“Not in immediate danger of falling off a cliff or tall building?”
“Don’t joke!” she admonished, and I realized a self-harm joke was in poor taste under the circumstances. I didn’t mean anything by it—I just wanted to make sure she was physically safe. I knew what the next days and weeks would hold, and I needed her to not fall apart, in case I did.
“Nathan said she left instructions what to do if, y’know . . .” I couldn’t get the words out. So Winnie said it for me.
“She died, Charlie. You can say it.” But I couldn’t.
“Apparently she doesn’t want a public funeral,” I told my sister. “Or anyone looking at her dead body.”
“Sounds like Mom.”
I couldn’t decide if it was generous of Mom to spare us the burden of summoning her friends, nieces, nephews, and vast array of cousins to say goodbye, or cruel of her to deny us the opportunity to gather and grieve. Unless she did it because she thought no one would grieve. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing.
“So what next?” Winnie asked.
“I guess we have to go there,” I said. “To help Nathan, y’know . . . put her affairs in order?”
“Right.”
“How soon can you leave?”
“Whenever.”
“OK. I’ll call you back. And Win?”
“Yeah?”
“We’ll get through this together, OK?”
“Thanks, big brother.”
We hung up. My wife was standing in the doorway.
“Get through what together?” she asked. “Charlie, what’s happened?” It was a fair question, so I answered it succinctly.
“My mother died.”
Her hand flew over her mouth. I wanted to add, “And I was the one who killed her,” but she knew that. Because she had stood there and watched me.
“Oh, Charlie.”
I folded into my wife’s hug. This was our first real tragedy as a married couple. Perhaps, as tragedies do, it would pull us together, put a lid on our nonstop quibbling, at least for a little while. There was of course a potential silver lining to my mom’s passing: my mother was loaded. Most of my fights with Marcela were about money, specifically how we never had enough to buy ourselves any time together doing something that didn’t include parenting.
But neither of us dared mention that. And, given what was coming, it was a damn good thing we didn’t.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
WINNIE
My brother and I decided to drive together to put our mom to rest in Los Angeles. Well, I decided, actually. I also decided we would take his car, and that he would do all the driving.
I told him I would take the train to his house in Santa Barbara because I didn’t want to leave my car parked outside for days on end. When he said I could just park in his spot in the garage, I made up another lie, about needing new brakes, and one of the parts being on back order. My brother didn’t know jack shit about cars, so he didn’t question it. I didn’t like lying to my only brother, but I’d never told him about having my license suspended and had no intention of telling him now. I had worked hard to assure him that I didn’t have a drinking problem; I didn’t want a little DUI to put a kink in my narrative.
He was there to pick me up when I arrived at the train station. We hugged and cried a little on the platform. An old lady who mistook us for long-lost lovers winked at me, and I got seriously creeped out.
“Let’s go,” I said, nudging my brother toward the exit.
He apologized for not being ready and having to pop by the house. I told him it was fine, it’s not like we were keeping Mom waiting. I’d had a nip of tequila on the train; I preferred hard alcohol to wine while traveling because I could pass the antiseptic smell off as hand sanitizer, which I also carried and liberally used.
His wife, Marcela, and their son Zander were watching Netflix when we walked into their cool-guy condo by the beach. It wasn’t exactly a family home, with its vertical floor plan and walls of glass, but real estate prices in California had skyrocketed in recent years, so he never moved out of the bachelor pad Mummy had subsidized—although that was likely about to change.
Marcela jumped up to hug me. It didn’t matter what time of day it was, that woman always looked like you were seeing her through a Snapchat filter—perfect skin, shiny hair, eyes wide and bright like a character from Japanese anime. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Winnie,” she said. Her perfume or essential oils or whatever magic elixir she was wearing wafted over me like a shower of honeysuckle rainbows, and I felt immediately calmer and grossly inferior.