Men loaded up the casket again and we drove to the cemetery and we all stood around the hole in the ground that was waiting for us.
Then the minister said some more things, but all I heard was “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” and then there was this roaring in my ears and I couldn’t see anything. It all went black and I was pretty sure God was making me die.
And then I was sitting on a bench under a tree, and Mrs. McMillan was there with her arm around me, using her handkerchief to put water on my forehead.
I had a terrible headache and I knew right away that God had done something to me. But I wasn’t dead and at least I could see again.
“Feeling better, Leanna?”
I looked at Mrs. McMillan. She is so pretty. I mean, she’s old, but she looks kind all the time. She looks like she almost always smiles. Her eyes are dark blue and they never look cold. I felt the tears start. She hugged me tighter.
“You fainted, Leanna,” she said. And for a moment I perked up because I had never fainted before, and I knew just how Anne Shirley felt because she had never fainted before and had always wanted to and then she did when she fell off the roof.
But then I felt mortified. Had all these people seen me faint? Did they see my underwear?
“We got you over here by the fountain and I told your mom I’d take care of you.”
I watched Mrs. McMillan dip her handkerchief in the fountain and wring it out and then she put it on my forehead. Then I saw my mom talking a little ways away. And I looked at Mrs. McMillan again and I said, “I think my dad died because of me. I have behaved inappropriately.” I told her everything.
When I finished she didn’t laugh at me or look angry. She took my hands and smiled.
“Leanna. No one knows why bad things happen. But I am sure that little girls aren’t punished for having bad thoughts or saying bad things about their parents. Why, we’d all be in lots of trouble if that were true.”
I thought about this. I knew it was sort of true because I’d heard lots of kids complain about their moms or dads at school and they were all still alive. Then I remembered.
“But I said I wanted to be an orphan.”
Mrs. McMillan nodded. “Yes, you did, and I think that was wrong. And I think if you are earnest and concentrate, maybe you’ll figure things out in a less drastic way.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant and I asked.
“Leanna. There must be a way for you to be a writer without wishing your parents dead.”
“Cassandra Jovanovich said I should just write and not worry.”
“That’s one solution. But it might be hard for an eleven-year-old girl to just ignore her mother. I think you have to find a way to tell her how much writing means to you.”
She hugged me and kissed the top of my head and wiped my forehead with the wet hanky again. And I suddenly remembered how the minister puts water on babies’ foreheads and kisses them when they’re baptized. Maybe I had just been baptized by Mrs. McMillan.
She left me sitting on the bench. I closed my eyes and said I was sorry. I didn’t want my father to die, and I really didn’t want my mother to die, either. I was hoping God would hear me, so I kept my eyes squeezed tight to find out if I was forgiven. But all I heard was a bird singing in the rosebush behind me. I could smell the roses as the bird stirred the flowers.
Later that night I thought that maybe I had been answered after all. Maybe a bird singing and the perfume from a rose was how God said things nowadays.