“HELLO, MOTHER.”
Rosalyn Barlow sat on a cold stone bench in the center of the Eddings family mausoleum. It was six thirty, and the sky was still dark as she looked up through the glass dome ceiling.
“How has it been for you, this second year of being dead?”
It had gone so quickly, these past two years, that Rosalyn had hardly felt them at all. In fact, it might as well have been mere moments since she received that call from her father.
Rosalyn let out a sigh as she stared at her mother’s portrait. It was, of course, the portrait the woman had specified in her carefully drafted instructions for burial. The cremation. The urn. The placement within the mausoleum, which she had commissioned as a present to herself on her sixtieth birthday. The picture, and the words beneath it—a full-page eulogy that she had written herself. The memorial service, the caterer to use, the guests to invite. The list of mourners permitted to speak. It wasn’t that she was a morbid person. Far from it. Mrs. Eddings had not planned on dying. What she had planned on was immortality, one way or another.
“My year has sucked, if you’re at all interested.”
It was the smile that always got to her, the way it seemed to respond to whatever it was Rosalyn said. Sometimes it seemed cheery. Other times sour and laced with cynicism. Today, it seemed more of a smirk as it stared back at her from the canvas.
Oh, for Christ’s sake, it was saying. Get over yourself and move on.
“Yes, Mother. Of course. I’m not a complete imbecile.”
Still, she had come here to think, to regroup before leaving behind events that by all rights should have devastated her. She’d come on the heels of those events, and in the face of exhaustion, to reflect before coming up with yet another brilliant plan, this time to control the impending damage from her husband’s affair, and to save her daughter who was digging herself a mighty large hole.
It was a strange place to do this, to think. In the center of a cemetery, surrounded by the dead, whose bones lay beneath the ground, and her mother’s ashes, which were carefully sealed in the sterling silver urn she was now holding in her hands. But it was precisely that—the presence of the dead—that opened the gate to the thoughts that were, on every other day, unavailable to her. Death was inevitable. Death would come. And when it did, even the most carefully laid plans would not be enough to stop the waves of indifference from rolling in, slowly erasing the lives that were lived. It had been a mere two years, and already the famous Mrs. Eddings was little more than a blip on the memories of those she had known. Rosalyn’s father was remarried. Her brother in London. It was Rosalyn and Rosalyn alone who carried the woman in her soul. And this was not by conscious choice.
She might have escaped this fate of carrying around a woman who was not only dead but also wholly unworthy of such a favor. But she had been branded years ago with her mother’s imprint after making choices that could not be undone.
It was the knowledge of this fact that was now consuming her as she held her dead mother in her hands. Ashes. That was all that was left of the force that had stood in her path like a fallen tree, the path she sometimes believed she should have taken. And whether or not that was so, there was no doubt she would long for it until she, too, was nothing but ash. In this room, among the dead, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to look down that path to a vision of a young man. It was a vision of love that she could hardly recall. Still, it had been there. She saw his face—the olive skin, the dark wavy hair, and the wonder he held in his eyes at sights he had never seen. Paris had grown old for her. At seventeen, she had been there nearly a dozen times. For him, a middle-class kid from Maine, it was magical.
The regret of following her mother’s orders to return home had not come for years. Wasn’t that always how it was with the young? There is nothing that can’t be fixed. Nothing that can’t be salvaged. And so she had plowed forward, numb from the profound loss of her first real love. She passed every test, met every expectation that was laid out for her. And when she did, new ones were put in place, like the little jumps and tunnels at a dog show. Over this one. Under that one. To the finish line.
Only there was no finish line. Her mother was dead, and she was still jumping and crawling.
Not that she disliked her life. Her husband lately, perhaps. Her friends, some. And the moment she left this room, she would again feel the invisible girders of a social structure that were stronger than steel. Her place in the community, the schools, the country club, the charity work and social engagements. She was raising five children who would never want for anything, who would be exposed to every corner of the world through travel and education. It was as meaningful a life as any other, as far as meaning went. After all, meaning was hardly intrinsic.
And that was precisely what made crossroads so tricky. She could blame her mother all day long for losing the life she might have had. It wouldn’t change a damned thing—not the fact that she had not chosen that path, or the impossibility of knowing how her life would have otherwise turned out. The journey had been her own, and it had taken incredible restraint for her not to tell Caitlin just how similar they were. There was nothing her daughter could do that would shock her, nothing she couldn’t understand from a place, not of empathy, but of familiarity.
“Yes, Mother. I know what you would do.” Her hands were gripped tightly around the handles of the urn, her knuckles white. “Should I accept the Conrads into the club as well? Would that make them grateful? Would it make them indebted enough?”
There had been a Kyle Conrad in Rosalyn’s life years before. Handsome, popular. Every mother’s dream for her daughter. And Rosalyn had delivered, doing things that had to be done to keep him by her side all through junior year. Until the trip to Paris. And upon her return, there had been a price to pay to win him back.
“Should I send him an invitation to my daughter’s bedroom?”
Her mother was still smirking at her. Nothing and no one could ever loosen the woman’s grip on her own righteousness, and Rosalyn felt it even now.
“There are things you don’t know, Mother. Things that would wipe that smile right off your face.”
But she knew that wasn’t true. Her mother had been immune to feelings of guilt, shame, or even mild regret. She would never stop smiling, never stop believing that everything she had done had been for the best. And Rosalyn’s perfect life gave her more than enough ammunition.
“I won’t be coming next year,” she said softly as she placed the urn back on the white marble pedestal built to hold it into eternity. “But don’t worry. I’ll have someone polish you.”
Her mother had been clever, but she hadn’t been intelligent. Had she been intelligent, she would have opened her mind to the possibility of her own failings, her severe miscalculations. It would have been pointless to tell the woman about the happiness Rosalyn had felt in Paris that summer, how her eyes had been opened to a new version of herself. A version she liked. Had Mrs. Eddings even allowed herself to believe it, it still would have done nothing to weaken the woman’s resolve, or change the course of events that had come to pass.
As Rosalyn stood to leave, she felt the presence of another person in the cold stone building. She turned toward the door and found Eva standing just inside its borders.
“You look like hell,” Eva said. Wearing a tight Juicy sweatsuit and no makeup, Eva wasn’t exactly looking herself either.
“I could say the same.” Rosalyn had planned on fleeing this place, on pushing her mother’s smile from her thoughts and letting her mind find comfort within the plans that still had to be formulated. Now the keeper of her memories was blocking the door.
“I told you I wasn’t coming this year,” she said.
Eva shrugged her shoulders and took a step toward her friend. “And I knew you still would.”
Rosalyn nodded. Of course Eva knew. Eva always knew, but even so, she seemed oddly sure of herself. This was their secret, Rosalyn’s homage to her mother’s crypt after the Halloween party. She had come alone the first year, after the party was over and her husband was dead drunk and asleep. But she had not left alone. Eva had made a point of it.
Silently, the two women sat on the stone bench facing Mrs. Eddings. They looked between the urn and the portrait, Rosalyn feeling what she was feeling, and Eva holding whatever part of those feelings Rosalyn couldn’t bear. Eva had been there that summer, the study-abroad trip to Paris their junior year. It was one of the many programs that made the Wilshire Academy so prestigious. The students who were chosen studied at the Sorbonne, living in university dormitories that were chaperoned by a handful of teachers. Of course, with Paris at their doorstep, supervision was a generous term, and the summer had become as much about becoming fluent in promiscuity as in learning the French language. Eva knew the joy that had found the young Rosalyn Eddings that summer, and the damage that followed upon her return. The weight of all this was particularly heavy on this early morning after seeing Barlow with Jacks hours before.
“I really am not coming next year,” Rosalyn said flatly.
Eva draped her arm around Rosalyn’s shoulders. She would come; they both would. “Okay,” she said, “okay.”