Page 18 of Into the Deep Blue

I get the text when I’m in my room after I peel off my ten-thousand-pound water-soaked hoodie. All that extra weight made the bike ride home extra fun.

Fiona: please don’t hate me

She must have sent it the second I left. And my heart melts with the sting of a fiery burn in the way only Fiona can make it.

I launch my phone across my room. It feels good to throw something, so I grab the open bag of Cheetos on my nightstand and throw those, too. And why stop there? I launch a can of soda, and now my room is a goddamn Pollock masterpiece of Cheetos and Coke splatter. When I’m out of things to throw, I fall into bed. How did this happen?

Grace says I’m a disrupter. If that’s true, Fiona’s a hurricane. I mean, what the hell, Fi? What was that? I don’t even know.

The icing on the cake is an email from Grace with the details for Maddie’s funeral next week. Great. I guess not being an asshole looks a whole lot like going, even though I barely knew this girl. But honestly, I’m kind of messed-up about Maddie. All I can see is her standing in front of me, asking to hang out, and me ignoring her. What is wrong with me? Grace told the group she took something tainted at a party as if it was an unrelated issue.

Everything is related.

Maddie reached out to me. One time. I should’ve listened.

***

I have no idea what people wear to funerals. Mom didn’t have one. I’m not wearing a suit. I mean, forget it. A navy sweater is the most I’ll compromise. I throw it on over a dress shirt, pairing it with some gray pants. It’ll have to do.

Sitting through a church service is not my thing, so I skip that part and show up for the procession to the gravesite. Our group is hanging back behind Maddie’s family and her school friends. It’s an impressive turnout. Grace waves when she sees me. Fiona’s there, too, deep in conversation with one of the other guys. There’s a hint of red woven between her dark strands. It suits her to a T. When she glances up at me, I look away.

I’m still kind of pissed. I mean, I don’t know what she wants from me. I tried to be real with her at her house and she kicked me out, so what do I do with that?

The rest of the funeral is massively uncomfortable. Part of me wants to go up to Grace and say.

“See? What did I tell you,”

but it would be a dick move, even for me.

“What’s it all about, ?”

Mom always used to say. I think she regretted kicking out Alex and Max, especially when it became clear that Dad’s We-need-to-live-our-lives speech meant live them separately. The unhappier she became, the more she said it. Always staring off somewhere—out the window, into the refrigerator, into the black hole of the kitchen drain. What’s it all about? If we were on a game show, I’d guess family would be in the top three answers, but there I was, sitting a foot away from her, so that couldn’t be it.

A priest gives the service over an open grave, and Maddie’s parents are crying. Birds chirp from a tree nearby. It’s really nice outside—a great day for birds.

Fiona’s staring at me. I can see her in the corner of my eye. I don’t want to look at her, but I can’t help myself. I cave.

A soft breeze blows a few stray strands of hair across her face. She’s pastoral. The lace of her blouse grazes her collarbone, and the sun highlights her like a painting. She’s the only one here wearing white. A guy from group is behind her with his hand on her shoulder, and all I can think is it should be me. I should be that guy, but I’m over here and don’t know why. So, we hold this stare that somehow says everything yet not enough.

Someone starts to cry beside me, and I shift my eyes back to the ground.

I’m pretty sure Mom wanted her ashes spread under a Keith Urban concert stage, but that was never going to happen. I don’t think Keith Urban’s people would let it for one, and two, there weren’t any ashes to spread.

There were teeth. Alex told me this while eating a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table. I’m not sure what happened to them. Does a country fly back a box of teeth and hand them over to the family, or are they held in an insurance adjuster’s vault for evidence? I don’t know, and I never asked.

Dad found out first. He was working in Portland. When headlines about an airline crash popped up on the newsfeeds, his foreman showed him and said.

“Wasn’t Liz headed to South America?”

I wish I could have seen his reaction. Alex said it sounded like he’d been crying when he called her, but I don’t believe it. I think she added that for my benefit or imagined it for hers. They found out on a Friday and spent the next day and a half together trying to get information from the airline. They didn’t tell me until Sunday when they knew for sure she was gone.

It’s so weird to think about. I spent that whole weekend partying, and Mom was dead. I should have been crying, or . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what I should have been doing, but it was definitely not having the time of my life with people I didn’t care about. And I felt so justified, too, like what did you all expect for leaving me home alone for this long?

I knew something was wrong the second Alex and Dad pulled into the driveway in the same car. When I was little, Nana told me about a Magpie landing outside her kitchen window the day her sister died. She said it was telling her the news. It sounded ridiculous at the time, but now I get it. Alex opened the car door for Max and scooped him up in her arms. He was hugging a plush white polar bear. The sight of it all was telling me the news. Alex looked up to my bedroom window, and I knew.

She knocked on my door a few minutes later and asked me to come downstairs.

Max was watching TV in the living room. Alex sat at the table, and Dad put on a pot of coffee even though it was four in the afternoon.

“, there was an accident,”

he said, matter-of-factly while counting the scoops of grounds.

“There was a plane crash.”

They looked tired, like two people who had already spent a weekend processing this. I leaned against the wall and listened.

Everything was a total blur, and at the time, I assumed this was news to all of us. I think Alex came over and hugged me. Then, they started talking about funeral arrangements and using words lik.

“recovery options,”

and I was still two days behind asking.

“How do you know for sure?”

I joined Max on the sofa in the living room while Alex vented to Dad about safety measures and airline responsibility. Their voices sounded like a distant fog. Cartoons were on the TV, but I don’t think he was watching them.

“Hey,”

Max said, not looking away from the screen.

“Hey.”

“Sorry about your mom.”

He said it so casually, because he didn’t really know her. Alex was stubborn and only came by on holidays or birthdays.

It was a knockout punch, and the moment that made it real. How crazy is it that the first expression of empathy came from an eight-year-old? My hands were shaking. I collected myself as best as I could and went back upstairs.

“,”

Alex called out after me.

That’s when the googling started. I guess I was looking for proof that this was a mistake and they were wrong. It was a terrible idea. Of course, there was footage of the wreckage—a burned-out shell of a plane, and I watched it and rewatched, scrubbing through the frames, one at a time, searching for some kind of proof she was in there.

It was the teeth. It all came down to the teeth.

So there was no funeral. Mom’s friends didn’t understand, but we aren’t religious and with no body to bury and no ashes to spread, we agreed her funeral was a one-woman show in the Amazon. Then, my friends slowly faded into the mist with her. It wasn’t their fault, they tried, but suddenly I was living on Mars, just fighting to breathe, while it was life as usual for the rest of them.

Alex and I chose the South Falls in Silver Falls State Park as the place where we would remember her. We used to go there all the time, minus Dad because he was always busy. Mom would sit on the wet rocks overlooking the falls, and we’d run around behind her, throwing stones over the edge. Then, we’d roast hot dogs over a firepit and feed birds out of our hands.

We didn’t have any ashes to scatter so Alex and I burned some of her things—one of her shirts, her slippers, and a photograph. We took those ashes to the park with Max and tossed them into the falls. We didn’t tell Dad. We wanted the moment to be ours. It was far from traditional, but it was us.

I’m kind of glad it worked out that way because looking at Maddie’s casket hovering above this hole is unimaginably brutal. I bail before they lower it.

Funerals are bullshit.

***

The house is quiet when I get home, and all I can think about are the people who used to fill it. The funeral messed with my head, and maybe I can sleep off this sadness. I go to my room and tear off my sweater, but I’m too wired to sleep, so I sit at my desk in front of my laptop. Max’s minifigure is beside it, watching, like it’s asking something of me, and I don’t know what.

A blank page is on the screen with Victim’s Statement Bennet on the top. The cursor blinks at the end of the words.

I don’t feel like a victim. If I wanted to write a victim’s statement, I would have done it when I was eight or ten. Or every year after, when things got worse. Now, I feel pain and sadness, but that’s been around a long time, too.

My fingers rest lightly on the keys. I type:

Dear South American Airlines,

Funerals are bullshit. I mean, I should be thanking you for crashing a plane in the middle of the Amazon.

I stare at this for a second, and then delete it.

Dear South American Airlines,

Jane Goodall had a chimpanzee named Frodo. She didn’t even work in South America. What earthly reason could you have for selling a Jane Goodall South American Tour?

I delete this. I write:

Dear South American Airlines,

You know, you really fucked me. You stole her happy ending because if she was alive, there was a solid chance she would have left him. You know what that bucket list was? A countdown, and every time she crossed off another number, she was that much stronger, that much closer to making it. And I really wanted her to make it. So where does that leave me? I guess I have to pick up the baton. I still have a shot, right? Maybe I can be the one who makes it, but how can I do that, South American Airlines, when the baton lies in ruin somewhere in the middle of the Amazon? What am I supposed to run with?

I delete this. I write:

Dear South American Airlines,

I am not a victim, but I am alone.

I delete this. Max’s minifigure is judging me. I know it.

The cursor blinks on the screen. I write:

Dear Mom,

I didn’t fuck up the house.