Funeral Games

CAITLIN CAMPBELL

My mom made me wash my face twice before we left for the funeral, which was crazy because I was only wearing eyeliner, if a lot of it. I didn’t argue. I don’t have a sister, but if I did and she died, I’d break the teeth of anyone who looked at me wrong. And if my mom wanted to be a perfectionist rather than a tooth-breaker, that was fine, too.

“Remember, Colleen,” Mom said as I swung into the backseat of the rental, “it was a car crash. Ok?”

I sighed loudly. Dad shot me a glare in the rearview mirror.

“Grandma and Mark’s mom and I talked,” Mom went on, “and we decided.”

“You mean Grands decided, right?”

Mom acted like she hadn’t heard me. “It isn’t time to tell the boys.”

“When will it be time?”

“Maybe never, pumpkin. But if the right time comes, Grandma will know, and she’ll tell them.”

“Mom, they need to know what happened.”

“Colleen, Marie was my sister and Grandma’s baby. You’re only fifteen. Just this once, you have to trust that we know what’s best.”

I didn’t say anything. “Colleen, promise me you won’t tell.”

H

There were photo albums at the wake and, even though it was depressing, I liked seeing what Mom and Aunt Marie looked like when they were young. My mom was a porker. She glared through these thick glasses like it was the camera’s fault that she was chubby and nearsighted. Aunt Marie was always grinning with her chin tilted back and her arms wide, like she was hugging everybody at once. You could tell she figured out early that she was the pretty one.

There was another album like that for Uncle Mark and one with Marie and Mark’s wedding pictures, but I decided not to look at those. It turned out there wasn’t much to do at a wake. You could eat, feel sad, and talk, and that was pretty much it. I don’t know my Illinois side of the family very well, so it gets awkward if I talk to them very long. Plus, they always want to know how my classes are going and if I have a boyfriend, which are not exactly my favorite subjects.

I spotted Aunt Marie’s youngest, Danny, attached to Grands’ legs.

“Here Grands, I’ll take him for a while,” I said.

She handed him over carefully, watching to make sure I wasn’t going to pour my coke over her head or drop a spider down the back of her dress. I was being totally selfish, though. The wake was getting boring, and I’ve always gotten a kick out of Danny. I took him down to the basement, where there were some couches for when you need to take a break from full-time sadness There were a couple of adults around, but it was mostly empty.

“Think of the biggest thing in the world,” Danny said. He was four then.

“Is it… an elephant?”

“No it’s not an elephant.”

“Is it all the water in the world?”

“No!” he said, although I thought it actually might be.

“Is it love?” I asked, feeling like a sellout for even saying it. It was the dumbest answer possible, but kids grow up on crap Disney movies with

their crap lies about the world, so it’s the sort of thing Danny might have believed. But he shouted “No!” cackling with laughter, and it was so nice to hear that I tackled him to the ground with tickles. Chris wandered down and gave me a look. He must have had some idea of funeral manners, which probably didn’t involve tickling his little brother to death.

“Hey, come here, cuz,” I said, and let up on Danny. As his giggles sputtered out, I rooted around in my purse and pulled out a deck of cards. “You know how to play Spit?” “My Grandpa Louise carries cards around with him, too,” Chris told me, but I ignored him and asked Danny to cut the deck. I shuffled the halves back together in my best Vegas-dealer style. As I dealt, I tried to guess who had told him his parents were dead, and how. My parents had woken me up to tell me. It was a Saturday and I’d only been asleep for a few hours. I thought they were going to yell at me for getting home at 4 AM, way past curfew, and worried that my breath might still smell like beer. My mom leaned against the doorframe and my dad sat down on the edge of the bed. I scooted as far from him as I could get and tried to think of an excuse. I was so primed to get yelled at that my dad had to repeat the news before I got it. When I looked closely at my mom, I could see her eyes were bloodshot. She kept undoing her cardigan and rewrapping it around herself more and more tightly. I wanted so much to fall back to sleep, so that I could wake up again and none of it would be true, but I couldn’t.

Maybe nine was too young for Spit, especially since this nine-yearold’s brain was all grief-addled. At first, he went too slow when speed is the whole point, but he picked up the pace a little as he understood the rules and forgot to be sad. He was actually pretty good. He had lots of pent up energy and quick, neat little hands – sloppiness is deadly in this game. I let him win the first few rounds, but by the fifth, he beat me for real, yelling “Spit!” so loud a lady jumped and spilled her drink.

I like Spit but the game wasn’t short-circuiting my bad thoughts like it should have. It was probably because it was the most time I’d spent all day with Chris, without any adults around. We were yelling and laughing, sometimes slapping each others’ fingers by accident. I felt hypnotized by the rhythm of the game, and like the truth might just slip out. Redking

your parents black queen didn’t die redjack in a car blackten accident. Rednine strangled her blackeight with his bare redseven hands (my blacksix mom doesn’t redfive know I know). Blackfour drove a ways redthree just after blacktwo to blow his redace brains out spit!

By the end of the sixth round, most of the kids at the wake had come down to the basement to watch us play. They wore their best clothes, which were every color except black, and I liked that. There were twelve of them, from Marie’s side and Mark’s side both. I was glad Mark’s family wasn’t totally shunned, although there was a clear divide between victim’s family and crazy murderer’s family. Only Chris and Danny belonged to both.

All the kids wanted a turn at Spit, but it’s a two person game, and it would have taken too long to teach them all. I taught them BS instead – I told them it stood for Bull Stink. We sat in a circle with all the older kids playing and Danny plopped down on my lap. He wanted to hold my cards, but kept tipping them down and everyone could see, so I gave him the jokers to play with.

I felt like adults going by were glaring at me, but I’m used to that at family things. No one wants me to influence their kids, and I can’t really blame them. I get in some trouble for my attitude, my grades and whatever else. One time, I got caught drinking vodka from the water bottle I bring to school. One time, I asked my chemistry teacher why she was such a bitch. When I got kicked off the swim team for cutting class too much, my mom, who outsources when she doesn’t know what to do with me, told my grandma. Grands and I had to have this long talk about it, and I was like, “I see you at Christmas, Easter and a couple of other times and now you’re going to make me a good kid? Way too late for that, lady.”

One of Mark’s sisters pulled me out of the game and went on about how sad it all was, and how nice it was of me to look after the kids. I’m not anybody’s babysitter, I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. A big older lady I didn’t recognize came by in the second round and told us we should all be ashamed for playing games at a time like this. Screw off, you old cow, I thought, and then I saw Chris’ face, so I said it out loud.

Clearly that woman hadn’t read enough. We had to read the Iliad for ninth grade English, and I didn’t really, but then we did the last chapter

in class, when they have a funeral for Achilles’ boyfriend/cousin (ew). And after they’re done with the rending and the gnashing, they’re all like, “Good grieving, guys, now let’s run a 5K!” And you know what? I get that. I’m on the track team, and I’m pretty good, and no one can understand how that works. It’s like they want to divide all the girls into two groups: the ones who study hard and do good at sports and have cute boyfriends but are smart enough to use condoms and the ones with nails scribbled black, who smoke up and cut themselves and show up to graduation with a bun in the oven, if they graduate at all. And here I am, with my body like the lean achiever girls, and my brain with the burnouts.

The thing is, I love racing, and I love winning, and I love running. When I run, the first couple of minutes are pure energy and then I start to check in and see what hurts, like, “hey ankles, how we holding up? Hey knees, doing OK? Still got that twinge, lefty?” For a while it hurts, but I think about everything that’s fucked up in my life and it powers me along, and I go faster for longer than anybody. And sometimes after that, I throw up, and that’s how I know I’ve done what I need to and it’s OK to stop. I ran the morning I found out about Mark and Marie and, oh man, was that the best run ever.

When I run, I like to imagine that there’s a ball of light in my stomach that shoots in a beam straight out the top of my head. Everything, even the bad thoughts and feelings, becomes part of that brightness; hard brightness of feet smacking track, sweaty brightness of swinging arms, gory brightness of muscles pumping, ghoulish brightness of organs jiggling. I feel at the edge of myself, somehow, like this is the most I could ever be, and it’s OK, it’s enough.

I like other games too, though, not just racing. There’s this one I really like where you have to say movie names alphabetically, and if you can’t think of one for your letter, you’re out. I like to play this game on car trips when I’ve been looking out the window, catching reflections of myself, and have gotten so sick of my stupid face and so tired of my stupid brain I could die. Problem is, some people, no matter how smart, suck at this game and don’t want to play. It’s only a fun game if you’re good.

Uncle Mark used to play games with me. Uncle Mark was the nicest man in the world, which makes it so weird what happened. He wasn’t like

my dad. My dad isn’t so awful, I guess, but he’s a mean drunk. He’ll have a couple of beers and a few C.C. Manhattans and call my mom a bitch, or crack the dishes together while he washes them. I always get scared he’s going to slam into my room and start shouting about what a bad seed I am, why am I such a fuck up, why am I so stupid? But most of the time he just gets this look in his eyes, mean and empty at once. He looks at me like I’m nothing to him, or worse than nothing because I’m making his life shittier. And everyone thinks he’s just a huge, squishy teddy bear of a guy. You think you know men, and then they call your mom a cunt or strangle your aunt. You can’t know anyone at all, I guess, but it’s harder for a woman to flip out and kill you like men can.

Uncle Mark was just so gentle. He worked at night so he could stay home with the boys during the day, when Marie was at work (but when did he sleep? Maybe that was part of the problem). One time when we visited, Mom asked him to talk to me about Seth, this guy I was dating. Mom and Dad must have been on one of their splits then. Seth used to hit me some, but it wasn’t like it sounds. First of all, it was more roughhousing, like boys do. Secondly, I’d hit him right back. I’m a tough girl, and strong, so I made it hurt. Anyway, it wasn’t when we were mad, or just when we were mad. It was shorthand for a lot of things: I’ve missed you, you look nice today. Hugs and kisses didn’t feel right to us.

“Your mom’s worried about you,” Uncle Mark said. It was a nice fall day, and he had invited me on a walk. He was tall and thin, which I like in men – big enough to be comforting, but not so big you couldn’t do some damage if they tried to hurt you. He was like a moth, with brown hair and brown clothes, glasses and cardigans. If he’d been my age and gone to my school, I’d never have known he existed.

“Yeah?” I said. If Mark wanted to butt in like this, I was going to make him do the work. But he didn’t; we walked along for a while without saying anything. We were going pretty slow because Mark had brought Danny with. Danny was three then, and he had this backpack shaped like a golden retriever puppy, complete with a leash. Danny could hold the leash when he was playing, but Mark had it then so Danny wouldn’t wander off. Every couple of steps, Danny had to stop, bend down, and place his palm flat against the pavement for a few seconds. He’d always

been the weirdest kid.

Finally Mark said, “You’re too smart to let anyone treat you like that,” and that was it. Of all the things in the world, from him. But I believed him because I’m a dolt and because Mark was so quiet, when he finally did say something, it seemed truer than what other people said. I didn’t break up with Seth right away – I’m not the kind of girl who does things just because someone tells me to – but soon after I started thinking that maybe it really was weird to go around half expecting your boyfriend to smack you all the time, which led to me picking a fight, which led to us breaking up.

H

When the kids got bored with BS, someone suggested hide and seek. “Alright,” I said, “but we have to stay downstairs.” There was some space: a pretty large sitting area, a few doors that probably lead to closets, a coat rack, and the bathrooms. It wouldn’t be a great game, I thought, but then I’m a game snob. One of Mark’s nephews started counting and I said to Danny, “Hey mister, want me to help you hide?” He nodded and took my hand, then headed right up the stairs. He took them one at a time, climbing up with the left foot then the right to meet it. I figured that we were leaving the game and was fine with that. Danny and I wandered through the crowd hand in hand. I watched people watching him with obnoxious, naked pity. I felt it, too, but the last thing he needed was to feel like a zoo animal. Poor kid, he couldn’t understand that everything had changed.

I let him lead me through a set of doors and realized we had entered the viewing room. It was completely empty, maybe because there wasn’t much to see with the caskets being closed. Mom and Grands had debated whether Uncle Mark’s head could be repaired, and whether it should be, whether anyone would want to see him anyway. Aunt Marie’s bruises were easier – stick her in a turtleneck and presto! But if you could see her, wouldn’t that make it weirder that you couldn’t see Uncle Mark, and shouldn’t they be a set? Whatever the reason, I was glad the caskets were closed. Stitches through your lips and cotton balls up your ass and the whole thing just pumped to the brim with formaldehyde. It’s fucking

grotesque.

There were portraits of each of them in black and white leaning against the caskets, and a ton of flowers, more on Marie’s coffin than Mark’s. “Mommy’s in there?” Danny asked.

“Yep, Danny boy, she is.”

“I can’t see her. Is she hiding? That’s a good place to hide – can we hide with her?”

If there was such a thing as the right crowd for that question, I was it. When I die, people will toss horseshoes around my feet, or use my hands for cat’s cradle. But I could see a lot of things going wrong if we hid with Marie, particularly that we’d scare the crap out of anyone who peaked inside the coffin.

“No, buddy, there’s only space for one, but do you want to see her?” The kids hadn’t seen her that morning. The police found Mark in his car a few blocks away, read the note, called up Mark’s sister, had her let them into the house, and did their crime scene stuff all before the kids woke up. It would have been awful for them to have seen her like that, but I thought it might help Danny to see her at the wake. Maybe he needed closure or something.

I realized that I wanted to see her, too. The last dead body I’d seen was my dad’s dad, but it had been ten years before and I didn’t really remember. Aunt Marie and I were never super close, but she was Mom’s baby sister, who brought me Polly Pockets every Christmas, took me apple picking one fall before we moved away, and took care of me when my dad was in the hospital for a ruptured appendix so I didn’t have to wait there with my mom the whole time. We went to the cathedral and she helped me light a candle and ask God for my dad to get better. Here lay the younger, thinner version of Mom, with Mom’s bushy eyebrows, which I also have, and Mom’s carrot-orange hair, which I would have if I didn’t bleach mine.

I lifted an armful of white lilies off the lid and set them on the floor, maybe not as gently as I should. By the time I put my hands on the polished wood, I was crying, but not too much. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what it must have been like for Aunt Marie; the person she trusted most coming towards her with huge, alien rage, closing his hands around her throat, not letting go. Did he charge at her, or close in slowly?

Did he say sorry, or maybe why he had to do it?

The lid of the coffin was cold, like everything in that place. I pulled a little, then a lot, and then I braced myself and really pushed with my legs and back, which was when I felt something shift, but it was the whole coffin, not just the lid. It was then that I got scared and felt like I was maybe doing something horribly stupid. What if Aunt Marie had buggedout eyes, or had leaked in the coffin? What if I tipped the whole thing over and sent her rolling on the floor? I decided that I needed to get out of there. I scooped up Danny and said, “Sorry, buddy, I don’t think she wants to see anybody just now.” Without replacing the lilies or wiping my fingerprints off the wood, I headed for the door and bumped it open with my hip. I almost ran over a funeral home spook who was going into the viewing room. “Sorry!” I yelped.

“My condolences,” he muttered. I got across the room and outside fast, in case he realized what I’d done and chased after me. It was spring, but still cold out. I set Danny down so I could clean up my face, but I didn’t have any tissues so I had to wipe the snot and tears away with my fingers. I tried to take the little handkerchief from Danny’s vest pocket, but it turned out it was sewn in place.

H

I was curious about what the funeral would be like, since I didn’t remember the last one I had gone to, and I’d never been to a double funeral ever. The pastor didn’t say exactly what had happened, he called it a “senseless loss,” and talked a lot about how we can’t understand why God lets things like this happen but we have to have faith anyway. The closest he got to admitting what Mark had done was to go on for a while about forgiveness, and how forgiving makes us closer to God and to the people who have wronged us, even if they’re gone.

It went on for a while, but I put everything I had into not fidgeting or slumping during the dull parts. I didn’t even let myself think mean thoughts about the awful soprano who sang eight verses of some song that was supposed to be hopeful but was really just depressing. It’s not like I believe in God or anything but I wanted, that one time, to be perfect.

Then no one would have to be ashamed of me or yell at me for ruining anything. They could use their whole brain just remembering Mark and Marie instead.

I stood with my mom and dad in the first pew. My mom was crying, and my dad, also on his best behavior, had his arm around her shoulders. Chris and Danny were down the pew from us, with Grands, who would now have to be their mother, too. I couldn’t hear Danny at all. Chris was crying to end the world. He sobbed until it didn’t even sound like sobbing anymore, but some combination of retching and whimpering. His sobs were horrible and lonely at first, but he sounded so pathetic, he made other people sob, too. I knew how they felt. I would have given anything to make him stop. I’d have hacked off my legs and planted them in the ground, and grown him fresh new parents. I would have gouged out my running brightness, if only it would shut him up. But there was nothing that was or could ever be enough.

H

I followed Chris downstairs when they took the caskets out to the hearse and waited until he came back from the bathroom. His eyes were puffy, and his nose red and scratched from tissues.

He should find out in a different way, I thought. Not in the basement while his parents’ bodies were loaded into a long black car, not from an older cousin who he didn’t know that well and who had no practice breaking awful news in a nice way. But, I figured, it matters more what you know than how you know it, right?

Just before you say something like this, it feels impossible and like you’ll never find the words, and you think you’ll back down. But then you think, why? Because you know the words, they’ve been chorusing in your head all day, all week even, since it happened.

Sometimes I do things for shitty reasons: I feel screwed-over by the world and want to screw somebody back, or I want to get a rise out of somebody, or I want to control them in sneaky ways. But this felt pure: Chris needed to know so maybe he could take extra care and not turn into Mark. It felt so, so important at that moment that this sweet kid know he

had to be wary of himself, so that no one else would get hurt.

I took his hand. He didn’t know to steel himself, he couldn’t have known. He didn’t know to expect something worse than the worst thing he could imagine. “It wasn’t a car accident, Chris. Your dad snapped. He killed your mom, and then he killed himself.”

We stood quietly for a moment, and I tried to read his messy face. Without letting go of my hand, Chris stamped down on my left foot. “Liar,” he screamed, actually screamed, “you’re a liar!”

Once he had run upstairs, I made myself look close at my toes. I’d been wearing dressy sandals, and he had split the nail of my big toe straight down the middle, from the tip nearly to the base. It was bleeding from where the tip had gone into my skin, and was already turning dark. I couldn’t touch it – the idea was horrible, like seeing someone touch someone else’s eye.

I limped back upstairs. The first person I saw was my mom. She was looking at her own mom, and at Chris. He was asking Grands something. She looked tiny and older than I remembered. She nodded once to him.

I headed to the door, but Grands caught me before I made it out.

“Colleen.” She was crying. She didn’t seem to know what she wanted to say. Then she put it together and asked, “Colleen, how could you? Why?”

In that moment, I realized that I’d made a mistake, that there was a difference between what I had wanted and what Chris needed. The weight of what I’d done slammed down on me. I wanted to hug Grands, to cry, to explain that I didn’t mean any harm. I just hadn’t thought it all the way through. But Grands’ heartbreak was terrifying – it was so much bigger than me – and I couldn’t find the words.

“Just a bad kid, I guess,” I said, and looked away.