Goodbye from the Edge of the World

art by Richard Hanus

by Angie McCullagh

 

Half hidden by the filmy curtain, I watch a man wheel a human-shaped bag from the house across the street, the gurney rattling over exposed concrete. With hands shrink-wrapped in blue Latex, he shoves the gurney into the back of a station wagon and lowers the tailgate with a muted thunk.

Redheaded triplets live with their two mothers in that house.

I text my neighbor Carla to ask if she knows who died but she doesn’t answer.

My mind goes white, my life distilled into a suspended haze. I start to shake, but it’s not unpleasant. My first sight of a dead body, the inaugural viewing of a person who has been removed from their pains and joys, small moments of cleaning spilled coffee, arguing with their mother, eating tart, rhubarb ice cream.

Perhaps they didn’t like rhubarb ice cream.

***

 “Maddie! Davey! Let’s go!”

Shooting down the hallway, Maddie grabs a plastic sleeve of crackers, the front door slamming shut behind her. Davey, the paper airplane to her Bombardier, meanders, one shoe untied, arms limp at his sides. “Why do we have to?”

“To show our respect.” I steer him to the car, hand him a can of root beer that will keep him quiet during the ten-minute drive to Peterson’s Funeral Home and Cremation Services. His rapid blinks, the jerking of his shoulders catch my eye in the rear-view mirror. New situations stress him out.

The soda can is large in his seven-year-old hand. “How does looking at a stinky old body show respect?”

The stinky old body, Carla finally informed me, was the triplets’ nanny, a middle-aged woman who wore bright orange Skechers and black leggings every day.

“It’s respectful to the living people, stupid,” Maddie says, crumbs dropping down her shirt, collecting in the small hammock of fabric between her barely protruding nipples. I’m terrified of those nipples. Of what is next: breasts, furtive encounters, drinking? drugs? pregnancy? I want nothing to do with being a grandmother. I’m not even through the tortuous years of motherhood.

The first-grade triplets represent a worst-case scenario. Three of them. All the same age with the same needs at different times.

I wonder if their play is hushed now, if they cry in the night for the nanny, if they have any sense of the finality of death. Davey is only starting to grasp that once you bury a gerbil, half-eaten by its brother, it never comes back.

The triplets’ mothers are tall and busy, each driving different model Volvos to their jobs. How do they manage now, with no help? The cars have been in the driveway more often lately, but the house is quiet, not even a drape flutters.

The parking lot bulges with vehicles, sun glinting off windshields. Davey throws an arm over his eyes and moans. Inside, the pall of grief is thick, mourners moving as if through wildfire smoke, covering their mouths, watching their feet tread over fake wood flooring.

Part of the nanny’s embalmed face is visible. A crescent of peach-stained skin, the sharp tip of a nose, a rounded chin.

Maddie strains next to me, eager to push her way up to the coffin, as if she’s arrived at a birthday party and wants a glimpse of the cake. I hold her hand to keep her back, let the family have their time.

“Where are the triplets?” I ask their moms.

Andrea, the taller of the two tall women, with coarse hair in a perpetual bun, says, “We didn’t want to expose them to the trauma.”

“They should be here.” My voice rises and I swallow. Still, it climbs. “The real trauma is never seeing their nanny again, not understanding where she went.”

Images come to me of my father, big-bellied and greasy-haired, who once took me fishing for blue gill in his leaky row boat. I held my pole, wearing a puffy, orange life vest, unaware at first that we were taking on too much river water. And then the small vessel sank and my father, who couldn’t swim and hadn’t worn his own floatation device, slipped under the murk. 

Andrea and her wife exchange worried glances.

“The triplets should be here,” I repeat.

Davey sways slightly and I give the moms a last, angry look. I pull him toward a table swathed in taupe fabric. We sign the guestbook on it. I have the sense that we’ve done something permanent by writing our names on thick paper with blank ink.

Behind the coffin, a shroud, also taupe, hangs in pleats and swoops. Garish bouquets explode from urns, topped with shiny white ribbons. When it finally feels appropriate to approach the body, Maddie mewls. “She made the best brownies with mini marshmallows in them.”

A puddle has formed underneath Davey and he looks as if he wants to crawl into the casket. “Oh Davey,” Maddie says and we walk him quickly to the bathroom to clean him up.

Later, we sit in our hot backyard, the grass dormant and brown. Davey jumps on the trampoline, a cheap model held together with rusting springs, while Maddie sprays him with the hose.

She shoots the water in arcs and swirls. “When does Dad come home?”

“Tuesday.”

“Where is he this time?”

The trampoline squeaks with every jump. Ee-er, ee-er, ee-er. Allen ordered the monstrosity off eBay. “Istanbul, I think. Maybe Iceland.”

Across the street the front door opens and a woman with platinum blonde hair, who looks remarkably like the nanny, steps out. Davey slows on the trampoline. Maddie forgets her hose, water splashing over her feet and legs. The woman moves into the driveway and we can see she is younger than the nanny by at least twenty years and wears different shoes, hiking boots of some sort.

“Who’s that?” Maddie asks.

“I don’t know,” I shift on my plastic chair. The new nanny?

Davey drops flat on his back, eyes closed. “I’m a goner. I’m dead.”

Maddie gulps water from the hose and then runs to the side of the house to turn off the spigot.

I scroll through obits on my phone, flinching at the photos of plump young faces and old people, skin drooping off their skulls. I zoom in on each one, searching for some clue or reason. Why did she go on that particular day, he at that particular hour? And who was with them, if anyone, when it happened?

A celebration of life will be held at the Eagle’s Club.

Visitation continues until sundown.

Funeral mass held at St. Mary’s, graveside service begins at 1pm.

But which to choose?

***

A row of streetlights stand like a wall outside our bedroom, as if we live in a movie set. In bed, I masturbate thinking about one of the obit photos: a young lanky guy with a big nose, who I would’ve found attractive when I was in college and actively chasing nerds. The belts of the garage door hum. Allen is home.

I kick off the sheets, raise my t-shirt. Our A/C is set a little too cold and goosebumps run up my belly and over my naked breasts. When he swings open the door and sees me, he whispers, “That’s a nice greeting,” and sloughs off his uniform jacket, clicks his cap onto the dresser.

Instead of spreading my legs I watch him watch. He drops his pants, which will go to the cleaner with his other three pairs because he has a week off. A week during which he said he wants to be home with me and the kids, doesn’t want to step foot in an airport or even see a single jet banking over the house.

We pleasure ourselves in tandem and fall asleep alongside each other like matchsticks in a box.

In the morning, the children are up early. Davey launches himself off furniture and somersaults across the floors, while Maddie reads a book about dragons. Allen drinks coffee and stares at his iPad, only occasionally looking at the children over the rim of his mug. He mumbles questions like, “What did you guys do in school while I was gone?”

They shriek that it’s summer and they don’t have school and doesn’t he know anything? He rubs his eyelids. “Guess I’m still lagging a little.”

Maddie disappears into her room and comes out wearing a yellow top, pink skirt, and black high tops. Davey will stay in his pajamas decorated with bananas riding skateboards until I make him change into clothes. He twirls on the ball of his foot. “Who are we gonna go see today?” As if he actually enjoyed the viewing we went to.

Allen’s thumbnail clicks his screen as he scrolls. He doesn’t seem to have heard.

I shower under cool water. When I open the bathroom door, Davey looks up at me from where he’s seated on the floor, waiting for me as he often does when I’m out of sight for long.

Tightening the sash of my robe, I say, “Excuse me, sir? I need to get my clothes on.”

He scooches over so I can pass. “I’m coming with you, on your errands today. Right?”

“If you want to. Or you could go with Dad and Maddie.”

“I want to be with you.”

***

The small crowd gathers under a white tent. Davey and I take chairs in the back row facing an aggressively polished brown casket covered with a spray of daisies and sunflowers. Behind the casket a sheet of fake grass covers a hole and a pile of dirt. It is worse, somehow, than seeing the loam itself.

A pastor steps up to a microphone wearing a flowy dress and Birkenstocks. She reads from the Bible, talks about how well this family knows God and that Miriam, the random woman I chose, is rejoicing with other relatives who’ve passed away before her.

My cell dings. I jump and switch it off, but not before a few mourners turn and sneer. Allen’s text says, “Why are you at Riverside Cemetery?”

He almost never tracks me. I wonder if Maddie mentioned something. I told her not to, that Dad wouldn’t understand I was trying to teach her and Davey that everything has a beginning and an ending and that the ending is something to be witnessed. But he might have fished it out of her somehow.

Davey curls up on his hard chair and lays his head over my thighs, which stick together from heat. I run my fingers through his sweaty hair, the light scent of tea tree shampoo rising off his head.

Miriam’s casket remains closed, but the smell of dirt, the nearness to the cool bowels of earth, the finality of it all turns my mind white again as I tremble. I think Davey, this time, finds the machinations calming.

My phone continues to vibrate from my purse but I ignore it until the coffin has been lowered, dirt scraped onto the top by people taking turns with a shovel, pebbles cracking against fiberglass. Then a New Holland backhoe rumbles to the site and pulls the rest of the dirt into the grave. Davey perks up at the heavy machinery and watches with wide eyes and brows crimped.

At home Davey and I fall asleep on the deck lounge chairs. I wake to Allen sitting on the railing, drinking a diet Mountain Dew and staring at me. “Graveside service wear you out?”

My brain is still half stuck in a dream, I mumble, “It’s peaceful there.”

“What about Davey? Does he think it’s peaceful?”

“It seems like he does.” I sit upright, run a damp hand over my face.

“Did you know the person? Who died?”

I could easily get away with this, tell him I knew her in passing, from school or the grocery store. But he already suspects my mind is a windy, flapping place, that the lively hummingbird he married has become more of a puzzle than he expected.

“She went to church every Sunday, never missed except when she had Covid. She liked to play Words with Friends and make candles and, when she was younger, she ran a cat sanctuary. Isn’t that interesting?”

Davey stirs, a small groan fluttering in his throat.

Allen looks at me agape. “Is this a one-time thing?”

“I felt like I should go.”

“Why drag Davey? I could’ve taken him with me. Bought him a doughnut or something.” I mean, you might have traumatized him by making him sit through a funeral.”

“It’s not traumatizing. No more so than his Dad flying jets all over the world. Maybe crashing into some ocean never to be seen again.”

He looks at me as if I’m a pistachio shell he’d like to crack open, my green, crusty insides revealed.

***

Allen is off again, high above our flyover state moving people, burning fuel, landing in other countries, eating airport sushi. It’s a relief, really, to be free of his judgments.

The kids ask if we can go to the zoo. It’s already eighty degrees by mid-morning, but we haven’t been in a while, so I take them. The sun is a radioactive organ. We buy frozen lemonades but we are all listless, including the animals who mostly hide inside or under rocks. We stop at the snow monkey exhibit, a giant fake boulder surrounded by trunks and stripped branches of dead trees. A few monkeys scamper around, but one sits near the top of the rock, his head slumped over his belly like a drunk.

“Is that one alive?” Maddie points.

Davey sits on the hot concrete and imitates the monkey. “He’s just sweating to death.”

“To death. That means dead,” Maddie takes a bite of her frozen lemonade, crunches, then grabs her head and squeezes her eyes closed. “Oww.”

We sit on a bench under a tree but the shade does nothing to cool us. “Let’s go to the Arctic,” I suggest. “We can pretend it’s cold.”

I lead the children toward the polar bears, feeling sorry for the big beasts that aren’t meant to live in Detroit but who should be trekking across ice floes searching for seals to eat.

The sea otters are the only ones enjoying themselves, slipping through their pool that is painted white and cut at angles to look like snow. We watch them until their antics grow tiresome.

The van’s air conditioning is broken. I haven’t taken time to have it looked at by a mechanic. I steer down Eleven Mile and past McKinley’s Funeral Home. Its windows are covered by lavender curtains and I imagine how cool and dim it is inside, how we’d dry out, become reanimated by the chill. It is everything I can do to keep my hands steady on the wheel, to not jerk the van into the parking lot.

“Why are they called funeral homes?” Maddie asks from the back, her voice limp.

“I guess it sounds more welcoming than a funeral center or a funeral mart.”

Maddie laughs at this, her giggle charming.

“A place to get Slushies and Last Rites,” I say to egg her on.

She laughs harder.

Davey stares out the window. “I have to pee.”

That is all the reason I need. I flip a U-turn and we wind our way back to McKinley’s.

No one is around to greet us when we enter the icy, burgundy-carpeted foyer flanked by artificial ficus trees. It’s like we’ve stepped into a 1996 Comfort Inn. “Hello?” I call.

Ghosts howl silently back at us and I shiver, but neither child seems to have felt it. My senses are wound tight. I have never been so sharp. I can almost see through the walls, smell burgers grilling down the block.

Davey holds his crotch while Maddie ambles around, touching vases full of silk flowers and running her hand down dusty drapes.

Around the corner, I see an open door, a toilet in the shadows. “Here, Davey. Quick, okay?”

I want to get out before we have to interact with a human.

Maddie plops onto a velvet chair, spins it in a circle with her toe.

I crack my knuckles, check my phone. C’mon Davey.

He begins to sing, his voice echoing off porcelain tiles. It’s a made-up tune, meandering:

We are in a place where they bring dead bodies

and take out their guts and fill them with chemicals

and put them in a coffin for people to look at

or not

Sometimes the coffin is shut

It is sad

His last line trails low like a tuba and then he appears in the doorway.

“Did you flush and wash your hands?” I ask, ready to grab his wrist and drag him back to the van.

As he closes the door in my face to complete his tasks, a woman glides in wearing a pantsuit and a floral scarf pinned at her shoulder. “Can I help you with something?” She clasps her hands, showing off a multi-carat diamond ring. I tuck my left hand under my right arm to hide the small solitaire Allen gave me at the Renaissance Center’s Highlands Restaurant a million years ago. But then, what do I care what this lady thinks about the size of my engagement ring? I let my hand drop to my side.

Davey whips open the door. “Do you have dead people in here?”

I see that his hands are red and damp, and tenderness spasms through me.

The woman says, “We do have deceased loved ones resting here temporarily.”

“Resting?” Maddie says, her upper lip cockled as if she can smell formaldehyde and rotting flesh.

The woman’s placid expression slips, her eyes darting. “That’s what we call it. Resting.”

I wonder if she and her co-workers are ever assholes about their clientele, joking about stiffs ending up on the wrong side of the grass.

I say, “We stopped in to use your restroom. My son…”

“Well, that’s fine.” She disappears back down the hallway and returns with a basket of peanut butter chews wrapped in waxed paper. “We don’t have allergies, do we?”

I shake my head. “Thank you.”

Maddie and Davey each take one. Davey unwraps his and begins to chomp while Maddie watches.

“It’s hard.” His jaw muscles visibly flex and he tilts his head slightly like a curious beagle. “It’s like rubber, mommy.”

Though I can see what’s going to happen next, I’m not fast enough to stop it. He spits the candy onto the burgundy carpet. I swoop to grab it, wrapping it in a gas station receipt.

Davey is crying now and brushing at his tongue.

“Oh, Davey,” Maddie pulls him toward the door.

I apologize to the woman, relieved when we are back in the car. Despite the heat.

***

At home I make snacks for the kids: half a banana each, graham crackers and juice boxes. I flick through the day’s obituaries, jotting down dates and times. A teen girl from West Bloomfield died from a “prolonged illness.” I draw an asterisk next to her name. I need, I realize with a jolt, to see her mother. How will she make it through a funeral for her daughter? How will she even stand upright?

A text from Allen pops up. I’m tempted to swipe it away but instead click on it.

Checked into hotel at Lisbon. Things ok there?

Everything is great. We went to the zoo and saw monkeys!

He should approve of a place as wholesome as the zoo. But a full minute passes before his next message.

Before I left, Maddie woke up with a nightmare. Took me an hour to calm her down. She was afraid of dying in her sleep. When I get home, we need to talk.

My blood turns to sap. How did I not hear Maddie call out or tiptoe into our room? I’m always the one who sings the kids back to sleep, rubs their small feet and tells made up stories about a chipmunk family called The Ramones.

I went to a Ramones concert once. In a different life. It was raspy, rough, thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and vinegary drugs that I can still detect in some of my old t-shirts if I inhale hard enough.

I could never have imagined then that I’d be creating animal clans one day for my sarcastic, pee-leaking children.

***     

I rush through the house, loading mugs and plates into the dishwasher and tossing small, stray socks down the laundry chute. I hurry Maddie and Davey to the car and watch as they buckle their seatbelts, then realize I left my purse inside.

I’m back in the relative cool of the house, purse tucked under my arm, when I hear the popping of stones under tires. Through the door that hangs open, I see Allen’s maroon Audi pull up next to the van. The kids emit squeals and wave out the windows.

Still wearing his white dress shirt and blue uniform pants, he leans into the van and talks to the kids, then glances at the house. I step farther into the shadows and watch him pull his bag from the backseat, rolling up the walk.

His fingers grip the suitcase handle so hard they blanch. “Where are you headed off to today?” His chest rises and falls.

I decide to be honest. The kids will tell him anyway. “There is a teen. Who died. Only a baby. I want to give my condolences to her mother.”

The smell of rotting fruit floats on the muggy air and I think of the spotted bananas.

“Why do you have to take the kids?”

“Because you were in Portugal.”

Davey yells with impatience.

“But you knew I’d be home soon.”

“Soonish. Sometimes you’re late. Sometimes you’re days or weeks late.”

“Sare,” he sits on the wooden bench near the front door, still clutching his suitcase. “Why are you doing this?”

“Paying my respects?” I say, hitching my voice up a few notes to shame him for shaming me. Who can fault a woman who only wants to bear witness? To honor others?

He presses the meat of his hands to his eyeballs. “To everybody in town?”

“Only certain ones.” My indignation gives way to doubt.

“But that’s not normal.” He splays his hands. “And are you choosing them at random? It’s sick.”

A UPS truck rattles past, driving too fast for this residential street. A dove coo-ahs from a power line. Davey yells out the car window. “Mooooom!”

Allen says, “Why, Sarah?” His face reddens and his chin begins to tic.

How is he this upset? He knows about my father, is beginning to realize that I’m a strange creature.

“MOM,” Maddie calls. “Davey is losing it.”

My bra is already drenched from the day’s heat, wisps of hair that have sprung from my ponytail, sticking to my neck. I move toward the door and bare my teeth at Allen. “I have to.”

“But why?”

Hope is what comes to me. A sense of expectance. Possibly of relief. I shouldn’t tell Allen that, though.

I breeze to the van that will carry Maddie, Davey, and me to the next service and the next and the one after that. As many as necessary.

I lower my window as we drive away and call, “I have to.”

Allen watches us. His shoulders, even in his structured uniform, slump. His shoes shine on the walkway. I know that I will not come back, except to gather my favorite clothes and books and the floral loveseat he has always hated but I love. The children will have to travel back and forth between us, but will, because of Allen’s job, spend most of their time with me.

I wish I had a filmy scarf to release into the summer morning that would twist and travel along the air currents until it landed at Allen’s feet and sent a message: That what matters, really, is not only how we start things, but how we finish them, and how endings and beginnings are tangled forever in a snarl.

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