“Deal. Now can we go to sleep? I feel like barfing, and I’m tired.”
“Okay.” Cora switched off the light and plopped down beside Mercedes, snuggling down in the blankets. She was quiet for several minutes, and Mercedes was almost asleep when she spoke once more, her voice so soft, Mercedes wasn’t even sure she was talking to her.
“There might not be such a thing as Hell,” Cora whispered. “But I do believe in ghosts . . . because sometimes I think I see my dad, sitting in his wheelchair in the living room. It’s just for a second, and then he’s gone. But it’s happened more than once. I want to ask him why he left me, but he always disappears.”
Mercedes pretended to be asleep and didn’t answer. But her heart was pounding, and she was wide awake. She desperately wanted to go home. But there was no way she was walking through Cora’s living room now.
* * *
Two weeks after the first anniversary of her death, Mercedes accompanied Noah to Cora’s grave. Heather had gone on April fifth, and Mercedes told Noah she would stay with Gia whenever he wanted to go, but he shook his head and said nothing more. He was quiet. Reflective. And for a while he seemed resistant to going at all. Whenever Mercedes brought it up, his lips would tighten and his head would bow, as if to say, “There is something I need to say but won’t.” And he wouldn’t. Mercedes didn’t even bother trying to wheedle it out of him.
There was a new awareness between them, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It didn’t rub in all the wrong places or cause them to constantly check their feet to see how they looked as they walked, like a kid with a new pair of sneakers. It was simply another layer, and it was almost frightening that it didn’t feel strange. Maybe it was because they didn’t change. They still teased each other and bickered like they were twelve. They still behaved exactly the same way. Except for the times Mercedes caught Noah gazing at her with an expression that heated the skin of her throat and tightened the muscles of her lower belly. When she caught that look she remembered how it felt to kiss him, and she desperately wanted to do it again. But they didn’t. She didn’t. The shower scene, as he’d called it in the salon, had not come up again. Not in innuendo or in real life. It was not forgotten, but it wasn’t discussed.
On the eighteenth of April, a Monday, Noah came home from work and suggested they go to the cemetery together. They bundled Gia against the threat of rain and climbed in Noah’s car, stopping at the store to purchase flowers. They had several graves to visit. They bought yellow roses—her favorite—for Cora and a sprig of evergreen mixed with baby’s breath and a few red roses for Papi. Maybe it was too Christmas-y for April, but Christmas made Mercedes think of ever-faithful, ever-loving Papi. Noah bought a spray of daffodils for his mother. The woman who was afraid of the light deserved a little sunshine. Finally, they bought a small, mixed bouquet to lay on Sergeant Mike McKinney’s grave. He wasn’t buried near the rest, but in the Veteran’s section at the top of the rise. Through the years they’d never forgotten him, though Noah and Mercedes had never really known him. Sergeant McKinney and his missing parts had made a lasting impression. Sadly, not the impression he would have liked, they were sure.
They wove their way to the best access point for the graves they needed to visit, and parked the car. By some unspoken agreement, Cora would be last. They visited the oldest loss first, trekking to Sergeant McKinney’s grave and laying the flowers beneath his name. Heather had already been to his grave too. There was a picture of Cora and her father together—it looked like a Xerox copy—in a plastic sleeve to protect against the April rains. Mercedes supposed it was Heather’s way of reminding her dead husband that it was his turn to look after their daughter.
“I know what you’re thinking, Mer” Noah murmured, his eyes on Mike McKinney’s name.
“What?”
“You’ve got that damn song in your head.”
“Dem Bones?”
“Yep.”
“It’s completely inappropriate. But ever since we had that talk, I think of it whenever I think of him. How did you know?”
“Because you’re tapping your toes in the rhythm of the song . . . and because it’s been stuck in my head for a year.”
“I’ll sing ‘Red Red Wine.’”
“Don’t you dare.”
Mercedes patted the stone, and Noah saluted it. Gia wanted to climb up on it, and Noah swooped her up so they could move on without desecrating Gia’s grandfather’s resting place.
Papi was next in the rotation. He and Sergeant McKinney had died fourteen months apart. Mercedes got him fourteen more months than Cora got her dad. Cora said it wasn’t fair. Mercedes reminded her that loss wasn’t a competition, but Mercedes never argued that the way Cora’s father died was worse. It was. Papi slipped away as peacefully and as quietly as he’d lived. His family missed him dreadfully, but there was no violence in his death. Only the violence of broken hearts.
Mercedes sang a verse from “A la Puerta del Cielo,” the lullaby that made her think of Papi, and touched her fingers to her lips and then to his name before rising. Noah reached out his hand to her, and she took it, walking with him, missing her father but moving on.
“What was that?” Noah asked.
“The song?”
“Yeah. You were singing that to Gia the other day, and Cora sang it too, though she usually just hummed it.”
“I taught it to her.”
“To Cora?”
“Yeah. A long time ago. It’s called A la Puerta del Cielo – At the Gates of Heaven. Papi used to sing it.”
“Tell me the words.”
“A la puerta del cielo—at the gates of heaven. Venden zapatos—they sell shoes. Para los angelitos—for the little angels. Que andan descalzos—that go barefoot.”
Noah smiled. “Maybe that song is the reason my little angel never wants to wear her shoes.”
“No sooz!” Gia piped up, right on cue. Mercedes and Noah laughed.
“Dee-Uh walk,” Gia insisted.
Noah let her down, telling her to stay close, and they walked in fits and spurts toward Shelly Andelin’s grave, coaxing the little girl along.
Shelly’s grave was a simple slab with her name and the word mother engraved above it. Noah had had no money when she died. What nineteen-year-old kid does? But he’d scraped enough credit together to buy a casket, a plot, and a stone to mark the spot. He’d told Mercedes once that his mother said he was the only thing she’d done well . . . and she hadn’t really done much. In Mercedes’s opinion, Noah was the best thing about his mother.
“I feel sad when I come here. I don’t miss her . . . not the way I should. I’m hard on her. In my head and in my memories, I’m hard on her,” Noah said. “Everyone deserves to be mourned, and I didn’t mourn her enough.”
“You’ve never been very good at pretending.”
“No.” He shook his head, and Mercedes could see the conflict in his face, the same conflict he’d been struggling with for weeks, but he shrugged it off again without unburdening himself.
“Gia, come on,” he called. Gia was lagging behind, weaving in and out of the stones, putting too much distance between them.
“I coming, Daddy.” She tried to run, her feet heavy in her pink snow boots, and Noah watched her with a small smile on his face.
“She’s not calling you Noah anymore,” Mercedes commented.
“No. She teases me sometimes and calls me Noah. How can a two-year-old child even know the concept of teasing? But she does. At first, I would roar and tickle her. But I realized I was reinforcing it. So now I ignore it completely. If she wants my attention, she has to call me Daddy. Otherwise, I’m blind, deaf, and dumb.”
Mercedes laughed. “Very smart.”
“I love her so much,” he whispered, his tone fierce.
It was such a sudden admission, and so out of the blue, that Mercedes looked up at him, puzzled. But something in his voice and face echoed an inner anguish, and Mercedes was quiet, letting him speak, trying to hear the things he might not say.
“The first year with a new baby is a blur. Dads kinda get shoved to the side. Or maybe we happily shove ourselves to the side. We go to the corner and pray the family survives. But that first year is mom intensive, you know? There’s no place for Dad. We’re the support, the backup. I obviously didn’t do the best job at that, considering my wife . . .” His voice trailed off, and he breathed once, deeply, and let whatever he was going to say dissipate in the breeze.
“The day Cora died, there was a short period of time when I didn’t know what happened to Gia. When I called you and you said you had her, and she was safe, I had this visceral, almost transcendent moment of relief. It was like a surge of superpower. That moment has sustained me through this whole year. When I’ve been at my lowest, I think of how Gia was spared, and it gives me strength. My mother told me once that I’m a miracle. She said she didn’t make my soul, and my father didn’t make my soul. Someone else did that. That’s the way I feel about Gia. I can’t take credit for her. I’m just lucky enough to get a front-row seat in her life.”
Mercedes couldn’t imagine Shelly Andelin uttering those words, but she was touched that she had. She felt a sudden rush of gratitude for the odd, little mouse Noah had called mother, and mentally thanked her for giving him something to hold onto.
When they reached Cora’s grave and brushed off the debris left by a long winter, Mercedes handed the roses to Gia so she could lay them on the grave. Gia didn’t want to relinquish them, so they let her tromp around with the flowers in her arms, watching as she marched in her private parade.
“I don’t know what’s going on in her little head half the time, but it looks like fun,” Noah murmured.
“It’s a party, no doubt.” Mercedes laughed. Since the flowers were in use, she dug Cuddy’s stones from her purse and studied them before laying them down on Cora’s headstone, one at a time.
“What are those for?” Noah asked.
“Cuddy gave them to me. He always leaves me a rock when I cut his hair. His pockets are full of them. I asked him once why he carries rocks. He says they keep him from floating away with the dead.”
Noah shook his head. “Cuddy scares me a little, Mer.”
“He doesn’t scare me.”
“Does anything scare you?” There was laughter in his voice, and she didn’t respond.
He scared her. Noah scared her. Losing him scared her. It always had, especially after Papi died.
“I like Cuddy. And you know me, Noah. I don’t like everyone. I can be a total bitch.”
“No, you can’t, Mer. You just think you can. Big difference.”
“Cuddy’s been told he’s crazy his whole life. And he believes it. He fried his brains with drugs to escape the crazy, and he just made it worse. But there’s a sweetness and a gentleness that’s constantly pouring out of him. He cries when I wash his hair.”