Good Girl Bad (29)
“Do you want me to stay here? And what about Gen, what do you think? She said she won’t go.”
Genevieve walks back into the room then.
She looks like she’s been crying.
“It’s all right. I’ll go.” And she falls into Nate’s arms, and is quiet and still.
“What date?”
Alone in the house, Rebecca is stumped by the question.
They’re past the condolences, the pleasantries. Now they’re getting into the nitty gritty of what Rebecca wants for the funeral, and she realizes she doesn’t even know if Leroy’s body has been released by the police.
Flowers and caskets don’t seem real; these are choices other wives have to make. Children, for their parents. Not her. Not for Leroy.
She’s glad everyone is gone. Nate has gone to ask Freddy some more questions, see if he can find out anything else that could help them to find Tabby. Gen has gone to the Hyatt with Rebecca’s parents. The silence engulfs her, soothes her somehow.
“I might have to get back to you,” she tells the funeral director faintly, feeling suddenly light-headed.
Are you expected to be competent arranging all these details for your husband’s funeral? At any time? Let alone when your daughter is missing? When your parents, who you’ve avoided for twenty-five years, pop up in your kitchen?
She hangs up the phone, and sits at the table, staring vacantly out the window.
The fridge hums in the background. A magpie warbles across the road. For the first time all spring, it feels like summer is coming. It feels like Rebecca could be in a parallel world, one where Leroy will be home soon, and they’ll pour gin and tonics and sit on the deck, a light breeze ruffling their newly donned summer shirts, the endless possibilities of life spread before them, magnificent.
Taken for granted.
It feels so real that Rebecca lets herself lean into it. Her eyes closed, she imagines the crispness of her drink. Leroy urging her to get changed for tennis, her pressing for them to skip it, to have another gin.
Teasing him when she finally acquiesces, lifting her shirt over her head as she walks to the bedroom to find her gym gear, glancing over her shoulder at him coyly. Knowing if she wants, she can derail his tennis plans completely.
A strange sound startles her and her eyes fly open, then she realizes that the noise came from her—a peculiar, low-pitched noise, somewhere between crying and growling, as though she could threaten the longing inside her away, or frighten her unhelpful daydreams back to where they came from—a useless, magical place that she will never get back to, ever again.
How do you plan a funeral, ever?
How does one move past the disbelief, the pain, the emptiness, to organize and think and wrangle something so huge into something that requires so much…planning? So much attention to details?
It doesn’t seem possible, and yet that must be how every funeral goes, mustn’t it? People left behind in utter chaos, trying to make decisions and get things done?
Rebecca slowly lowers her head to the table, until her forehead is resting against its cool surface. She closes her eyes again. In another life, organizing a funeral would be effortless. It’s the sort of thing she should excel at. Order, purpose, ticking things off in a linear fashion.
When will the body be released?
Date, time, casket.
Invitations.
Today, even the first of these steps seems too hard.
She wonders how Genevieve is coping. Does Gen really keep in touch with Cheryl and Rob? Something about another parallel world, where her daughter chats to her parents—about what?—makes this current reality seem even more untethered.
Do her parents know how to comfort a grieving child? she wonders, and the thought really does untether her, and she stands up and bites down hard on her fist, and screams and screams and screams.
24
Two Months Earlier
Tabby is super careful writing anything down.
She doesn’t share anything that could be identifying. But sometimes she just needs to write her thoughts out, trying to work them out. She always feels better at the end of a writing session.
She hates the word diary. Diary sounds like something a nine-year-old would keep. Whining and bitching. She thinks what she does is something far superior to that.
Now, she writes: I think he really loves me. I think I can finally leave this shithole and be free. We made love today in his bed, and it was kind of gross being in her bed, and I did feel kind of guilty, because separation is hard for kids, we should know, and I feel bad about that, God.
Poor Gen.
So…her bed. So weird. But she never wants to make love to him anymore, he told me it’s been years, which is so surprising, because they’ve always been so touchy, for as long as I can remember, but I suppose they maybe just love each other like friends, not lovers.
Lovers.
Her stomach flip flops all over the place when she thinks about his tongue on her nipples, the way he stares into her eyes as he touches her, like he wants to know all of her, inside and out. She’s never felt so seen, so known.
She thinks she could tell him anything.
I had another fight with Mom, she writes. I think I’m starting to work it out. It’s not just that she has a temper. It’s when I stand up to her. Or when she feels rejected. I can see it come across her face. It’s fury, yes, but it’s also first this tiny flicker of something else. Desperation? Panic? It’s like she feels something bad, and so she has to make me feel worse, and that makes her bad feelings go away. I used to think it was me, that I did something wrong, I’d try so hard to fix it. I’d cry at her feet, literally, like she winded me, like I couldn’t breathe, because it was so unexpected, so out of the blue, it was bewildering, her words were always so violent, so painful. And I’d tiptoe around her for weeks, terrified of it happening again, never knowing when it would come out of nowhere and knock me out.