I was getting ready for the funeral two days later when I realized I’d forgotten to bring my hair dryer from school. I asked Fritz if I could use his. The plastic covering the heating coils was missing and a strand of my hair got caught in the fan. My hair started to burn. The smell was awful. I thought of my father’s impending cremation. For some reason I thought that was funny, but when I looked in the mirror, I was grimacing.
After visiting the cemetery where my father’s ashes were going to be buried in the family plot, we went back to the House. Nobody outside of the immediate family was there, no food had been prepared, and nobody had anything to say.
After an impersonal ceremony at the crematorium, I had tried once again to convince my grandfather not to bury my father’s ashes. Dad was so adamant about it that I’d known since I was eight that this wasn’t what he wanted. I came as close as I ever had to raising my voice to him, and he came as close as he ever had to showing his anger. I tried to explain to him how wrong it was, how profoundly disturbing it would be for Dad to be trapped in that earth. But my grandfather wasn’t listening, and I lost the argument.
I couldn’t stay in the library with the rest of them, but none of my old haunts appealed to me. I didn’t want to be there at all.
I climbed the back stairs to the second floor. The door to Liz’s room was slightly ajar, but I knew she was in there. I took a few steps farther down the hall to the Cell, but when I saw the stripped mattress and a couple of his white button-down shirts on wire hangers in an otherwise empty closet, I doubled back to the stairs leading to the attic. I was surprised to see the cot where Dad had slept for a few months after he and my mother split up, still covered with his old army blanket. The black-and-white TV was on the floor next to an old manual typewriter. I walked over, picked up the blanket, and sat down. I rested my face in it.
It smelled dark, and sharp, and like my father.