Good at Being Alive(3)
I still don’t think much of it when a crowd forms near the gate. They aren’t responding to my texts, but shit happens. Cell signals are bad. They’re probably panicking as they try to get through security to make our flight. Jessie will eventually find a way to make all of this my fault, then conclude that she’s going to “let this go,” as if she’s the bigger person. That’s how this usually unfolds.
But when first class boards, then groups two and three, and there’s still no word…I start to worry. “I’m not sure what to do,” I tell the gate agent. “My family was taking the train in, but they’re not here and they’re not answering. Should I get on board or wait?”
Her face falls and she and the guy beside her exchange a look. “You heard about the crash, right?”
Bex
“Take the Xanax, Rebecca,” says Jill. “We’ve got everything covered.”
Xanax? Everything is already too surreal as it is—I pinch my thigh, half certain this is a nightmare. Apparently it’s not.
The press reports on the train crash as if it’s a miracle. Only thirty-one people, three percent of the train’s passengers, died. Of a thousand passengers, my family made up ten percent of the fatalities.
It really happened, Bex. I pinch myself again. It’s not a nightmare.
I slip the Xanax into my pocket when her head turns. Today, of all days, I don’t want to embarrass my family. Their funerals—three at once, the height of efficiency—should be the rare occasion when I don’t shame them. If there’s a heaven, I want them to be sitting there thinking, Oh thank god, she’s not making an ass of herself for once.
I also don’t trust Jessie’s sisters. There’s nothing especially alarming about any of them, but there wasn’t anything especially alarming about Jessie either, and I still had to tread carefully.
“This belonged to our mother,” says Jenny, holding up some vase on the mantel. If she had a purse big enough, I suspect she’d slide that vase right in.
Maybe that’s why I don’t trust them—because they’re circling ever closer, like hyenas nearing a carcass. They shed tears for Jessie and Bronwyn at first, but I’ve sensed self-preservation stealing over all three of them for the last day or so, ever since the will was read and they discovered everything is going to me. They now want to run through the house like game show contestants, grabbing every valuable they see.
Joanna emerges from the powder room a moment later, frowning at me in the exact way Jessie used to. None of the sisters care for me, and this week has made that worse.
They don’t understand why I’m not crying. I haven’t cried once in the week since the accident, but it’s not that I’m not sad. It’s that I can’t grasp that it’s happened. I’m underwater, pressed deep by its weight. The sounds that reach my ears don’t make sense—everything I look at is dark and slightly blurry. What I’d really like to do is sleep. I just want to sleep for a very long time. And not allow these vultures to steal all my family’s shit while I do so.
Jill looks at her watch. “We should go.” She holds out her hand for the house key, as if I’m a child playing with a valuable. “Head to the car and I’ll lock up.”
“I’ve got it,” I say staunchly.
They glance at one another with a look I’ve seen several times this week. There she goes again, being a pain in the ass. Jessie warned us. Maybe I am being a pain in the ass. Or maybe there’s something Jill wants to snatch once I’m out of the house. Given how annoyed she is, my money is on option two.
I lock the door and stumble to the waiting car, flanked by three women who dislike me.
I shouldn’t be going through this with them. I shouldn’t be alone. I shouldn’t be here at all.
I’m still alive because I got drunk the night before my flight and arrived at an airport too late. I’m still alive because I didn’t care enough to arrive on time, because my family was filming a show intended to save my dad’s business, and I basically blew it off.
The limo heads toward a church I dislike, at the wrong end of town. After the burials, there will be a reception at the country club my dad and Jessie joined a few years ago—one of those places that takes pride in the way it hasn’t moved forward with the times. Cell phones and denim are forbidden. Women aren’t allowed on the golf course before one p.m.
It annoyed me that Jessie wanted to join, that she was so enamored of the club’s prestige that she was willing to overlook the way it marginalizes pretty much everyone who isn’t a balding Caucasian male.
And you’re here resenting a woman on the day you’re burying her, Bex. So which of you is worse?
We arrive in the church’s parking lot forty minutes early. Everyone watches as I climb from the car. A heavyset man with gray hair practically radiates disdain for me—the Henchman, perhaps, here to ensure I’m appropriately dressed and not carrying a flask. If so, the joke’s on him: I’m not wearing panties, and the flask is in my purse. Sure, I don’t want to shame my family, but emergencies happen.
Linda, my dad’s longtime assistant, walks over while the aunts bicker about what we should do next and pulls me toward her. “Oh Bex,” she whispers, choking on tears. “I’m so sorry.”