Things That Grow Page 3

“Yes,” Mr. Walsh continues. “You see, some families bury their loved one’s cremains and have a traditional funeral service at a gravesite. Others choose to bring the cremains elsewhere . . .

  “There’s also the option of keeping the cremains in an urn.”

  He flips to a page that has a photo gallery of urns. Most of them are a solid color or have quiltlike designs on them, but one has a Red Sox logo. It’s a baseball urn. I know Chris has spotted it, because he’s swallowing a smile.

  “I bet there are a lot of people around here who want that Red Sox urn,” I say, trying to keep my voice even.

  “Indeed,” Mr. Walsh says. “We hope it’s an alternative for the many people who want to bring their loved one’s cremains to Fenway Park. That’s not allowed, you know.”

  “People do that?” Seth asks, disgusted. “They bring ashes to a baseball stadium?”

  “Oh yes,” Mr. Walsh says with a chuckle. “My nephew used to lead tours at the ballpark, and at least once a week he’d catch someone depositing cremains on the turf or in the crevices of the bleacher seats. He stops people when he can, but some are too fast for him.”

  “That’s so weird,” Chris says.

  “That’s so gross,” I say.

  “Red Sox fans are eternal. I do warn ticket holders that most stadiums are covered with the cremains of the people who loved their team,” Mr. Walsh says.

  “Jesus,” Seth says, and then we all look up at Franken-Jesus right there in front of us.

  “For your purposes,” Mr. Walsh continues, trying to get back to business, “we also have smaller urns, if you plan to divide the cremains among a group of people.”

  Every time Mr. Walsh says “cremains,” I clench my jaw to keep it together. I can’t look at Seth; I know he’s about to laugh, too.

  I must not be controlling my facial expressions very well, because Mr. Walsh looks uncomfortable and says, “Forgive me. Have I said something funny?”

  “It’s just that you keep saying ‘cremains.’”

  “Yes?” Mr. Walsh asks, confused.

  “Is that what we’re supposed to call the ashes?” Chris asks, and I’m relieved he’s never heard the word either.

  “Is ‘ashes,’ like, not politically correct to say anymore?” Seth chimes in.

  Mr. Walsh pulls his chair closer. He’s wearing a dark green blazer, a wise wardrobe choice. Even though it’s a humid ninety-eight degrees outside—the worst of Boston’s late-August heat—the air conditioning inside the funeral home makes it uncomfortably cold. I’m freezing in the black tank dress I’d changed into before we left, and when I look at Chris’s arms, they are covered in tiny goose bumps.

  He’s wearing a light blue T-shirt. Chris’s closet is all jeans and solid-color T-shirts that are the same brand because he likes the softness. They all fit him the same way and flatter my favorite part of him.

  I want to touch his clavicle.

  “It’s an industry term, I suppose,” Mr. Walsh says, distracting me from my silent objectification of my best friend. “I believe we began using the word cremains to prepare the family for what they’ll actually receive.”

  Uncle Seth is nervous. “What will we . . . actually receive?” he asks, cracking his knuckles.

  “People hear ‘ashes’ and they expect just that. But . . . you’re not getting ashes. Human remains don’t look like what you see at the end of a cigarette or the ashes from a fire. Movies about cremation have led people to believe that when human bodies are oxidized, they take the form of gray dust.”

  “Like the end of Infinity War,” Chris says, and Seth and I look at him, stunned that the only Jesus-knowing person in our party has invoked an Avengers movie in this funeral home.

  “Sorry,” Chris says, looking at the ground. “That was stupid.”

  “No, it isn’t stupid! Infinity War is a great example!” Mr. Walsh says, tapping the table in front of Chris to give him credit. He looks so thrilled to be sharing a cultural reference with a teenager that I wonder if he has any non–funeral home friends.

  “In Infinity War, people disintegrate into dusty ashes. But bodies,” Mr. Walsh continues, “when they’re oxidized—they don’t look like that. We want people to understand that human remains—cremains—don’t look like ashes at all.”

  “What do cremains look like?” Seth asks. His right hand grips the edge of the table.

  “Human bones are made of calcium phosphate,” Mr. Walsh says. “They’re solid and strong and white. Almost like stone. Because of the bones, you should expect to see something much more like . . . gravel.”

  He is quiet as we all try to imagine Grandma Sheryl as gravel. My stomach does a backflip and my mouth goes dry.

  “Would it help if I showed you a picture of what you’ll see at the end of the process?” Mr. Walsh asks.

  “No. No, thanks,” Seth says before I can say yes.

  I’m desperate to see a picture of cremains—to prepare for them—but I keep my mouth shut because Seth is not ready. His eyes are red, and he’s starting to cry all over again. Mr. Walsh pulls a box of Kleenex from nowhere and places it in front of us.

  Chris takes my hand in his under the table. He can sense that I’m about to lose it, too. When he reads me like this, I am so in love with him that it makes me want to hide under my chair.

  Before I can prevent my brain from doing what it shouldn’t, I imagine having sex with Chris. I picture it happening in my bed, in his bed, on the football field at school, and in front of the Natick Mall—all in three seconds.

  Then I imagine us old and dying in bed together.

  Then I imagine us being cremated together and sharing that horrible, stupid Red Sox urn for the rest of eternity.

  I turn to Chris, and his big brown eyes are already fixed on mine, as if I’m the center of his universe, but I know it’s the other way around.

  He is my best friend and my inspiration for everything good thing I write. He is my conscience, the person I want to know, forever. I can’t risk screwing that up, this perfect thing we have. That is why I will push these feelings aside until they go away—so I can keep him.

  We are supposed to start our senior year together in two weeks and put out our final four issues of the N-Files. We have so many stories we want to write. We’ve already come up with our Halloween costumes (we bought matching curly wigs so we can both go as Neil Gaiman). We have plans to skip homecoming and get our tarot cards read by real psychics in Salem.

  But how can that happen now?

  I take my hand out of Chris’s so I can rub the makeup that’s seeping into my eyes. Uncle Seth is also composing himself; he gives his hair a tussle and rubs his hand down his face.

  “I feel like I should start from the beginning,” Mr. Walsh says. “Everyone take a deep breath, I’ll get us some pretzels, and then I’ll tell you about how all this really works.”

  Chapter 3

  Twenty-four hours later, Chris is sitting on my bedroom floor, drawing, like it’s any other day. His back is against my bed, his notebook rests on his knees. His hair is its short summer length. From this angle I can see a few tiny hairs growing on his square jawline. They are delightful.

  I’m lounging on the mattress above him, and when I prop myself up on my elbows, peering over his shoulder, I can see what he’s creating. It’s his Chris Burke signature style—the kind of polite ink drawing that would work as a classic children’s book illustration—but the subject matter is deeply upsetting. Chris’s favorite artist is Edward Gorey, who was the king of creepy ink illustrations. He made men with skeleton faces, bad things happening to cute children, people who look like they’re stuck in an evil fairy tale. Chris has a framed print of a Gorey self-portrait on his wall, and sometimes when his mom passes it, she mutters, “That man,” as if Edward Gorey himself is out to get her.

  “Interesting,” I mutter at Chris as I survey his work.

  His drawing-in-progress is of a rocket ship that looks like a coffin. It has fire coming
out of its bottom, and it’s flying through space, past a round object that could be the moon. There’s a little window at the top of the coffin in which Chris has drawn a tiny face with dead eyes illustrated with little x’s.

  He’s using the colored pencils Grandma Sheryl got him for Christmas.

  “Is that a space coffin for Grandma Sheryl?” I ask, noticing that there are black streaks on my white bedspread. God, my eyeliner is everywhere.

  If Grandma were here, she would tell me that I’m asking for conjunctivitis, but I don’t want to wash off the makeup she last saw me in. I just keep putting a new layer over the last one. It is not hygienic, but it feels right.

  “Sheryl would never want a coffin this ostentatious,” Chris says. “She’s too classy. This is for those rich guys who want their body shot up into space just to prove they can pay for it. They should put this in the Walsh’s Funeral Home catalogue just to see who asks for it.”

  Chris gives the body of the coffin rocket some definition and draws a price next to it, like the one we saw next to the picture of the doves. “Send your soul out of this world—for only one million dollars!” he writes.

  “Mark that up,” I say. “It should be at least two million to have space cremains.”

  “What’s your story for the rocket coffin?” Chris asks, turning his head so he can give me a tentative smile.

  I let my head rest on the bed, so now our faces are so close we could be kissing. It would only require one of us to lean in a few inches. I don’t want to exhale, my breath is probably terrible, so I move my head before I answer him.

  “You know I’m bad with space,” I say, turning onto my back. “My alien stories are the worst.”

  “That’s not true,” Chris says. “What about ‘Hayley’s Comet’? That was awesome.”

  “That wasn’t actually about space. It was about a girl who hates everybody. It’s a story about feminine anger, not space.”

  “Whatever, it was great.”

  “Your illos made it great. Your pictures were the whole story.”

  Chris ignores the compliment. I stare at the ceiling—wanting to focus anywhere but on him—but he’s up there, too.

  For my birthday, he made me a massive drawing of the Natick Mall, which is within walking distance—albeit over a dangerous major thoroughfare—from our neighborhood. The mall is so big, and it continues to expand, with standalone strip malls and fancy condos all around it. It feels like it’s going to suck us up like a black hole, as if our tiny, retro residential road will be absorbed by a new Shake Shack or a seven-floor furniture store, and our homes and families will disintegrate into nothingness.

  Chris illustrated our anxiety about this by creating a massive sketch of the mall on a long sheet of poster paper. He drew a swirling hole of dark matter in the parking lot area.

  “It’s not a black hole,” he explained, “it’s a portal.”

  He told me that he believes the portal is really there, and if we found it, it would lead to another mall parking lot. He claims that all malls are connected. He called the drawing Leaving Nordstrom. I taped it to my ceiling that night. Now it’s the last thing I see before I go to sleep.

  “If I’m going to write a death-inspired sci-fi story right now, it won’t take place in space,” I tell him, because I know he’s waiting for an answer. “I’d rather write about a guy like Mr. Walsh who runs a funeral home, but it turns out—and we won’t know this until the end of the story—that he’s dead. He’s been dead the whole time.”

  “So he’s like a zombie funeral home director?” Chris asks.

  “Not a zombie, but a ghoul. He still has his full personality and brain. Like, it turns out he used so much of the weird chemicals in the funeral home—formaldehyde or whatever—that when he finally died, his body remained preserved, like canned goods. So he just keeps running the place because . . . what else is he supposed to do with his life?”

  I turn over on my stomach again to watch Chris flip to the next blank page of his notebook. He starts sketching, and within a minute he’s drawn a tiny Mr. Walsh, with more ghoulish features. He’s wearing a button that says ASK ME ABOUT ETERNITY!

  “That’s good,” I tell Chris. “Save that one. I actually want to write it.”

  “I’d read that,” two voices say in unison, and I am reminded that other people are here.

  Our closest friends, Jessica and Jason, sit side by side in the corner of my room. They wear matching track pants, and T-shirts printed with our school logo (a very angry-looking bird), although I’m sure that’s not planned. Jessica and Jason are inseparable, like Chris and me, but unlike us, they are a couple. They are allowed to kiss. I have asked Jessica a thousand times what will happen if they break up, and she just says, “We won’t,” as if she knows the future. As if there’s no risk whatsoever.

  Chris and I find it fascinating that Jessica and Jason kind of look like each other, the way people and their dogs do. You’d think that would be impossible, seeing that Jessica is short and Korean and Jason is tall and white and blond, but it’s all in how they carry themselves. When Jessica grew out her long black hair last year, Jason’s usually cropped cut suddenly went past his ears. When she got bangs, he let his hair fall just above his eyes. And because all they do is run—on the track team, for fun, on various community leagues, and as a way to get to school—they’re almost always in athletic gear, and often, it matches.

  They’re unlikely friends for Chris and me, seeing as we’re big on avoiding sporting events and prefer sitting around each other’s bedrooms, but I think Jess and Jason know that no matter how far they run, we’ll be there for them when they’re done, ready to eat and watch movies. Jessica and Jason live in the fancy condos by the mall, so it’s a pretty quick jog to our neighborhood—for them, at least.

  They came over, not long after Chris’s parents stopped by with baked goods, bottles of soda, and a bouquet of flowers to offer their condolences, which basically meant sitting on my floor and just being present. Jessica usually talks a lot more than Jason, but today he’s taken the lead. All four of his grandparents are dead, so he knows what this is like. He’s said more words to me today than he ever has. I like this version of my friend.

  “Sheryl was the best,” Jason said when they arrived, pulling me in for a big hug. He smelled like body odor and cinnamon, a surprisingly nice combination.

  Jessica, standing behind him, whispered, “I’m so sorry, Lori,” but she looked too uncomfortable to say anything else.

  After we came upstairs, it started to feel like things were normal, but they aren’t. We’re all pretending that it’s any afternoon, but it’s not.

  “My mom will be here soon,” I announce all of a sudden, more to remind myself. She used to visit a lot when I first moved in with Grandma Sheryl, but for the past few months I’ve flown to see her instead. We were aiming for two visits a month, but that became monthly soon enough. Now that I think about it, it’s late August, and I haven’t seen her since July 4.

  “Right,” Jason says. “I guess we should probably go and let you deal with family.”

  “Unless you want us to stay,” Jessica adds.

  “Go,” I tell them. “It’s only going to get more depressing and boring here.”

  They stand up; Jessica looks relieved to be dismissed.

  “Call if you need anything,” Jason says. “And remember, it’s going to be different every day. The grief—some days it’s really easy, and other days it’s like you can’t get out of bed. I know you’re not a runner, but you can always do a brisk walk. It might feel good.”

  “I love you,” I tell him, “but I’m not going to do a brisk anything.”

  Jason laughs and hugs me again, and then he gives Chris this Rube Goldbergian six-step handshake that I’m always surprised Chris knows. We hear them jog downstairs, say goodbye to Seth, and then they’re out the door.

  Chris and I are alone.

  “We could just run away,” he says, and gives
me a small smile.

  Before I can ask him what that would entail, the doorbell rings.

  Mom.

  My body tenses, as if it’s preparing for a fight, but Chris puts his hand on my arm to settle me.

  “Try to be nice. Remember that her mom just died,” he says, and I exhale. He’s right.

  Chris and I make our way down the stairs, him right behind me, and as soon as Becca Seltzer is close enough to reach me, her arms are around me tight.

  Seeing my mother is sort of like the best and worst thing at the same time. I resent that her arms feel like home. That the smell of her—the distinct odor of her vegan, nontoxic lemon-cedar deodorant—reminds me of the way her car smelled when she used to pick me up from school in all the many towns we lived in together (five).

  I resent that even though she doesn’t act like a mom in the right ways, she’s so overwhelmingly my mother that I can’t help but lean into her embrace.

  “My baby,” she says, touching my hair and looking at its color with some confusion. “Aubergine?”

  I also hate that she says aubergine.

  “It’s supposed to be dark red,” I tell her.

  “Well, it’s a risk. I like it!” she says, which makes me want to dye it something else.

  I look behind my mother and see that Bill is standing just inside the front door, his face in his phone. From the few times I’ve met him I know that this is his natural resting position in life—slumped over and scrolling.

  “Honey,” Mom says, squeezing my shoulders. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when we lost her. It’s both beautiful and traumatic to see a person’s soul leave their body, and I wish I could have shared it with you.”

  This is a very Mom thing to say.

  “We weren’t there when she died either,” says Seth, who appears from the kitchen. “I’m not sure anyone was there when her soul left her body.”

  “Well,” Mom says, still taking me in, “she has passed on through all of us just them same.”

  This is what my mother believes—that when someone dies, pieces of their soul enter the bodies of those who loved them most. She got this from a self-help book called The Dissolving of Spirit: How to Escape Mortality. She bought it for Grandma Sheryl years ago for no good reason, and it’s still sitting unopened on Grandma’s bedroom bookshelf. I’d like to light that book on fire right now.