“Case?” she says. “Are you there?”
And then, of course, you are.
FORTY-ONE
It was the second worst day of your life.
The first is obvious. But, even now, when you think about it, you can’t help reminding yourself that at least you gotto havea worst day. At least you got to sit there feeling terrible in an ill-fitting suit your dad ordered from Costco. You got the gift of feeling nauseous and sweaty as you sat in the hard pew in a church that neither Sean nor anyone else in your family had ever attended. Sean did not get another day. Instead, he was being spoken about by a reverend who never knew him.
You could barely hear the religious man’s words because in your head, all you could think was that it should be you in that box. That’s the thought that was on repeat.It should be me. It should be me. It should be me.You were the expendable one. The one who never quite figured out how to thrive. The sound of these thoughts drowned out the quiet gasps of your mom crying and the baby across the aisle cooing and stuffing the corner of a hymnal in her mouth. It even drowned out the loud scratch of the microphone when it brushed the reverend’s collar and snapped all the mourners to attention.
It was not a bad service, from what you caught of it. The religious people who ran it must have at least gotten the hint that you were a clan of agnostics verging on atheists. They didn’t speakmuch about heaven or hell or other things you’d heard at your Catholic grandmother’s funeral five years ago. They had done their research about the deceased, and when the reverend told stories he’d been fed about Sean’s lively personality, they sounded heartfelt.
But somehow this made things worse. It would have been easier to wallow if the eulogy had been incompetent, too holy, or sanctimonious. Instead, it was well done, but you still knew that barely anyone in the room understood the real Sean, much less the complicated circumstances of his death.
The exception, of course, was the girl at the back of the room, sitting next to her Serbian grandmother. You tried not to look back there too much, but you couldn’t help it, and whenever you did, she was staring straight ahead like she had blinders on. Your parents couldn’t stop crying. On top of everything else, they had been fielding calls from reporters all week, people who were trying to sensationalize Sean’s death and make it part of an exposé about the dangers of illegal bike races. Your dad had been angrier than you’d ever seen him yesterday, screaming into the phone at some poor fact-checker from the local paper.
But now that he was in the room with everyone else, he just looked defeated. Your mom had thrown herself into every detail of the funeral, all the while wearing the same face she did after a night shift at the hospital: determined and resigned at the same time. Neither one of them asked you how you knew about the bike race or whether Sean had told you. They knew about his risk-taking past, and even though they were completely gutted by his death, they also had this look about them like maybe they’d known this was a possibility.
You only spoke to Diana once at the funeral. In the middle of a diving coach’s speech about Sean’s team spirit, you left to go to the bathroom. You couldn’t listen to a man who knew nothing about anything talk about Sean’s leadership in the locker room and how devastated he was when Sean had to quit. It was all too much, so you whispered to your parents that you needed water and ducked out into the hallway, where you could breathe.
In the hall, you could sigh and swear to yourself as much as you wanted. And when you went into the bathroom, just to run some cold water over your hands, you let yourself release some childish sounds of anguish. A long whimper that wasn’t quite a cry and that echoed around the cavernous church bathroom. You sat down on the tile floor and listened to the buzzing fluorescent lights. Then you stood back up and walked out to the hall to find Diana waiting for you.
Her hair was cut short and dyed blond, but it was still curly, and escaping the confines of some bobby pins. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think she cut it herself with some kitchen shears. She looked older, and the black dress she’d borrowed from her baba only added to the effect. Despite being just a year older than you, she’d always seemed more mature, like she’d had twice as many life experiences, which was probably true.
“I think we should leave,” she said to you in the hallway.
You were the only two people there, and you could hear the echoing murmur of the diving coach still nattering on inside.
“I don’t know…,” you started.
“We don’t have to talk or anything,” she said. “We can just drive.”
At that, you acquiesced and pulled out the keys to the Corolla.
“You can drive this time,” you said, and tossed them to her.
Leaving the church felt right the second you did it, abandoning the sad brick building and just getting on the freeway, where the weekend traffic was sparse and lazy. Midafternoon light came in through the dirty windshield, refracted and faded. Diana drove outside the bounds of the city, and then kept on going past the first-ring suburbs. You realized you had actually never seen her drive a car before, but she seemed perfectly natural behind the wheel. She turned the radio on and found a jazz station on theA.M.dial that was playing something from decades ago. A man improvising on a saxophone from a time before your parents were kids.
Diana was true to her word; you didn’t speak as you made it out past the suburban sprawl to the first farms. You saw cows, lowing by the side of fenced-in lots, and goats stomping around in their proprietary way. There were even a few alpacas, twisting their long furry necks to watch you go by. You wanted to ask Diana how far she was going to drive, but she’d said no talking, so you didn’t risk it.
You were aware of her, though. She smelled like cigarettes, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. A couple of times she blinked, and you worried she wouldn’t get her lids back open. Eventually, you looked out the window again, and there wasn’t much around at all. Just some hills, birch trees, and a few clouds. She seemed relaxed, but then you saw her hands, white-knuckled on the wheel.
You only realized where she was going when you saw the familiar wooden sign for the quarry. You were coming around a corner on a tight two-lane road, and you caught sight of it alongwith the gravel parking lot, totally empty on a cool day. You looked at Diana, but she didn’t look back. You didn’t know if she had been planning to come here all along or if the car had somehow found its way here like a salmon returning to its natal stream.
She turned off the car. Then she got out and started walking. You weren’t sure you wanted to follow, but the thought of just sitting alone in a car for the next hour seemed like the only thing worse, so you opened the door and stepped out. The feeling of the stones against your shoes felt both familiar and strange, and when you looked down at the rocks, you noticed a pink hue mixed in with the cream.
You had read a little bit about the quarry online since your day there with Sean and Diana. It was a former granite mine from the 1920s. They used the stone for foundations, streetcar routes, and monuments. It was hard to imagine it now that the mines were filled with water, but they used to be full of quarriers lifting stones with a giant crane, then using them to build statues of dead heroes.
As you walked the path to the cliffs, you wondered which famous men were immortalized with this stone. What had they done to be remembered forever? And why was everyone else buried out of sight where no one would ever think of them?
“Case. Stop!”
You might have walked right off the cliff if Diana hadn’t held out her hand. Somehow, while you were thinking about statues, you’d reached the edge. Oddly enough, your adrenaline didn’t spike; you just stopped and looked down. You weren’t sure what you were expecting, but there was no one down in the water this time. No teenagers cracking beers and splashing. And no Sean inhis serene back float. Just an upside-down sky, painted across the clear surface of the water.
The emptiness was unnerving. It was like no one else could come now that Sean was gone, and the thought occurred to you that maybe all the other kids had just been extras in Sean’s movie. Now that the lead wasn’t there anymore, doing flips from improbable heights, the extras weren’t there either.
Diana took something out of her pocket then. A piece of paper. It wasn’t until you saw the photo of Sean that you recognized it as the funeral program. Your parents hadn’t chosen a bad picture necessarily, just a safe one. It was one of his senior photos, the one for the school yearbook where he wore a gray T-shirt under a navy V-neck sweater and looked a little like somebody’s helpful grandson. There was none of that mischief in his eyes. No challenge in his smile. And you didn’t have long to look at it before Diana began to fold it.
