who’s Mira?”

“An old high school friend. We see each other for lunch sometimes.” The last time I had lunch with Mira was when Lili went off to kindergarten and my afternoons freed up. We’d lost touch after high school and run into each other when she was looking for a
preschool for her daughter. She’d become a prominent divorce attorney, and I met her downtown at a restaurant where all of the men and women were wearing power suits and talking on their cell phones. I tried too hard to sell Mira on the new and improved version of myself, and the whole lunch was an uncomfortable affair that I wanted to end quickly.

“Mrs. Hecht seems nice. Maybe you could have lunch with her.”

“Why are you so worried about my friendships?” I asked, aware that I had just been scrutinizing hers.

“Everyone should have a best friend,” she said with conviction.

I had a best friend once, I wanted to tell Lili. I wanted to drive her to the mansion and take her on a tour of every spot where Tzippy and I had played when we were growing up. Another wave of loss lapped against me.

She picked up a bunch of bananas. “These in season?”

I looked at her, amazed at how she’d gone from bratty to compassionate to impish in the span of the last ten minutes. “Yes, smarty-pants.”

Back in the car, I took a deep breath and said, “I found your marijuana in the basement.”

“I’m sorry,” Lili said after a fraught silence. She looked just as she had when she was seven and I made her return a handful of sugar cubes to Benji’s Delicatessen. She held out her little hand, coated in white granules, and apologized to Benji remorsefully.

“Were you getting high in our house?” I asked, remembering how smug I felt when I assured Dot that this was just a phase.

“Just once with a couple of kids from Summerfest, swear. When you and Dad went up to Elkhart Lake.” Lili had sold lemonade at Summerfest and met some college kids.

“You mean you weren’t doing it with Taylor?”

“You hate her, don’t you?”

“That’s not the point, Lili. I’m concerned that we can’t trust you and your friends home alone anymore.” I shuddered thinking
about the four girls in her class who only a few months ago died in a solo collision.

“It was ages ago, Mom. I hid the pot in the freezer, and I was going to throw it out, but I forgot.”

The freezer? “But I found a joint in the cedar chest.”

“This guy Ned must have stuck it in there,” she said quickly, gulping down her words as she did when she was nervous. “I didn’t.”

She sounded convincing, but I was afraid to read her face. I needed to believe that she’d in fact hidden the marijuana in the freezer and had never opened my chest or found my letters to Tzippy.

“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

“No.” Lili looked down at her lap. “Swear.”

Sam would not be grilling steaks for us that evening; I’d failed both to buy them at Sendik’s and to remember that he had a client dinner. I’d also been so tied up with Lili that I hadn’t picked up Dawn’s return call. I dialed her number three times, but my calls went through to voicemail. I microwaved a few burgers for Lili and me, and she was sweetly contrite as she slathered on mustard, volunteering all sorts of newsy tidbits about her day. After dinner, she went upstairs and did her exercises.

When Sam called me on the way home from his dinner, I told him about the pot. He was willing to accept Lili’s explanation and move on. He walked through the door with a big smile, changed into jeans, and made one of his enormous bowls of freshly popped popcorn—no microwave bags for him. The three of us sank into the soft brown cushions of our sofa and let the buttery kernels comfort us. I couldn’t have told you what was on or how we managed to polish off the entire bowl. But for that moment, with Lili’s body curved into mine and Sam’s arms around us, I felt like a bird who had returned from a dangerous migration. For tonight, life was sweet, maybe Splenda-sweet, but I’d take it.

A few days later, we made our annual Thanksgiving trek to Deerfield. Traffic was predictably heavy, and the drive took us two and a half hours. Lili slept most of the trip; she’d gone over to Megan’s the night before and hadn’t come home until midnight. For the last couple of days, she’d been doing her exercises diligently, and soon she’d be running again. Sam and I were elated that she was already falling back into step with her old friends and her old self. She’d decide that Taylor was bad news, if she hadn’t already.

Lili only woke up during our ritual pit stop. Sam bought her a package of watermelon Bubblicious, as was our tradition, and for me a can of diet soda, my road trip indulgence. He didn’t buy anything for himself. Sam rarely ate between meals, one of the many good habits Rose had instilled in him.

I caught a glimpse of Lili in the rearview mirror, blowing a big pink bubble. She looked about ten years old.

“Did you have fun at Megan’s last night?” I asked.

Her bubble popped. “Total blast. Mrs. Travinski took us to Kopp’s when she got home from work.”

Dawn was fun like that, the kind of spontaneous mom who would pile a gaggle of teenagers into the car and take them for custard in the dead of winter. “What was the special flavor?”

“Cranberry Medley.” Lili wrinkled her nose. “Gross. I got chocolate,” she said, and blew an enormous bubble.

“They usually have pumpkin this time of year,” I said as the bubble popped. We all laughed as she peeled sticky pink gum off her eyebrows.

Rose and Artie met us in the driveway and gave us a warm hello. Rose held out her hands and squinted at me. “You look svelte.” It was the highest form of compliment from Rose Blumfield. I had lost weight over the past few months, but not enough for anyone else on this planet to notice.

She slipped her arm through mine and pulled me to her. “I’ve lost a few pounds too. Had to. I’d nearly gone over my Lifetime.” Rose needed to maintain a certain weight for the privilege of inspiring her rather cultish Monday-morning following.

“We’ll have a little brunchy and then leave these boys to their football,” she said, although she didn’t need to tell me the plan; we’d been following the same routine for years.

Rose kept an immaculate house that always smelled like fresh air. This sense of order was important to Sam, so I kept our house clean too, although I’d always been a bit of a slob as a child. Rose had already set the dining-room table for Thanksgiving. “We’ll be eighteen tonight,” she told me, and reeled off the guests she’d invited. The Blumfields had been celebrating Thanksgiving with the Hirshes since Sam was in diapers. The group expanded and contracted based on which of each family’s children were able to make it. Neil celebrated Thanksgiving with Jenny’s family.

The kitchen table was set with pretty yellow plates and a matching tablecloth decorated with sunflowers. Rose had put out a basket of muffins, fruit, and turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, sans the crusts.

“Come, let’s eat,” she commanded.

We all sat down, and Lili took a muffin. “Looks delicious, Grose.”

Artie asked, “So, Lil, when’s that ankle going to heal up?”

Lili smiled at him brightly. “Soon, Grandpop.”

I hadn’t seen her so optimistic about her injury in months.

“Good girl. Grose and I know you’re going to get back into tip-top shape.”

After lunch, Sam and Artie went off to the den to read the paper together, both grumbling about the Tea Party’s latest antics. Lili and I cleared the table while she chattered on about the stores we’d hit tomorrow afternoon. These shopping expeditions had begun when Lili was six and we took her to the American Girl store, and they’d evolved into a whirlwind tour of her favorite shops, where Rose would treat her to something I would never buy for her. Grose and Lili enjoyed the frenetic energy of Black Friday, and I enjoyed watching them enjoy each other. I wondered about the rituals Lili and my mother might have shared had I allowed them the freedom to do so.

I was on my way to freshen up when my cell phone started to vibrate. I discovered two messages from Neil. In the first, he was trying hard to sound casual when he asked me to phone him. In the second, he said, “It’s about Mom. Please call.”

I dialed Neil, but his voicemail picked up, so I tried Jenny. No answer. Now I was growing frightened. I went downstairs to get Sam. He and Artie were watching the Bears play the Lions. “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.

Rose and Lili emerged from the kitchen as I was explaining. “Why don’t you try the nursing home?” Rose said.

“Thanks, I will.” After a few minutes of waiting for Bonnie to pick up, I learned that my mother had been taken to the hospital. As I dialed Neil again, my fingers shook so hard that I could barely punch the numbers on my phone.

“Neil, what’s up?” I asked, trying not to sound panicky.

“She had a heart attack.”

“Do they need to operate?”

“Let’s just wait for the test results,” Neil said soothingly.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I hung up and slouched into Rose and Artie’s couch with the phone in my hand. I knew that my mother had high cholesterol, as did half our friends, but she was taking medication. Unless she’d forgotten. “I need to go to the hospital to see my mom.”

Rose’s lips curled into a smile that barely masked her disappointment. “Of course, dear.”

Surely she must think I should go see my mother. It had been Rose who’d convinced me to invite her to our wedding. She said I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t.

Sam jangled the loose change in his pockets.

“Why don’t we wait until after dinner?” He was trying to be practical and appease both his mother and me.

“Well, I could go alone and come back and pick you up after things settle down,” I offered.

“Come on, Barbara. That doesn’t make sense,” he said. We were heading into dangerous territory, the place where he didn’t
want to accept that we had a crisis on our hands.

“Those are your options, honey.” I spoke slowly and without emotion.

The person who handled the aborted holiday feast with the most maturity was Lili. She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read and said, “Mom, I’d come to see you right away if you had a heart attack.”

Her words, so simple and beautiful, made me forgive her for months of snottiness. “Oh, Lili.”

“Why don’t I stay with Grose and Grandpop, and Dad can take you home and pick me up tomorrow?”

We all looked at one another with a
Why didn’t we think of that before?
expression. Lili had a knack for knowing what needed to be done.

24

S
am and I walked through the front entrance of St. Mary’s Hospital together, our arms touching slightly. Neil had given us my mother’s room number, and I followed Sam while he figured out the proper elevator to the cardiac unit. We were waiting for it when I spotted Dawn. Maybe it was her walk, youthful and confident, or the appeal of her otherness or her vocation, but something about her had always felt familiar. She reminded me of Simone.

“Everything okay?” she asked, looking worried.

I felt like I’d been traveling in some exotic country and finally encountered someone who could speak English—that’s how grateful I was. “My mom had a heart attack.”

“Oh, crap.”

“We’ll be on the fifth floor.”

“I’ll let you get settled, and then I’ll sneak up to see you on my next break.” She massaged my shoulder for a second. “Now, you hang tough, honey.”

“Thanks, Dawn.”

Neil met us outside my mother’s door as if he’d been keeping a lookout for us. Jenny was home with her brother’s family, all in from St. Paul for the holiday, so he was alone. He put his hand on my forearm. “They’re running tests now.”