Death drove me out of this place and death brought me back.
I knew my father would die, but I didn’t expect him to have a heart attack on a boardwalk Ferris wheel. He was gone before the gondola came back down to the ground. He didn’t have a chance.
I also didn’t expect my mother to want to bury him in California, near my childhood home. We’d all left the state after I graduated from high school, shedding horrible memories that permeated the summer after my senior year of high school. All of us had made lives elsewhere. We started fresh. Me in Chicago, my parents in New York. But California had been Dad’s favorite place we’d ever lived, Mom swore. And she wanted to spread his ashes standing at the end of the same boardwalk he died above.
I’d thought it was morbid, but I was hardly one to instruct another person on how to grieve properly. After my best friend Mel died in a car accident, I’d done my fair share of weird grieving behaviors, most of them self-destructive. I’d been in the same car but had only sustained some severe injuries even though she’d hit a redwood tree in the mountains. Survivor’s guilt wore me thin in the years just after the accident.
I swore when I got on the plane from Chicago that I wouldn’t let any of the old feelings seep through the cracks in my mind like smoke entering a room beneath a closed door. I came here for my father’s memorial and I’m leaving as soon as my mom opens this container and tosses the ashes out into the bay.
“Well?” she prompts me, turning and looking at me with watery eyes. There’s something about the set of her jaw that dares me to challenge her. “Aren’t you going to say something?”
I stare, transfixed by her pain. She’s beautiful, my mother. And right now, she’s vulnerable.
I want to tell her I was never close with Dad. That I don’t know what to say. On the tip of my tongue is the thought that this is all ridiculous. It’s macabre. He died atop the Ferris wheel just to our southeast. I glance over my shoulder at the monstrosity as it moves, half expecting to see his ghost waving from the top.
But he’s not there.
I turn back to my mother and look at the urn.
A whole human reduced to gravel. They gave him to us in a plastic box that contained a plastic bag that was marked with a metal tag that looked like it belonged on the D-ring of a dog collar. Instead of Fido, it had some random number engraved on it. Not even his name. It made me imagine him being shoved into the crematory after they swept some other poor soul out, their ashes mingling because it’s impossible to get them all out of the oven.
Maybe that’s why it’s a number and not a name. It’s not entirely Henry Grove, but mostly him. For a moment, I imagine the seal on a bottle of orange juice: 100% juice blend!
I picture a label slapped onto the bag of gravel: 100% Henry blend!
“Nancy!” My mom loses patience as I zone out.
“Umm—” I hesitate, struggling to find words. Something that shouldn’t be hard for a journalist. “He was a good dad,” I say.
“Jesus Christ, Nancy, is that the best you’ve got?” she asks. Then she smiles sadly at me. “I guess I don’t have anything better to say. I’d expect more from you, though.” She reaches out and squeezes my hand. “Having put you through journalism school.”
“Well, I never studied obituary writing.” I smile back at her.
“I guess we might as well open this and do the damn thing,” she says as she drops my hand. She tries to get the zip tie off the top of the bag, but it won’t budge. I help her tear a hole in the plastic.
“Together?” she asks.
I nod, and the two of us shake the bag out over the bay and say goodbye to my father.
* * *
We part ways afterwards. She heads to an old friend’s house. A lady she was close with as I was growing up. I go back to the hotel, not in the mood for stirring up memories. I take the most direct route, avoiding any of the places Mel and I used to frequent.
My hotel towers above the city, high and removed from the places below that hold so many of my most prized moments with Mel.
I grab a water bottle from the mini fridge, suspending any irritation I might feel about the price of it, and I walk over to the floor to ceiling windows. I catch sight of my reflection projected out into the cloudless blue sky over the city, but shift my focus further out.
I see the ocean, and I’m immediately brought back to a night with Mel, drunk on Smirnoff Ice that we bought from a gas station not known for checking IDs, stumbling down to the water with our shoes in our hands. It was near midnight and the sky was clear, just like it is now. The stars were bright and the world before us felt infinite.
The fifteen-year high school reunion is this weekend. An unfortunate coincidence, because under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t be caught dead on the west coast at such a time. I wasn’t popular in high school and the idea of seeing my peers fifteen years later holds no appeal.
I had friends. Mel and I had friends. There was a group of us that ran around together. Danny, Jack, Mel, me, and our favorite English teacher, Mr. Bloodsmyth. He was an import from the UK and made a big splash with his accent during his first year at our high school. All the girls had crushes on him, me included. Bloodsmyth was probably in his early thirties when we were on the edge of eighteen. We all stayed after class with him to talk about this and that, sometimes books that he’d recommended us, sometimes life.
I wonder how he’s doing.
I wonder how Danny and Jack are doing. I haven’t heard from any of them in years.
I made a conscious decision to separate myself from that summer on social media. I’m not friends with anyone from high school. My sole goal after that May was to put that weekend at Danny’s dad’s cabin as far behind me as possible.
I step away from the window and place my water bottle on the nightstand. My flight is this evening and I have an entire afternoon in front of me. I crawl onto the bed and grab the remote. I find a true crime show and set the alarm on my phone.
Before I know it, I drift off to sleep.
