I was not in the bathroom, in the tub, or in the spigot; I did not hold court in the mirror above her head or stand in miniature at the tip of every bristle on Lindsey’s or Buckley’s toothbrush. In some way I could not account for – had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father’s heart truly heal? – I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.
Downstairs Hal was holding Buckley’s wrist as it held the brush stick. “Just pass it over the snare lightly.” And Buckley did and looked up at Lindsey sitting across from him on the couch.
“Pretty cool, Buck,” my sister said.
“Like a rattlesnake.”
Hal liked that. “Exactly,” he said, visions of his ultimate jazz combo dancing in his head.
My mother arrived back downstairs. When she entered the room she saw my father first. Silently she tried to let him know she was okay, that she was still breathing the air in, coping with the altitude.
“Okay, everyone!” my grandmother shouted from the kitchen, “Samuel has an announcement to make, so sit down!”
Everyone laughed and before they realigned into their more closed selves – this being together so hard for them even if it was what they all had wanted – Samuel came into the room along with Grandma Lynn. She held a tray of champagne flutes ready to be filled. He glanced at Lindsey briefly.
“Lynn is going to assist me by pouring,” he said.
“Something she’s quite good at,” my mother said.
“Abigail?” Grandma Lynn said.
“Yes?”
“It’s nice to see you too.”
“Go ahead, Samuel,” my father said.
“I wanted to say that I’m happy to be here with you all.”
But Hal knew his brother. “You’re not done, wordsmith. Buck, give him some brush.” This time Hal let Buckley do it without assistance, and my brother backed Samuel up.
“I wanted to say that I’m glad that Mrs. Salmon is home, and that Mr. Salmon is home too, and that I’m honored to be marrying their beautiful daughter.”
“Hear! Hear!” my father said.
My mother stood to hold the tray for Grandma Lynn, and together they distributed the glasses across the room.
As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections – sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent – that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone.
With the promise that Hal would teach him to do drum rolls after dinner, Buckley put up his brush and drumsticks, and the seven of them began to trail through the kitchen into the dining room, where Samuel and Grandma Lynn had used the good plates to serve her trademark Stouffer’s frozen ziti and Sara Lee frozen cheesecake.
“Someone’s outside,” Hal said, spotting a man through the window. “It’s Ray Singh!”
“Let him in,” my mother said.
“He’s leaving.”
All of them save my father and grandmother, who stayed together in the dining room, began to go after him.
“Hey, Ray!” Hal said, opening the door and nearly stepping directly in the pie. “Wait up!”
Ray turned. His mother was in the car with the engine running.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt,” Ray said now to Hal. Lindsey and Samuel and Buckley and a woman he recognized as Mrs. Salmon were all crowded together on the porch.
“Is that Ruana?” my mother called. “Please ask her in.”
“Really, that’s fine,” Ray said and made no move to come closer. He wondered, Is Susie watching this?
Lindsey and Samuel broke away from the group and came toward him.
