The Point of Pain
Willa spent the miserable week after her father’s death in Graham and Angela’s room with the door closed.
Willa, who couldn’t stand to be indoors for too long.
During that week Angela lived in the garden. Tending her tidy rows, weeding. She even slept out there on the bench, covered up by a quilt Kate brought her when she refused to come inside.
And Kate and I spent our time hugging each other, keeping up the house, dealing with the outside world’s occasional intrusions. It was understood that I was Willa’s designated attendant, and Kate was Angela’s.
But Willa wouldn’t let me attend to her. All day, I sat on the hall floor outside the bedroom into which she’d retreated, hoping she’d emerge to cry on my shoulder, or scream.
If she’d asked me to shave her head, or mine, like those grieving women in documentaries, I’d have agreed, gladly.
“She’ll talk to you when she’s ready, sweetheart,” Kate said. “It’ll be okay.”
Gruff Kate, calling me sweetheart. It made me cry.
Everything did. Graham’s shirt in the laundry, his jar of sour-plum jam in the fridge. Me, the tough cousin. But I didn’t hear a single sob from Willa.
I slept in her room, left her trays of food she didn’t touch, and, periodically, knocked softly on her parents’ bedroom door, calling her name.
“Willa?”
Not a sound.
But I listened, waiting for a breakdown that didn’t come.
Willa came out only for the memorial service.
It was on the beach at sunset, and it was well attended, with a hodgepodge of readings from est and Buddhism and Judaism and Graham Kingston lyrics. The ceremony was beautiful. Someone made a design on the sand out of wildflowers, swooping around in spirals and paisleys.
Willa still wasn’t speaking to me, but Kate told me she’d made a single request—that someone find her a black dress to wear to Graham’s nontraditional ceremony.
“I’m wearing black, too, then,” I insisted, and no one argued.
Some friend of Angela’s offered a few to choose from and Kate took them in, hastily, with safety pins. At the service, one kept scratching my waist. As Graham’s friends sang and spoke of him, I was grateful for the point of pain on my right side. It was something else to focus on.
Willa let me stand on her left and hold her hand. It was so cold, so limp in mine—when I squeezed it, she didn’t squeeze back. But I kept it in my grip, wiping my tears with my left hand.
I could hear Angela, close on Willa’s other side, crying softly. I hoped Willa felt comforted by her mother’s warm body beside her, since she couldn’t derive any comfort from mine.
I let the mourners’ words wash over me. I wasn’t interested in metaphors about waterfalls. And there were many. Time was a waterfall, life was a waterfall, beautiful and powerful, never-ending. The beauty of nature would purify us, heal us, after this tragedy, and eventually Graham’s meditation spot at the falls would be celebrated for the creation, not the loss, that happened there.
I was only interested in what wasn’t being said about Graham’s life and death and his cherished wife and daughter.
And this fear that maybe Willa wasn’t speaking to me because she blamed me.
We hadn’t gone through with the plan, but I knew she felt guilty that she’d considered it, let the thought in—inviting nature to betray her father. Because I felt guilty about that, too.
After the speeches, everyone left the beach but me and Willa. We sat so close to the water, ignoring the creeping tide, that the skirts of our too-large black wool dresses were soaked to the hip.
I didn’t care if my dress got wet to the starched collar. I wasn’t leaving until she was ready.
Willa picked up a nearby daisy from the service and floated it in her lap, in the black pond her skirt held. “They’re costumes.”
“Costumes?” I thought this was a metaphor. A comment on our earthly bodies as temporary shells or something. Costumes we shed when we died, was that where she was going?
“These.” She wrung water from her dress hem. “I’m pretty sure they’re from a play. Wonder which one.”
She meant the borrowed dresses we were in, the ones from Angela’s theater friend. Grateful that she was speaking to me, I ran with this. “The Sound of Music? Novitiates’ dresses, maybe?”
She nodded vaguely.
“Wills?” I asked.
She turned to me.
“I’m sorry. About everything. Your dad. How we... How things ended.”
“I know you are.”
“It just happened. You didn’t cause his accident in some mystical way, by simply agreeing to the plan, by tempting nature. You know that, right?”
“But what if I had tempted nature?” she asked, so softly I could barely hear her. “Would you hate me?”
“But you didn’t. And anyway, it was my plan. If anyone tempted nature, it was me.”
She smiled sadly. “I feel so confused. So heavy. Like if I sat here and waited for the tide to come in, this dress would weigh me down to the seabed.”
I reached for her hand. “It won’t always feel like that, I promise. It’ll get better. I’ll help. I’ll stay, just like we planned. We’ll go to that school in Humboldt together, and—”
She shook her head. Stood, extricating her fingers from mine. “You should go back to the city, Jackie. Go back and be with your own family.”
I was still taking this in, how unlike her it was, how uncharacteristically cold and cruel, when she said softly, “I think I’ll camp on the beach for a little while.”
She walked away.
I thought she meant Glass Beach. I told Angela and Kate what she’d said, and the three of us decided to let her mourn in her own way.
“It’ll be okay,” Kate said. “It’s just what she needs.”
But, sometime that night, she took off. The beach—did Willa know, even then, that she meant distant beaches? Mexico, where she drowned, less than two years later?
For once, Kate had been wrong. It wasn’t okay.