Regretting You(25)

My father’s parents flew in from Florida three days ago. They’ve been staying with us. My grandmother has been helping out around the house, and I’m sure it’s been good for my mother. She’s had to deal with funeral planning for not only her husband but also her sister.

Aunt Jenny’s funeral was yesterday. My father’s is right now.

My mother insisted they be separate, which made me angry. No one wants to sit through this two days in a row. Not even the dead.

I’m not sure what’s more exhausting. The days or the nights. During the days since the accident, our house has had a revolving front door. People bringing food, offering their condolences, stopping by to check in. Mostly people who worked at the hospital with my father and aunt Jenny.

The nights are spent with my face buried into my soaking wet pillow.

I know my mother wants it to be over. She’s ready for her in-laws to go home.

I’m ready to go home.

I’ve been holding Elijah through most of the service. I don’t know why I’ve been wanting to hold him so much since it happened. Maybe I find his newness kind of comforting amid all this death.

He begins to grow restless in my arms. He’s not hungry—Jonah’s mom just fed him. I changed him right before the service started. Maybe he doesn’t like the noise. The preacher my mother selected to conduct the service doesn’t seem to know how to hold a microphone. His lips keep brushing across it. Every time he takes a step toward the speakers, they screech.

When Elijah begins to full-on cry, I first look at the end of the aisle for Jonah, but his previously occupied seat is now empty. Luckily, I’m sitting on the edge of the pew, closest to the wall. I quietly leave the room without having to walk down the middle of the aisle. The service is beginning to wind down, anyway. They’ll have the prayer, and then everyone will walk past the casket and hug us, and then it’ll be over.

I hugged most of these same people at Aunt Jenny’s funeral yesterday. I don’t really feel like doing it all over again. It’s part of the reason I’ve been insistent on holding Elijah. I can’t really hug people when my arms are occupied with my baby cousin.

When I’m outside the chapel and back in the foyer, I put Elijah in his stroller and take him outside. Ironically, it’s a beautiful day. The sun warms my skin, but it doesn’t feel good. It feels unfair. My father loved days like this. One time, he called in sick and took me fishing, simply because the weather was so nice.

“He okay?”

I glance to my left, and Jonah is leaning against the building in the shade. He pushes off the brick and walks toward us. I find it odd that he isn’t inside right now. My father and Jonah were supposedly best friends, and he’s skipping his service?

I guess I don’t have room to talk. I’m out here too.

“He was getting restless, so I brought him outside.”

Jonah places his palm on the top of Elijah’s head, brushing his thumb over his forehead. “You can go back in. I’ll probably just take him home now.”

I’m jealous he gets to leave. I want to leave.

I don’t go back inside. I take a seat on a bench right outside the front door to the chapel and watch Jonah push the stroller across the parking lot. After strapping Elijah into his car seat and loading the stroller into his trunk, Jonah gives me a small wave as he climbs into the car.

I wave back, unable to mask the empathy in my expression. Elijah isn’t even two months old yet, and Jonah will be raising him alone now.

Elijah will never know what Aunt Jenny was like.

Maybe I should write down some of my favorite memories of her before I start to forget.

That thought breathes new life into my grief. I’m going to start forgetting them. I’m sure it won’t happen at first, but it will, after time. I’m going to forget how my father sounded off key when he sang John Denver songs at the top of his lungs every time he mowed the yard. I’m going to forget how Aunt Jenny used to wink at me whenever my mother would say something that exposed her overbearing side. I’ll start to forget how my father always used to smell like coffee or fresh grass and how Aunt Jenny used to smell like honey, and before I know it, I’ll forget how their voices sounded and what their faces looked like in person.

A tear falls down my cheek, and then another. I lie down on the bench and curl up my legs. I close my eyes and try not to get swallowed up in more guilt. But the guilt wraps its arms around me, squeezing the breath out of my lungs. Since the moment I found out they had the wreck, I knew in my gut what caused it.

I was texting Aunt Jenny.

She was responding to my texts at first . . . and then she wasn’t. I never heard back from her, and then two hours later, I found out about the wreck.

I’d like to believe it wasn’t my fault, but Aunt Jenny said she was on her way to work when I texted her. I should have been more concerned about her reading my texts while driving, but I was only concerned about myself and my issues.

I wonder if Mom knows my conversation with Jenny is what caused them to crash. Had I not been texting her in that moment—had I just waited until she was at work—my mother wouldn’t have lost both her sister and her husband. She wouldn’t be struggling right now with being forced to bury two of the most important people in her life.

Jonah wouldn’t have lost Jenny. Elijah wouldn’t have lost his mother.