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The house felt empty. No presence. No one in the rooms. Nothing in the attic. No weight of the past. No sense of her mom and dad. It felt like someone had picked it up and shaken out all the people and all the history and left it empty, not a house anymore but a series of boxes, connected by wall-to-wall carpeting, with nothing left inside.
and Louise knew that after they split the money they’d call a little more than usual, then they’d call a little less, then it would be texts, then there would be longer and longer between texts, and then it would be over. She and Mark were too different. Without something holding them together—living in the same town, Mom and Dad, children the same ages—they would drift apart.
“Ian—” she started. “You need her to give you the puppet if there’s going to be any growth.” He wasn’t listening. He’d closed the door. She spent the next five minutes agreeing with him just to get off the phone.
He behaved for the rest of the flight. Louise hated it. This was the library books being sad all over again, the promise of a dog they’d never get, telling Mark to stay for Pizza Chinese to send off their parents. Mothering, manipulating—sometimes there wasn’t a difference. She’d learned that from her mom.
Not so soon, Louise thought. I can’t handle another one so soon. But she didn’t have a choice. She would have to handle whatever happened. There was no such thing as too much. There was just more and more, and her limits didn’t matter. Life didn’t care. She could only hang on.
and I don’t know what to do, Aunt Gail, and now Aunt Honey’s in the hospital, and my parents are gone, and I don’t understand what happened, or why they’re dead, and I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I think I’ve got a limit and I think I’m getting real close to it and I’m scared of what’s going to happen when I reach it because what’s going to happen to Poppy and I can’t do this alone anymore, I need help, please, I need someone to help me.”
“The mama!” Barb said, shaking them hard. Then she shoved Louise away and practically skipped to Mark. “I like a big comfy man!” she enthused, throwing her arms around him and wriggling from side to side.
“Amen,” Aunt Gail said. “Amen,” said Barb. “We’re going to take this curse and pop it like a pimple. It’ll be easy-peasy, slick and greasy.” Louise squeezed her eyes shut. She had been prepared for anything, but she was not prepared for Barb.
“The Enemy will try to crush our spirits by conjuring extraordinary manifestations that will make each of you wish you had never been born. Be strong, trust in the Lord, and stay hydrated.
“There are no ghosts in the Bible,” Aunt Gail said. “A man dies but once and stands before God. Hebrews 9:27.”
“She transferred to Bishop England because she’s dyslexic,” Louise said. “Your aunt Honey thinks it sounds better that she flunked out. She gets it in her head how things should be and then she makes up stories that that’s how they are.” “But she got so angry,” Louise said. “Why do you think your aunt Gail got Jesus?” her mom asked. “She turned to the only person big enough to stand up to her mom. Once your aunt Honey decides how something’s going to be, that’s it.
Louise knew what she was doing. They all did it. When a conversation got too close to something a Joyner or a Cannon didn’t want to talk about, they made it personal. “She’s here because you’re lying,” Louise said. “She’s here because all of you think that if you don’t talk about something, it doesn’t exist.
Louise couldn’t. She thought about those women—Aunt Honey, her grandmother, her mom—deciding what needed to be done and doing it. They had a hardness she was beginning to think, more and more, she’d inherited. A hardness she couldn’t have imagined before she had her own child.
“When he’s gone,” Mark said, “so’s Mom.” “Mom’s already gone,” Louise said. “This is just one more thing she left behind.”
“I’d like to say this is the weirdest shit that’s ever happened to me,” Mark whispered. “But I have a bad feeling it’s going to get a lot worse.”
It took two more thudding steps forward and Louise felt her sense of perspective warp. It looked like it should be farther away, but it stood taller than her, taller than Mark, at least seven feet high. Something flickered and died behind her breastbone. She couldn’t fight this thing, but even so she braced her legs and adjusted her grip, because she didn’t have a choice.
and they had been happy for so long, and warm, and safe, and cared for, and now they had lost their creator and grief had twisted them into this deranged thing and she didn’t want to do this.
“Why?” he asked again, and it was a child’s voice, lost, with no way home. In that moment Louise thought of The Velveteen Rabbit and she knew why she had always hated it. Being loved didn’t mean you were alive. People loved lots of inanimate things: stuffed animals, cars, puppets. Being alive meant something else. “Because you’re real, Pupkin,” Louise said. “And nothing real can last forever. That’s how you know you’re real. Because one day you die.”
And now they were gone and so was her mother. Louise began to cry. She cried because at last it hit her that time only moves in one direction, no matter how hard we wish it wasn’t so. Not fair, she heard Pupkin protest inside her head. “No,” Louise repeated quietly to herself as she wept. “Not fair.”
When Louise was little, her mom had loved her without reservation, without hesitation, but Louise wasn’t born knowing how to do that for someone else. These stuffed animals were how she had first learned to love something that couldn’t always love you back. They were how she had learned to take care of something that relied on you completely. They had been training wheels for her heart, and now it was Poppy’s turn.
“I have very good taste,” Mark said. “I mean, Mercy helped, but what you’re seeing is mostly my vision.” He looked nervous and proud and like he really needed her to like it.
For a little while, for the last time, Mark and Louise stood in the house where they grew up and smelled the scent of their dad’s stollen baking in the oven.
Sometimes it wouldn’t bother her for years, and sometimes it hit hard. The worst was when she dreamed they were still alive and it had all been a terrible mistake. In those dreams, she was still thirty-nine and when she got Mark’s call she called home and this time her dad answered the phone and she talked to him and then to her mom and she would wake up glowing. She’d open her eyes and sit up in bed full of energy and actually reach for her phone, and that’s when she’d remember they were dead and it would hit her all over again, as hard as it did the very first time.
