Ina’s funeral is on Wednesday, and I sit with the family—feeling strange and peaceful about her being gone. So many people come to celebrate her life, to gaze up at the two portraits that bookend the coffin. One is from her wedding day, dressed in a cream-colored dress with her dark hair a halo around her head. The other could have been taken a week ago or ten years ago, or twenty. She was beautiful with her dark-brown hair, and I’m surprised that I ever wondered what she looked like when she was young. She was the same—beautiful and strong and independent.
Saturday morning, when Ina has been gone for two weeks, I climb the back stairs and tap on the glass door. Vicki waves me in. She is sitting with her hand on a cup of tea.
“Good morning,” I say, and at the sound of my voice, Cotton starts singing, “Happy Birthday to you,” and I call out a thank you. I nod toward the entry, asking permission to get her bird. She nods. Cotton greets me with a bobbing dance and hops to the edge of his cage, reaching out with his great talons for my arm.
“How did you know today is my birthday?” I whisper.
“I love you!” he calls out and then sings another refrain of happy birthday. I smile and make my way back to the kitchen, feeling soft and weepy.
“I love Cotton,” I say in my “Cotton voice,” and he tucks his head.
I sit down at the table, and Cotton shifts to my knee, lifting his wings for some love, and I oblige.
“How are you?” I ask, determined to do the right thing. Ina’s death isn’t about me. I sometimes have a hard time realizing that other people have their own lives and that it isn’t always about me. I have always been so full of myself. When I would go to school and think that everybody was watching me, noticing if I had stains on my clothes, seeing all of my failures, seeing my mother’s failures, whispering about how dirty my hair looked behind me, but nobody was. Nobody cared what I looked like, or what I was doing. Nobody ever cared, except Dylan, and I had shut him out for his care. That’s what he meant when he called me a narcissist. The time I’ve spent hiding out in the basement apartment has made me see everything from a different angle, like I am somebody outside of my own life. All these months while I walked the edges of society, the world just moved right on without me, and now I have come to terms with my tiny role going back into the world.
“I’m good,” she says, but her eyes are tired, and the weariness on her face is startling for its rarity. We sit for a few minutes, letting the bird take our attention while we each draw our emotions under control. We are in danger here, both of us, of breaking into sobs.
“You know I have loved living here?” I ask, relieved that my voice is steady.
“I hope so. We have loved having you here, Dear Heart.” She smiles, but I see the small crease in her brow, a sadness different from her grief.
“I think it’s time for me to go back home, you know?” I doubt that she understands, because I haven’t shared any of my past with her, only with Ina and Cotton. “I think I’ve been hiding here.”
She nods. “Back to Illinois, then?”
I was wrong; she already knew what I came here to tell her.
“Yeah. I think it’s time.”
“Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning.” She says this like sage wisdom, and it is, and I let it hang in the air, thinking about going back to the beginning and what that means to me.
“My mom died a couple of years ago, and I just kinda left.”
“And now you need to go back.”
I nod, unable to speak for a moment, my head bowed.
“Mother said you would.”
I look up, a little startled at this. “I didn’t ever talk to her about going home. Isn’t that funny? I didn’t even know I needed to until the morning she died, really.”
“Mother had a way. She always knew things before they happened.” She smiles, a small, sad parting of her pixie lips.
“Really?”
“Do you remember when you first came here, and I told you that you were the only person she had allowed to come see the apartment?” I nod, letting the memory spread out. “She had placed the ad in the paper for one day only. She said that a girl needed us, and she would be with us for not quite two years.”
I gasp. “How did she know that?” I ask, feeling on edge, like my world is in danger of breaking apart.
“She said she had a dream about you. She thought your name was Alice, though.” She shrugs, acknowledging that Ina was not always one-hundred-percent correct.
Her mentioning my mother’s name sends the chills racing from my scalp down my spine.
“That was my mom’s name,” I admit, awed by the coincidence.
“Mother had a way.”
I look at her, take the entirety of her into my heart. I have never been a “goodbye” person. I just go. But with this family, I feel like it isn’t a goodbye. I take Cotton to his perch. I will miss him so much. I will miss them all.
“My mother always said that you had something great inside of you, that you have a something that is very rare. I don’t know if she ever quite put her finger on what she believed it was.” She pauses, and I let her words sink in, letting them register.
Ina saw greatness in me. That wonderful woman saw greatness in me. I open my mouth to tell Vicki that she has me wrong—there is nothing great inside of me, nothing rare—but she gives a little shake of her head, quelling my argument, “Mother always believed that forgiveness is the key to finding greatness, in yourself and others.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever do big things,” I say. I tried that, my big life, and burned.
“It is not about big, it’s about good. Did she never say that to you?”
“No,” I whisper.
“I’m sure she meant to.”
I nod, because I know I have some forgiving to do, of myself and of others. I know I have some forgiveness to ask for as well. In person. Face to face. “Thank you for letting me be part of your family,” I say, and the catch in my throat makes my words creak. Vicki steps up, and we hug in the middle of the kitchen, both of us crying for all we have lost and all we have yet to lose.
“You will always be part of our family, Dear Heart.”
It’s only now that she has said it twice that I recognize Dear Heart is a name she is using for me. We smile, soggy through our goodbye.
I go downstairs and start carrying my bags around to Little Red for the return trip to Illinois. I leave the apartment exactly as I found it, although the book I borrowed from Ina, The Grapes of Wrath, with her notations and underlined passages, is already stored in my duffle.