The Loose Ends List(80)
Gram has her family and her fresh orchids and a lit candle from her favorite store on Madison Avenue.
“Come on, Aaron, you crawl up here, too.” Dad slides awkwardly between Jeb and me. Out of nowhere, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s “Dream a Little Dream of Me” comes on.
“I want to go before the song ends, Doctor.” She must feel a collective stiffening, because she says, “It’s okay. I’ve said and done and lived everything. And what’s left, I’ve left for you. I love you all. Thank you for making this life so very rich.”
The doctor injects a clear liquid. Mom strokes Gram’s hair and Uncle Billy holds her hand. Bob sits on the other side and smiles at her, tears streaming down his face.
“Sleep now, Mommy,” Mom says softly.
Her eyes close, and then she’s gone. Just like that.
We sit a long time. We don’t want to disrupt her departing soul. We get up, one by one, and kiss her cheek. She’s still warm. Mom and Uncle Billy stay alone with Gram. They help the nurses wrap her in her sheets from home, and tie her body with white ribbons made of sugarcane so the dolphins don’t get stuck. We wait, stiff and sad, in Mom and Dad’s cabin until they come back. Uncle Billy tells us he carried her all the way to the stern of the ship and set her on a soft belt that gently pushed her through an opening into the sea.
Now I’m the fully hollow pumpkin. The one all scraped out and left to rot.
Dad guides me down to the ballroom, where the last of the Wishwellians have formed a perfect horseshoe surrounded by a thousand candles. We walk from person to person like we’re doing a morbid folk dance, hugging Vito’s family and Burt and Francesca and Eddie and Camilla and Enzo.
I can’t do this. It’s too hard.
It gets blurry when they show photos of Gram on the big screen. There are lots of them from when she was young and in the thick of the jazz years. They play Otis Redding’s “Remember Me.”
Why are they trying to make it worse?
I can’t eat. I’m so tired and thirsty. People around me talk and joke about Gram as she’s floating, floating in the ocean. It’s dark and cold, and I’m so afraid she’s not quite dead. I’m so afraid sharks are ripping my gram apart and we’re here in this grotesque display of disrespect. Enzo keeps a hand firmly on my leg and squeezes every few minutes, pumping life to my heart.
Roberta and Ty step up to read:
Dear Astrid,
You taught us that age is an illusion steeped in bullshit. You showed us that even the smallest adventures count, even the briefest human interactions matter, and there are no limits to the joy this life offers. You are not just an unlikely revolutionary and a remarkable woman, you are everybody’s gram, and we will miss you terribly. We love you.
The Wishwellians
“I’m going to bed,” I say. I lean on Enzo and stumble to the cabin. I’m halfway to sleep, my head pressed against the picture of Gram holding me on her lap, when I hear thumping. I imagine it’s Gram slamming up against the ship.
“No, no, no, no.”
Enzo is having the serpent dream.
We hide again in the vortex. It feels selfish, indulgent, but being with Enzo is the only thing that makes a dent in the pain.
My family pesters me to see if I’m okay. I put a sign on the door. I’M OKAY! Okay is a ridiculous word.
We’re in the middle of the Pacific and won’t reach Hawaii for another week.
Gram died two days ago already. I’ve had two milk shakes and a bag of chips, but I’ve had sex eleven times. When I went to get the chips, Wes and Burt were on the balcony with a case of wine and a picked-apart chicken.
“What do you mean you’ve never seen Sixteen Candles? It’s a classic,” I say. Enzo hasn’t seen any classic American movies. I get a burst of energy and text Jeb and Janie. Movie marathon? We meet in the theater, and Eddie sets up Sixteen Candles and tubs of popcorn. The theater fills with people who actually saw eighties movies in the eighties.
After movie number three, Francesca texts us: We need Astrid’s family in the library.
We file in and sit in front of a movie screen. The anxiety overtakes me. I know what this is. It’s her “group” project.
“Hello, lovelies. I’ve called you all here because Astrid made a video. Before I play it, I want to let you in on a little secret. You should be very proud of Astrid. She came to me during her trip with Ruth and badgered me about financials to the point where I thought she might be working for the IRS. It turned out she was deeply moved by our mission, and asked me to identify people she could sponsor. She asked that I choose people who had reached out to me and who deserved to be here, but couldn’t afford it otherwise.”
“Astrid paid for all the patients?” Dad says.
“And the families. All of it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Please don’t mention this to the others. Astrid wanted them to think it was an anonymous Good Samaritan. But I thought you should know Astrid is a Wishwell angel.”
Gram is an angel. I picture her winged raisin body floating around in a thong bikini.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Wes says. “Not in the least.”
I’m not surprised either. I’m just grateful.