The Girl in the Mirror(7)
“I can help with the sailing, Dad,” I said. “I’ll even help with the babies.”
Dad laughed. “Stay here and help your mother,” he said. “Stop her from giving all my money away.”
Two weeks later, Dad had a heart attack on the pier at a beach in southern Phuket and was pronounced dead at the scene. Francine said his body had to be taken back to shore in a tuk-tuk because the aging pier wasn’t strong enough for an ambulance.
Francine and her children were back in Australia within two days. The live-aboard sailors of Phuket, a disparate bunch of hippies, old salts, and dreamers from all over the world, had pulled together to help the young widow. They had organized the repatriation of Dad’s body, fed and comforted the kids, and sailed Bathsheba back to the marina, hauling her out onto the hardstand, where she stood high and dry for the next nine years, because nobody in the family knew what to do with her.
I had met these people, these ragtag seamen, on our sailing holidays with Dad. He’d have a drink with them, but sometimes it seemed as if he only talked to them to collect stories about their stupidity: their amateur sailing, their dull lives, how the Thai tradesmen ripped them off. They were nice people, he’d say, like it was the worst thing you could say about anybody.
And now I understood. Nice is dumb.
At Dad’s funeral, Annabeth wore black silk and Francine wore black satin. Francine, awash with pearls, led a cortège of ghost-pale daughters in matching white dresses, their dead-straight hair pulled back by long black ribbons. Annabeth—taller, but a much less imposing figure—was flanked by Summer and me in tailored linen and Ben in his first proper suit. Annabeth only had three children, but she had the boy. Francine was the newest, youngest wife, but Annabeth was still prettier. Besides, Annabeth had the beach house. Or so we thought.
Margaret didn’t come to the funeral. I think she was the only wife who knew what Dad was really like. I was about to find out, before the service even started.
The funeral home was one of those one-stop shops that aims not to offend anyone and ends up being a soulless train station. When we arrived, a soft-spoken man with startlingly pink skin took Annabeth aside. He explained that Dad’s casket would be rolled into the service on wheels. Health and safety regulations.
I don’t know whether Dad could have mustered six loyal mates to carry him, anyway. There were hundreds of people arriving for the service, but they weren’t Dad’s bosom buddies. Apart from family, I didn’t know any of them. They were smiling and chatting easily to each other. No one was crying.
The pink man asked my mother whether any of us would like to “view the deceased before we close the casket for the ceremony.” He gestured down a quiet corridor, away from the room into which the crowd of cheerful mourners was pouring. He might not have figured out that Annabeth was an ex-wife. She looked forlorn enough to be the widow.
“My children are far too young for that,” Annabeth said. She steered us toward our relatives. Her parents were in a corner with my aunts and uncles and a few cousins. They looked hot, itchy, and awkward in borrowed black clothes. January in Wakefield is a punishing time, and the air conditioning was showing its age.
I didn’t mean to spy, but I needed to know that Dad was really dead, and I kind of wanted to see the coffin on wheels. It was easy to evade my grandparents and head down that corridor. I pushed open a tomb-like door and found myself alone with my father’s dead body.
He had died in the tropics, and I guess he had been embalmed, but there was a faint odor in the room. I remembered a dog I had seen—and smelled—when I was a kid, lying dead in a gutter on a busy Thai street. I sure knew Dad was dead now.
Still, I crept forward until I saw him. The great Ridge Carmichael, reduced to a quiet, coffin-bound corpse. His body looked hollow, and his face was a horrible gray. Only his hair looked normal. He had recently turned sixty, but just a few strands of silver had pushed their way through the blond.
Sixty was old to be a father of small children, but it was young to die.
Tall vases bursting with white flowers stood sentinel around my father’s coffin, emblems of love. And not any old flowers. Someone had chosen the varieties: roses and irises.
My eyes filled with tears. Someone had done this to honor me and my twin, Dad’s firstborn children. None of his other kids had flower names.
I buried my nose in the nearest bouquet of irises and breathed deep. I knew they wouldn’t have a fragrance, but it’s a lifelong habit of mine to sniff my namesake flower. I’ve always wished they smelled as pretty as roses, and I guess a part of me believes that persistence should be enough to get what you want in this world.
As I was sniffing the odorless irises, being rewarded only with the smell of death, the door swooshed open behind me. I looked around. A cloth was draped over the trolley beneath the coffin, and it reached the floor. It was the only place to hide. I ducked under.
Just in time. I stiffened at the clack of stilettos. Mum always wore flat shoes. Who was this?
The intruder approached the casket and stood silent. I couldn’t breathe.
Now the door opened again, and I heard a soft tread. “Francine,” came my mother’s voice. “I apologize. They told me Ridge was alone.”
Francine and Annabeth had always been polite to each other. Too polite.
“No, I’m the one who should apologize,” said Francine. “I agreed to allow you this time, but when it came to it, I couldn’t bear them to put that . . . that lid on without seeing him again.”