The Secret Sisters
Pia
Whatever happened later, Pia could always know that her eyes were even more green than something and that something something else. Edgar never finished the sentence, and Pia lacked his way with words, so she hadn’t even a good guess as to what he was about to say.
“I love that color on you,” he whispered just before the entire world collapsed inward. “It makes your eyes even more green than . . .” something.
He did that sometimes. Whispered in her ear. When he’d been drinking a little and watching her from across the room, thinking of later things and earlier things and all sorts of things that were possible between them. Sometimes he didn’t even say anything that made sense. He just murmured “la la la” and jangled her earring with the tip of his tongue, and for some reason Pia found this more sensuously eloquent than any words. Edgar was ridiculously inventive with his tongue.
“I’m not a handsome man,” he told Pia when they were first dating, “but I am blessed with moments of amazing dexterity.” And those moments emerged as promised over the twenty years they were together.
“It makes your eyes even more green . . .”
She definitely heard that much. Keeping her gaze forward, her expression composed, Pia leaned slightly into the whisper. She smiled and tilted her head so that his mouth brushed close to her hair. She wasn’t really listening for specific syllables, just allowing his breath against her neck.
It was New Year’s Eve. They were at a party, surrounded by polite laughter and chamber music and expensive perfume. They were dressed up. Edgar wasn’t usually a dressed-up sort of person, but he looked good in a tux and didn’t mind wearing one in winter, when Houston isn’t as hot. This was one of the museum’s major annual fund-raising events. People with money to donate had to be finessed into forking it over, and every year Edgar did his tie-and-tails best to romance the big benefactors. He was decked out in what he called “Sunday-go-to-meetin’” clothes, even though this wasn’t Sunday and “meetin’” had not been a part of their lives for a long time. Pia regretted that later. She wished she’d made an issue of it and dragged him to mass; wished they’d had the boys confirmed and Sunday-schooled, giving them some sort of faith to seize on to when loss yawned like a sinkhole, destabilizing and swallowing everything for miles.
something something
She didn’t quite catch it. Pia was left with that unfinished edge unraveling between her ear and the part of her brain that would have collected the words carefully, kept them in a private time capsule. Edgar’s Last Words. Part of his private obituary, along with so many other details of him no archaeologist could ever dig deep enough to discern. His sleeping sounds. How he pressed his knuckle under his nose when he was angry, trying not to say something cruel. The way he cracked the boys up by orating street signs in an officious announcer voice.
“Accurate Air Incorporated,” he would read from the back of a truck, and then tag it with a fake slogan. “We incorporate air accurately!”
Edgar Wright Ramone, PhD, curator of Eastern European displays, husband of eighteen years, father of James and Jesse, Eagle Scout, cribbage shark, master of the Cajun barbecue, a man blessed with moments of amazing dexterity, whispered his last words to his wife.
something something
Then suddenly, soundlessly, he simply crumpled. And not gracefully or in slow motion. It was an abrupt, boneless descent. His champagne flute shattered on the museum’s marble floor. His chin glanced off Pia’s shoulder, leaving a small, blue bruise. There was no extending of the hands, no attempt to balance or catch himself. Pia felt in her feet the solid knock of his head against the mosaic tile circle, above which a huge pendulum swung, illustrating the rotation of planet Earth. It happened so fast, Pia didn’t even drop her champagne. Someone took it from her hand as she knelt down, confused, calling Edgar’s name.
“Edgar?” It was a question, not a scream or even an exclamation. “Edgar?”
The party guests tried not to look, looked, were embarrassed for the couple they assumed to be drunk, became curious, grew concerned, told an intern to call 911, watched a doctor in evening attire administer CPR, told the chamber musicians to stop, stood stunned, sat stunned, and finally left whispering, passing hushed voices back and forth. The sibilant consonants and breathy vowels made a shuffling sound, like paper unfolding behind their hands.
Shush sha . . . said maybe an aneurysm . . . sha sha . . . family . . . really makes you think about . . .
Edgar ended with the dying moments of the year. It turned midnight as they placed him on a gurney. Bells rang across the city. It was 2001. Pia got into the ambulance with Edgar’s body. The sirens were silent, and the driver talked on his radio with the same rustling paper tone as the partygoers.
There was paperwork. Forms to sign. A required explanation of legalities before she could officially release his organs for donation. Pia did all that. Then she had to call home and tell the twins to come and get her because she’d left the car at the museum, and they came, and she had to tell them their father was dead. The sun rose on the new year a little while later, but instead of finding Pia the Wife where it had left her, it came up on an empty place, and in the shadows stood Pia the Widow.
Pia’s brother, Sonny, and his wife, Beth, worked at a funeral home, so the business of family attrition and human disposal was something they knew from every angle. Beth was the office manager. Sonny’s profession was a little less self-explanatory. His business card said “Death Event Coordinator.” Pia didn’t know if the death was the event or if the event was the whole production that had to be coordinated afterward, but whichever—this was his profession now. He had an appropriate vehicle in which to convey death, a price list, a planning guide, an embossed order of worship. There was a flowchart of steps to be taken, none of which led to despair or chaos—only loss. And Sonny saw loss as a fordable stream.
He sat with Pia at her kitchen table and led her through a workbook called Coping with End of Life Issues. Pia was grateful and amazed that she could feel so calmed, so cradled by compassion as he presented all this unthinkable information. It was the innate priest in him, she decided. He no longer wore the collar, but he was still a minister, a comforter.
“Beth suggested we plan the memorial service at our church,” he said, showing her a little floor plan of the sanctuary and fellowship hall. “I’m not sure we’d have adequate seating at the funeral home.”
“The church doesn’t mind that we’re not . . .” Pia wasn’t sure what word she should use—noun, adjective, or verb.
“God doesn’t read labels.” Sonny set his arm around her shoulders in a brotherly one-armed hug and added a small, bracing squeeze. “The United Methodist policy is open hearts, open minds, open doors. We’re pretty lax about who comes and goes.”
After Sonny left, Pia called her sister, Lily, and Lily cried, her voice muffled and hoarse.
“Oh, Pia! Oh, my God!” Lily wept softly, the phone cupped close to her mouth for what little privacy was possible. “I’m so sorry I can’t be there for you right now.”
Lily’s attorney tried to arrange for Lily to attend the funeral, but prison officials could not be persuaded, and this made Pia so sad. Lily and Edgar had always been great friends, and it would have meant a lot to Pia to have her sister beside her in the blowing rain at the cemetery. Usually, a family can depend on funerals to force some semblance of togetherness, but with such irreparably tangled circumstances and the wind whipping so, what was left of Pia’s little family was effectively shredded to a few loose strands.
Sonny orchestrated everything from Edgar’s body in the morgue to Edgar’s ashes in the vase. No, the urn. They didn’t call it a vase. Pia wondered if it would be incredibly crass to use it for one after the ashes were scattered over the Gulf of Mexico. It was ridiculously expensive. She wasn’t about to just throw it away. Edgar wouldn’t have liked that. (Not that it mattered much what Edgar would or wouldn’t have liked. Edgar would have liked to be alive.) Pia leaned over to Sonny and asked him at the church. About the vase. About the appropriateness of using it and whether it would hold water.
Sonny listened carefully to her question, nodding and holding her hand. He suggested she wait and see how she felt about it later. Then he called someone on his cell phone and said it looked like rain, so they were going to want the canvas pavilion set up at the cemetery after all. But the canvas pavilion did little to keep back the bitterness of the day. Flapping in the wind, it struggled to define the ritual space, to form a firmament between the cold, soaked sky and Edgar’s empty grave. Pia didn’t understand why it was necessary to be there. Sonny told her something about dedicating the site, even though the actual remainder of Edgar’s body was in a black plastic container in the trunk of Pia’s car. Edgar’s parents had had his name carved on the stone between their names, as if they hadn’t expected him to forge granite-worthy bonds to anyone else in his life, and somehow, their dying wish overwhelmed Pia’s living preference.
At the cemetery, Jesse and James stood like sentries on either side of their mother; pale gray eyes forward, dry and stubborn; square jaws set hard, lips bowed slightly, pulling back against the sorrow; broad shoulders forming a straight line with the brim of Pia’s netted black hat. The twins were not quite eighteen. Over the past year, they had become unrecognizably tall. At some point their soft curly hair got cropped off and businesslike, and their voices descended in pitch from angels to men. They had men’s complexions. No more baby-soft cheek and chin, no adolescent petulance or stubborn acne. Their faces were stippled with five o’clock shadow on the sides and above the mouth. Pia realized she should have told them to shave, but their shaving was something she’d never even thought about. Edgar paid attention to that sort of thing.
She kept noticing small fissures like this. Cracks in the wall. Edgar had been the mortar of their immediate family. The boys were exactly what Edgar raised them to be. Strong. Kind. Responsible. Pia was proud of them. When it was time to walk away from the grave, they each offered her an arm, and she tucked her hands into the warm crooks of their elbows. It felt good, but they smelled so much like Edgar, she had to pull away.
Beth was in her element, setting out dessert bars and bubbled brown casseroles back at the fellowship hall. She had the reception organized down to the last wedge of bundt cake, assisted by a group of stout, oldish women from her church. As the afternoon wound down, Beth stood beside Pia and kept the receiving line moving along; squeezing each person’s hands tightly between her own, reminding them to sign the guest book, assuring them that the very hairs of our heads are numbered and that Edgar was now celebrating an eternity of joyful adoration in the presence of the Prince of Peace.
Pia stuck with a simple “Thank you so much for coming.”
“Don’t be so brave,” said Jenna, whom Pia would have introduced as her boss, even though Jenna would have introduced herself as a friend. “You are absolutely entitled to fall apart, Pia. And I want you to take as much time as you need, okay? This is all about you and the boys getting through this. I don’t want to see you back in the office for at least a month.”
Pia nodded. She nodded a lot that day, without even hearing what she was agreeing to, or thanking someone for, or giving a general acknowledgment of.
Edgar was such a wonderful man.
Nod.
The boys look so much like Edgar.
Nod.
Now you be sure and call me if there’s anything I can do.
Nod.
How are you holding up, hon?
Nod.
Edgar’s family, friends, business associates—all the population of his life story—trailed off into the waning winter afternoon. Pia found herself leaning against the wall in the ladies’ room of a church her soul didn’t know. Through the air vent, she heard Sonny talking on his cell phone. Everything went pretty well, he was telling someone. Yeah, he was saying, things were pretty much wrapped up. In the church kitchen, Beth bent over the sink, the sleeves of her stodgy brown cardigan pushed up over the dishwater. She looked like a sparrow with stubby, worn wings.
As Pia walked out across the parking lot with James and Jesse, the sky lowered itself into a faded January sort of light that, even in a place where it’s always warm, feels gray and gives out far too willingly. Too quietly. Too soon.
My Library
