I DON’T EVEN WANT TO TALK ABOUT Alexis’s wake.
I don’t want to talk about her little sister, slumped on a chair in the back of the funeral home, twisting Alexis’s violin bow between her shuddering hands, twelve years old and three days into her new life as an only child.
I don’t want to talk about her dad, who stood in the receiving line, dutifully shaking hand after hand, but whose legs were trembling so hard it was like he was willing himself not to run out the door and keep running forever.
I don’t want to talk about her mom, the wet circle her tears left on my shoulder after she hugged me; how she thanked me for the violin money; how even in her grief she was kind enough to pretend that I had always been good to her daughter, that the past three years I’d abandoned her had never happened.
I don’t want to talk about the line that snaked out the door of the funeral home into the parking lot, and all the kids from elementary school who were there, kids who’d gone nine years sitting alongside Alexis in class without ever exchanging a word with her and who now would never get the chance.
I don’t want to talk about the twenty retired Sacred Heart nuns, the ones who made the long journey by Greyhound bus all the way from the mother house in Kentucky, some with walkers, some in wheelchairs, to pray over a girl they’d never met simply because she was an ASH girl, and one of their own.
I don’t want to talk about how beautiful a day it was when they buried her, the sunshine so tastelessly bright, the flowers rudely blooming, the mockery of the chirping birds. Or the park we passed on the way to the cemetery, where mothers pushed their young children on swings and the children laughed, throwing their heads back and drinking in the sun. How dare they laugh? Didn’t they know what had happened? Didn’t they care?
And I don’t want to talk about how much it all hurt, because even an honors English girl like me doesn’t have the language.
A couple days after the funeral, I came home from school to find my mom sitting at the kitchen table with her hands around a mug of coffee.
“Honey?” she said. “Can we talk?”
I sat down.
“It’s been a hard week for you,” she said, putting a mug-warmed hand on top of mine. “A hard couple years.”
“It is what it is.” In the days since I’d heard the awful news, stupid little clichés like these—the enemy of journalism, Ms. Lee had taught us—were all I could think of to say. It was like, the darker and wilder my thoughts grew, the emptier my spoken words became.
“I was thinking,” my mom continued. “I don’t want to make anything harder for you than it already is. But, well, did you know Dad’s birthday is next Wednesday? He’s going to be forty-five.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to go to Nebraska for a few days. It’s a long drive. I could use some company. And it’s been almost three years now since you’ve seen him. He misses you like crazy, Wendy. No matter what he did, he is still your dad.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” I said, echoing the words of the email I had sent him back in December, “I don’t have a father.”
My mom sat back in her chair. The color rose in her cheeks as if she’d been slapped.
“He will always be your father, like it or not,” she said sharply. “That’s what a family is.”
“Can’t I just stay with Aunt Kathy while you’re gone? Or Aunt Col?”
My mom shook her head. “You know Aunt Kathy—she and Simon are swanning off to Palm Springs tomorrow for the rest of the week. And Aunt Col is working overnights. And before you even ask, I am not letting you stay home by yourself. I don’t want you to be alone after all that’s happened.”
I picked at a piece of egg that was crusted onto the tablecloth from breakfast.
“You’ll get to miss a couple days of school,” my mom said hopefully. “Might be good for you just to get away for a while, try to process everything that’s happened?”
I knew that she was right at least about that—I really could use a few days to get my head right. Someone had already placed a little white cross near the tracks at the place where Alexis had been killed. She was really gone, and soon enough, the people who had actually known her would grow older and move out of the neighborhood, and she would become just like Sandy DiSanto or Tiffany Maldonado, a ghost, a superstition, a cautionary tale instead of a real human being whose life had ended and who I had loved. Slumber parties would begin to buzz with new Alexis-related superstitions: If you listened to classical music during a rainstorm, little girls huddled beneath their sleeping bags would whisper, she would appear to you. Bored teenagers would dare one another to stand on the tracks and call her name. Parents would use her as a warning when their kids stepped out the door with their headphones stuffed over their ears. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the thought of any of it.
“Honey?” my mom said gently. “What do you think?”
“If I say yes,” I said finally, my eyes trained on the smear of egg, “I reserve the right not to talk to him or let him hug me.”
“Fair enough.” She swallowed the last of her coffee and stood up. “Does this anti-hugging policy also apply to your mother?”
“You’re different.”
Her arms around me were like putting a blanket over a fire—they smothered away the hot pain, at least for a little while.