Jennifer Brown - Torn Away

Before I knew it, we were driving up the exit into Elizabeth, all at once the surroundings looking familiar and unfamiliar to me, as if I’d been gone forever. This part of town had been untouched by the tornado, and other than a few downed trees, you would never have guessed that anything unusual had happened here. We stopped at a grocery store and bought flowers to put on the graves. I picked out pink carnations for Marin’s, because the florist had sprinkled glitter across them. I knew how much Marin had loved pink and sparkles. My grandmother bought red roses, because those represented love.

We shared memories, and picked out the perfect flowers, and by the time we reached the cemetery, my mom and sister were in some ways more alive to me than they’d ever been.

We both stopped talking as we drove through the cemetery. There was a very somber feeling about being there, so somber I almost felt a buzzing in my ears. Someone was being buried near the entrance; the mourners’ dresses fluttered in the breeze as they stood with their heads bowed.

Everywhere I looked, it seemed, there were mounds of new dirt. New graves. My grandmother had told me that the final death count from the tornado was one hundred twenty-nine. One hundred twenty-nine lives stolen, only two of them from me. It seemed so weird to think of so many families grappling with the same sadness I’d been wrestling. This was the only cemetery in Elizabeth, so most of them were likely buried here.

“Let me see…” my grandmother said as she turned right down one of the little side roads that snaked deeper into the cemetery. “I think it’s over by that fence back there.”

I gazed out the window, trying to find two fresh mounds near the fence, swallowing against the lump in my throat. This was where they were—my mom and my sister. This was where they would be forever. The finality of their deaths hit me on a whole different level. This wasn’t temporary. They were really gone. They were never coming back. At the end of this nightmare there would be no happy reunion.

Finally, my grandmother put the car in park and turned it off. She let her hands rest in her lap, gazing down at them for a few minutes. The only sound in the car was the crinkle of the plastic around the flowers as I squeezed them tighter.

“You ready?” she asked.

I turned back toward the window. The two graves were obvious now that we were near them. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

We got out and traipsed toward the fence line. I read some of the names on the headstones, not recognizing a single one, and idly wishing that there were at least one person nearby that Mom would have known. Someone to keep her company. But I guessed she had Marin for that. I clutched the flowers so tight my fingers ached. Marin’s purse bumped along my side.

“They don’t have headstones yet,” my grandmother said as we got closer, but it was as if she wasn’t really talking to me so much as she was talking to herself. “I hope he bought her one, at least.”

I couldn’t imagine Ronnie not buying them headstones. But who knew what Ronnie would do and not do these days? After all, I’d never have guessed he’d abandon me. Boy, did he ever surprise me with that one.

We stopped walking, and even though I suddenly didn’t want to, was suddenly terrified to, I had no choice but to look at their final resting place.

I turned my eyes forward, expecting to be hit by an onslaught of sadness. Maybe even weakness, grief pulling me to my knees.

But it was just dirt.

Two splotches of dirt in an otherwise grassy field. One splotch of dirt much longer than the other. My mom and Marin were under there somewhere, but these splotches of dirt weren’t them. Now that I was here, I wasn’t even sure why I expected them to be.

My grandmother sniffed lightly, and I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, which might have been her wiping her eyes, but I was too riveted to the dirt mounds to pay her much attention.

“They’re gone,” I said. The obvious. “Ronnie sent me away before the funerals. I didn’t get to say good-bye, and now it’s too late because they’re gone.”

“I didn’t get to, either.” She paused for a really long time. Then finally, “But I like to think they knew I loved them, even if Marin didn’t know me.”

“But I never got to say it. I never told them.”

She sniffed again, and then said, her voice louder with resolve, “You can tell them now.”

I turned to her. “But I can’t. I don’t know how.”

My grandmother looked like she was slowly melting. She tried to keep it in, but her face jiggled and wobbled and soon crumpled in completely. She nodded, letting out a sob. “I know,” she said. “And I don’t know how to help you. I feel like the only thing I can offer my daughter after all these years is to help you let her go, and I can’t do it. How can I, when I’m not ready to let her go myself?”

I stood awkwardly in front of her. I hated that she was crying, but this whole grandmother-and-granddaughter thing was so new to me, and I was such a volcano of conflicting feelings myself, always feeling so near eruption I barely wanted to move.

I bent my knees and dropped the flowers on the ground, then stood up again. Slowly, I opened Marin’s purse, then unzipped the small compartment inside. The foils shone at me, as if they were lit from within rather than reflecting sunlight. I scooped them out and held them in my palm, offering them to my grandmother.

She sniffled some more, blinking and calming down as she tried to understand what I was giving her.

“What’s this?” she said, pulling a crumpled tissue out of her pants pocket and wiping her cheeks with it.

I licked my lips. “This is Marin,” I said.

Slowly, with shaky hands, she reached out and plucked a foil out of my palm. She unfolded it, looking uncertain.

“ ‘Marin loves scorpions,’ ” she read. She flicked a curious glance at me, then reached out and took another. “ ‘Marin is a monkey.’ ”

And even though my drawings couldn’t possibly have made sense to her, she took another and then another, reading each one aloud, sometimes laughing a wet laugh and sometimes unable to finish the sentence for the tears in her voice. She met her other granddaughter that way, one chewed-up memory at a time.

We sat down on the ground together at my mom’s feet, the purse open between us so my grandmother could put the foils down without their blowing away. I explained some of them. The same way she told me about my mom’s cut bangs and swimming prowess, I told her about Marin’s peach-colored leotard and about the East Coast Swing. I picked at the petals of one of Mom’s roses as I talked, and my grandmother cried and asked questions and laughed and interjected and cried some more.

Finally, when we were both talked and cried out, I turned onto my knees and placed the bouquets of flowers on each grave, wiping dirt that had gotten stuck on my palms onto the sides of my shirt. I assessed how the flowers looked, and then, struck by a moment of bravery, I decided that if I was on my knees anyway, I might as well give talking to my mom a try.

At last.

My grandfather had said that to pray was to speak from my heart. So that’s exactly what I did. I pressed my palms together and closed my eyes, feeling shaky and nervous and self-conscious. I talked silently, in my head, so my grandmother couldn’t hear what I had to say. We had started to get to know each other, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to know everything. I still wanted to keep some things to myself.

Hey, God, I said. I know you’re keeping Mom and Marin safe up there and everything, and I’m really glad about that. I’m sure they were scared when they got to you. So thanks for taking care of them. I took a breath and squeezed my palms together tighter. I’m, um… not sure how to do this, but I’d really kind of like to talk to my mom, if that’s okay. I haven’t gotten to say anything to her since she died.

My knees pressed into the soft ground, and I let my butt sink slowly to rest on the backs of my legs. I squeezed my eyes tight, like I’d done before, and tried to picture Mom’s face in my mind.

And just when I thought the image would never come, it did.

She was smiling at me. Laughing, maybe. There was sunlight highlighting the top of her head and she was wearing that ridiculous pair of sunglasses that I’d always made fun of because they were so huge.

I felt such love radiating off her, the words poured out of my heart.

Hi, Mom, I said in my head. I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me until now. I didn’t know how to talk to you at first and I was afraid that if I started talking to you it would mean you were really dead. Which is stupid, of course, because you’ve been really dead all along. I’ve just had a hard time believing it.

So I guess you’ve seen everything that’s happened since you died. All the stuff with Ronnie and Clay and Lexi and Meg. I’m not gonna lie, Mom, it’s been hard. And scary. And every day I wish I had died with you. Not that I’m suicidal or anything, so you don’t need to worry about that. Just that I wish I hadn’t been left behind, all alone. That part really sucks.

But I’ve learned a few things. Like that Ronnie loved you so much he can’t live without you. Which, even though it hurt me, is kind of cool in a way.

And that Clay is maybe the worst man on earth and I will never, ever be stuck in the same room with him again. At first I didn’t understand why you lied to me about him leaving us, and I felt really betrayed. I thought everything I knew about you might have been a lie, but since meeting him and your parents, I’ve realized that the parts of you I knew weren’t untrue; they were only part-truths. There were lots of things about you that I didn’t know, and learning those things has actually been comforting in a way. They make me feel closer to you. And I can see that actually there’s one real truth, and that is you loved me enough to do anything it took to protect me. I think that’s something I’ve known my whole life. I’m thankful for it.