“I’m sure Thomas won’t mind,” Lillian said. “Ada would throw a fit at you taking a cab alone at night.” She sounded bereft.
“Oh, Lillian. I shouldn’t have left. I should have been there—I—”
“She told you to go,” she sniffed. “No one won against her. Except time, I suppose.”
“I told her she was too mean to die.”
“She knew that was a joke,” Lillian said. “She loved you. You know that, don’t you?”
I nodded even though she couldn’t see it. “I’m going to pack. I’ll call from the station when I know what time I’ll arrive.”
My mother was ashen by the time I hung up. “Ada?” she asked faintly. I nodded and she closed her eyes. My breathing was ragged, but no tears had fallen yet.
“I have to go. Lillian needs help planning the—the funeral.”
I stood and my mother followed. “I’m coming with you.”
“No. I’ll call once we set the funeral. You’ll come for that with Daddy.”
“I—”
I cut her off. “I need to do this. Myself.”
She looked at me for a long moment before nodding, then pulled me close in a tight hug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I couldn’t reply.
Dan wanted to drive me, but I said no. I would take the train. The three of them would come down in a couple of days.
“Call me, please,” Dan said. I told him I would and kissed his cheek.
My father didn’t argue about me going, but I didn’t say a word to him, even when he insisted on driving me to the station and seeing me on the train. “I’m sorry,” he said as they called for me to board.
I finally looked at him. “Are you?”
He seemed taken aback. “Of course.”
“You’re the one who said she only wanted me there for someone to find her when she died. She was alone when it happened. Do you know that?”
He flinched, turning pale. “Marilyn—”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to fight. But I should have been there. And I wasn’t because of you.”
I turned, picked up my valise and typewriter, and stepped onto the train.
As it rumbled down the tracks toward Philadelphia, I tried to rest. But every time I closed my eyes, I heard Lillian saying, “Ada—Ada died,” over and over again until I thought I was going to scream.
Finally, the train pulled to a stop at the 30th Street Station. And as I stepped out onto the platform, I thought about how different the circumstances were from the last time I stood here. I dreaded going to Ada’s house both times, but for such different reasons. It was going to feel so wrong without her.
I walked out into the night air, still hot in this little city that had grown on me so much, and looked around for Thomas. But I spotted Lillian instead, Sally in her arms.
Setting down my suitcase, I embraced her, Sally straining between us to kiss my chin. “How are you holding up?” I asked her.
“I’ve been better,” she said. “She’d hate that I drove her car here.”
I almost laughed at that, but a choking noise came out instead. It was true. She would have been livid. But that was how I knew it was true. If anything would bring her back from the dead to argue, it was that car.
“She’s really gone, isn’t she?” I asked.
Lillian nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. I was dangerously close to needing my own.
“How are we going to stay in that house?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’m glad you’re here.”
It wasn’t until I was back in my bedroom, the clothes that I had left in Avalon boxed in the corner, that the tears began to flow. And once they started, I didn’t think they would ever stop.
I don’t know when I fell asleep, but my dreams were a mix of Ada being alive and realizing she was dead all over again. So when I woke, it took me a minute to remember what was real and what wasn’t. And once I did, I didn’t want to get out of bed. It would be so much easier to stay under the white coverlet, selected by Ada, and let the grief consume me until I joined her.
But I heard Sally whine, and it reminded me that Lillian needed me. So I rose, went to the bathroom to wash my tearstained face, and then dressed to go downstairs.
The next two days blurred together. We met with the rabbi, who tried to dissuade us from following Ada’s request for cremation, as it went against Jewish custom, but Lillian stood firm. I remembered something Dan’s father had said at my grandmother’s funeral, about the tradition of mourners shoveling dirt onto the casket themselves. “It’s a mitzvah to honor her wishes over our own,” I told him, not knowing if that was actually one of the six hundred and thirteen official mitzvahs or not. But that language spoke to him, and he agreed to perform the ceremony as Ada had wished. Before he left, we had set the date and time.
He knew her well enough to give his own eulogy, but he asked if either of us wanted to speak as well. Lillian shook her head. “I don’t think I could get through it,” she said.
“I’ll do it.”
The rabbi turned to look at me in surprise.
“She was—is my family.” Lillian patted my leg, and the rabbi agreed, rising to leave.
Then there were decisions about shiva and notifying the community and my family. Lillian dealt with the crematorium, and I made the other phone calls—an arrangement that worked for me. I couldn’t talk about her remains like that.
Dan and my parents drove down Tuesday night and came to the house to see what they could help with, but I asked them to stay at a hotel instead. I didn’t want my father in Ada’s house, and Dan couldn’t stay with us without more chaperonage. No one argued with me—a first with my parents. We ate a solemn dinner that a silent and drawn Frannie had cooked, and then they prepared to leave for the night.
“How are you?” Dan asked as my parents went down the front steps, my mother clutching my father’s arm. “Really?”
“Numb,” I said. “I just need to get through tomorrow.”
“What can I do?”
I smiled tightly at him. “You’ve already done it. Just be here.”
He pulled me in for a hug, and for a moment I melted against him, letting him hold me. But I couldn’t fall apart. I had to finish my eulogy and figure out how I was going to make it through reading it in the morning.
Once they were gone, I went back to my room and sat at the vanity, looking down at the typewriter that Ada had given me. But the words didn’t come.
“Oh, Ada,” I sighed out loud. “How am I supposed to do this without you?”
I thought of my first glimpse of her. How she took my lipstick. Our night in Atlantic City. The way she called me stupid after Freddy, but made it clear all along that she would take care of me, no matter what happened. Her forcing me and Dan together, seeing what I couldn’t. You do know the ending, she repeated in my head. And I began to write, pausing only to wipe away tears.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
I woke to the sound of the alarm clock Ada had put by my bedside months earlier, my eyes opening on the day I dreaded. Yet the house still contained her presence. It felt impossible to believe that when I went downstairs, she wouldn’t be at the breakfast table, her newspaper in front of her face, a tart remark on her lips about the hours I kept.