JAMIE FORD
ALEXIS STARED UP AT A partially pregnant sky. Typical Seattle, overcast with a hopeful, glowing luminescence. She wished it would rain. She wished the sky would make up its mind, as she had.
Looking down, she regarded the hole in the ground—a resting place for her mother, swiftly dug with a trowel Otto had purloined from an army surplus store. The makeshift grave looked meager, unceremonious compared to the massive granite headstones that dotted the damp, mossy hillside of Lakeview Cemetery.
Milling about the dewy grass was a collective of residents, past and present. In place of flowers, Mr. Kenji had provided assorted greenery from the hotel, potted plants and planted pot.
Alexis dreaded that it had come to this. She wished her mother had been afforded a real funeral instead of this drive-by-shooting version—she and her family from the Angeline, quickly interring . . . something.
“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” one of the twins said.
“We need someplace to visit,” the other argued. “Someplace to remember. The Angeline won’t always be there. . . .”
Alexis nodded, feeling the weight of the soiled cardboard box in her hands.
Inside were her mother’s ashes.
Clovis had relented, preferring to bend the rules of his crematorium rather than store her mother’s body indefinitely. In the process, he had removed the pearl necklace Edith wore, not realizing they weren’t real. Only paste. But Alexis wore them anyway.
As she handed her mother’s ashes to Ursula, she noticed the old Seafair pirate was tearing up behind her ceremonial eye-patch (worn for special occasions such as this). Everyone was. Her mother’s death heralded the end of an era.
Mia walked up, glamorous in a long black dress, and late, as usual. Mr. Kenji handed her the violin and she began to play a haunting melody.
Nervously, Alexis touched each pearl, the way a priest might regard a rosary bead, the way she’d seen in movies. Each pearl represented a resident, a member of her extended family—a wayward saint cared for by her mother.
As the wind blew, Alexis closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was at another funeral, the only other funeral she’d ever attended, nearly ten years earlier. A memory that she’d rarely revisited, until now.
Lost in the dusty corners of her childhood, she remembered a similar gathering. Her mother was ever-present, as was Ursula, who had more teeth back then. The rest she didn’t recognize, though she knew they were part of her colorful extended family.
As she struggled with the faint images, she realized where she’d been—her father’s funeral. He’d knocked up her mother and vanished, but evidently the circumstances of his death brought strangers back together, if only for one surreal afternoon.
“Who was he?” she had asked.
“Just a friend.” Her mother answered, fidgeting with the pearls around her neck.
Alexis had never realized it was her father. But now it made sense. The most vivid memory was of LJ, a huddled mass on the periphery, babbling to himself.
“He mixed up his medication this morning,” her mother had said.
As Alexis watched the scene again, she realized what LJ had done. She’d seen it once before. He’d dosed himself and was tripping badly, probably on purpose. He wasn’t escaping the memory of accidentally killing her father; he was forcing himself to remember every detail. He was punishing himself. The guilt had derailed him, along with the acid, until his murmurings took a detour and he started shouting about how Buddy Holly had been a narc and was killed by J. Edgar Hoover.
Ursula pulled him away, sending him on a mission to clean Jimi Hendrix’s grave. That task kept him occupied for some time; Jimi was buried in Renton.
Afterward, they’d had a wake at the Angeline. Alexis had sat on the cracked, coffee-stained linoleum, coloring letters on a scrap of cardboard. The adults milled about, drinking her mother’s sherry like sacramental wine.
“She’s so creative,” Mr. Kenji had remarked. “Practicing her ABCs?”
The conversations drifted in and out. No one realized that her letters formed a sign that read need help. She had learned how to read early and write early, and people were still surprised by it. And in between debates over her father’s career choice and whether Jerry Garcia was actually a better guitarist when stoned, she had wandered outside and found a spot on the sidewalk next to the meth kids that was overlooked by members of Seattle’s more polite society. She hadn’t realized that they were panhandling. But she’d seen the signs soliciting assistance and thought she’d fit in.
Alexis sat there, alone in a crowd of strangers with her cardboard sign, expecting something—she wasn’t sure what. Then she felt he mother’s hands on her shoulders.
When Alexis opened her eyes again, she was at Lakeview, Ursula was pouring out her mother’s ashes. Part of them. The rest would be scattered as she’d wished. She felt hands on her shoulders again.
“You OK, chica?” Linda whispered in her ear. “You were gone there for a while . . .”
She felt Linda’s hands wrap around her waist and leaned back as her dry, chapped lips brushed her neck.
“You didn’t think I’d stay mad forever, did you?”
Alexis inhaled Linda’s scent, reached down and touched her hands. She noticed that Linda’s fingernails had been chewed to the quick. She did care.
“Not forever.” Alexis said, looking at the rest of the funeral gathering. “Just until you track me down in Arizona and I have to get a restraining order . . .”
“I don’t mean to spoil the moment,” Linda said, “but I think this is where—you know—you’re supposed to say a few words. You’re family and all. . . .”
Family? Alexis glanced at her uncle in the distance. And what about the residents? Her mother had known them for a lifetime longer than hers. They were family as well.
Linda whispered in her other ear, “Awkward . . .”
Alexis leaned back, enjoying the embrace. For once Linda was there for her, not just in it for coffin time—unconditional and unexpectant.
It was an interesting change.
Inhaling, Alexis blurted out, “I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you how great my mother was, but most of you know that.”
Alexis paused to collect herself, noticing a crow flying overhead, wondering if the black bird might be Habib.
“Edith was a lot of things. A friend, a defender, a protector, a benevolent dictator, a warden, and ‘a bull-goose loony,’ as LJ once said. But to be honest, she had her struggles as a mother.” Alexis swallowed hard. “All of you were her family—she called you heroes. But what was I? Where did I fit in? She kept me here, under wraps. Sometimes it was like she needed to be needed. I needed a mother, not a caretaker. But she did her best . . .”
Alexis paused, staring back at the eyes that watched her struggle to put together a fitting eulogy. She wished LJ were here in more than spirit; he would have been up to the task.
“Last year, for Mother’s Day, I went looking for the perfect card, among all the sappy Hallmark offerings. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Because the perfect card for Edith would have read, “Well . . . you tried.”
“She did,” Roberta chimed in, and the others nodded in agreement.
“And I’ve tried, too,” Alexis answered, “to keep going, to keep the Angeline sailing.” As she spoke she winked to Ursula in her pirate garb. “But we’ve run aground without her, and despite my desperate attempts, I need to move on.”
She couldn’t make eye contact with Otto, Mr. Kenji, Roberta, or any of the residents. She knew they were crestfallen.
“Now for the hard part,” Alexis said as she knelt down and removed the necklace, placing the pearls in the grave, kicking up a bit of dust from her mother’s ashes.
After each resident said a few words, sang a few songs, or recited a few lines of poetry, Alexis walked back toward the black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the cemetery. Her uncle was waiting for her. Linda trailed behind.
Mia caught up with her, handing out the violin. “I’m sorry I didn’t get the concert planned in time.”
“Don’t worry about it; that wouldn’t have changed anything.” Alexis took the violin with a weak smile. “Maybe I’ll actually learn to play this in Sedona.”
“Don’t tell me that’s it?” Linda said. “You’re free now, you can emancipate yourself, go from minor to major. You can stay here, in Seattle. My stepdad can help with the lawyerly things, he’s good at that.”
Alexis paused, nodding, part of her agreeing. “But I can’t.” she said. “Look at me. I’m the world’s oldest fourteen-year-old. I’m not my mother—”
Linda interrupted. “You’re more. You’re like Edith 2.0. And Edith 2.0 can do what she wants now.”
“Even if that means going to Sedona?”
Linda looked crushed. She dropped her head, paused a moment, maybe waiting for a reprieve; it never came. She turned and walked away.
Alexis knew that despite Linda’s support, there were strings attached and those cords were binding her here. If she were to have any kind of life, it would have to be away from those closest to her. She would have to leave the Angeline. Like Habib, she would have to fly away.