Diary Three Read online

  3:50 P.M.

  Note: I’m about to start my homework but want to say that I think today went pretty well. Not that I didn’t think of Mom every other second. Not that I didn’t cry four separate times in the girls’ room. Not that I didn’t nearly bite Jill’s stupid head off when she asked me if I miss my mother. (She actually asked me that.) But I got through the day.

  Time for homework.

  10:39 P.M.

  News of the day: I have this enormous pit in my stomach. It’s just huge. It sits there and makes eating difficult and concentrating difficult and sometimes even being nice difficult. But today I was able to ignore it a little. Or to work around it. Or something. I MADE myself eat breakfast before I left the house. I allowed Dawn and the others to sit with me at lunch, instead of insisting on sitting alone. And I ate lunch. Not a huge one, but enough to get by on. When I have trouble concentrating in class or on my homework I just forge ahead. I tell myself I can think about Mom lots of times during the day, but just not at that moment.

  To be honest, I feel like the walking dead, but at least I’m walking. I am not going to give in to this feeling. (Is it grief? A different kind of grief? Is this as bad as it gets, or is there something worse?)

  11:04 P.M.

  I almost put the journal away and went to bed, but I can’t stop thinking about something. It’s what Dad and Aunt Morgan were discussing at dinner tonight.

  Scattering Mom’s ashes. It’s something Mom talked to Dad about last month, and together they planned some kind of service. A private service with Dad, Aunt Morgan, Dawn, and me present. Just the four of us. And Mom’s ashes. Dad and Aunt Morgan want to have the service (ceremony?) soon. Tomorrow. Aunt Morgan wants to return to Atlanta practically the moment it’s over. She’s eager to get back. (I can’t believe that a week or so ago I thought she and Dad might get married. I know that will never happen. They are way too different. Plus, Aunt Morgan has her life in Georgia, and Dad has his here in California.)

  Anyway, Dad and Aunt Morgan want to scatter the ashes tomorrow, so Aunt Morgan can fly to Atlanta on Sunday and go back to work on Monday.

  But I am not ready to scatter the ashes.

  I CANNOT DO THAT TOMORROW.

  I think I have talked them into having the ceremony on Sunday. Aunt Morgan can return on Monday and start work on Tuesday.

  I just need a little time.

  And I have to say that when I asked if we couldn’t PLEASE put this off until Sunday, even Aunt Morgan looked relieved. I would like one nice restful, peaceful, school-free day tomorrow before I face the ceremony.

  Saturday 3/27

  11:36 A.M.

  I actually slept late today. Slept until almost 9:00. Dad and Aunt Morgan slept well too. When I finally came downstairs, they hadn’t been up for very long. The three of us sat around the table eating toast and cereal, and talking. We talked about our plans for the day. I said I was going to do homework in the morning and see Dawn and Ducky in the afternoon. Dad said maybe he’d better get himself over to the bookstore, for a few hours anyway. And then Aunt Morgan said, “What about the women’s shelter?”

  “What women’s shelter?” I asked.

  Dad and Aunt Morgan glanced at each other, which was not a good sign.

  “What women’s shelter?” I asked again.

  “Well,” said Dad, but his voice trailed off.

  “We’re going to donate your mom’s clothes and things to a shelter downtown.”

  “Donate her clothes?” I cried. “Now?”

  “Sunny,” said Dad.

  “But Dad, she’s only been dead for eight days. Why are you getting rid of her things already?”

  “Sunny, why should we keep them?” Aunt Morgan asked me.

  “Why shouldn’t we? Would Mom want us to get rid of every little piece of her so quickly? You’re making it like she never existed.”

  “You know that’s not true,” said Dad.

  “Well, that’s what it feels like.”

  “But we’re going to keep plenty of reminders of Mom. We have all our photos. And the house is full of things she bought or made.”

  “We’re just going to give away the things we have absolutely no use for, such as her clothes,” added Aunt Morgan.

  “Frankly, Sunny,” Dad went on, “some reminders of her are a little overwhelming for me. I can smell your mother’s scent in her clothes.”

  That made me sit up straight. I wasn’t used to hearing Dad reveal such intimate, personal things. Besides, I knew what he meant. Walking by Mom’s closet was almost shocking. Still…

  “Well, what if I want some of her clothes?” I said.

  “Keep whatever you like,” Dad replied. “I won’t give away anything you want.”

  “She left some of her jewelry to you,” said Aunt Morgan. “Quite a bit of it, actually.”

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say because suddenly I felt very confused. Giving away Mom’s things made sense—and it didn’t. I wanted her clothes and jewelry—and I didn’t.

  I left the kitchen to think for awhile.

  When I returned, Dad and Aunt Morgan were still sitting at the table, talking.

  “You already called the women’s shelter, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Yes,” replied Dad.

  “Without asking me?”

  “Some decisions are going to be mine alone. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’ll include you whenever I can. But not always.”

  I don’t know why, but that made me feel calmer.

  “When are we going to take Mom’s things to the shelter?” I asked.

  “In a couple of weeks,” said Dad. “It’ll take me awhile to sort through everything.”

  “Do you want me to help you?”

  “If you’d like to.”

  “Okay. But not today.”

  “We don’t have to start today.”

  1:06 P.M.

  Ducky just called. He wanted to know if Dawn and I want to go to a movie this afternoon. Sounds like a good idea.

  8:30 P.M.

  Well, it was actually a pretty good afternoon. Just like at school yesterday, I can’t say that I didn’t think about Mom most of the time, or that I didn’t cry several times. But still, it was not a bad afternoon.

  Ducky arrived in his beat-up car and Dawn and I piled in. We drove to the mall. I’m not a HUGE fan of the mall. But today it felt like a good place to spend time. It’s full of distractions. The movie theater, restaurants, stores (even if they’re sort of boring ones), people to watch. Ducky and Dawn are so great. They came prepared with lists of things they needed to do or buy at the mall (so we wouldn’t get bored). Ducky needed new sneakers, Dawn had to get a key copied, Ducky wanted to look for two CDs for his brother, Dawn said she’d outgrown her bathing suit. They even had a task for me. Dawn had promised Jeff she’d get him this water toy he’d been asking for, and she sent me off in search of it, which took forever. By the time we’d been to a movie and eaten dinner (Mexican food from the food court) it was after 6:00.

  “Boy,” I said as we sat at our table, sipping the last of our drinks.

  “What?” asked Sunny.

  “The day went by pretty quickly. Mostly they’ve just been dragging. Even at school. They’ve been dragging for weeks. This one felt a little more normal.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Ducky.

  “I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I feel guilty.”

  “For feeling better?”

  “Well…yes. I mean, Mom’s funeral was just five days ago. And here I am, almost having a good time. It doesn’t seem quite right.”

  “Don’t you think your mom would want you to feel better?” asked Dawn. “She wouldn’t want you to feel horrible. That would make her feel bad.”

  I squirmed. “I know. It still doesn’t feel right, though.”

  “So…what are you saying?” asked Ducky.

  Now I felt cross. “I don’t
know.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I mean, I’ve never been through this before.”

  “Neither have we,” said Ducky.

  “Yesterday I nearly bit Jill’s head off because she asked me if I miss Mom.”

  “Well, that was a fairly thoughtless question,” said Dawn.

  I nodded. For a moment, we were quiet. At last I said, “anyway, it’s still been a pretty good day. Thanks to you guys.”

  10:40 P.M.

  A few more thoughts about today.

  I guess I’ll just have to take things as they come, see what happens as time goes on. I know Dawn’s right, that Mom wouldn’t want me to feel bad. But I’ll just feel however I feel.

  I’ve been thinking about Mom’s journals, what they meant to her, what she hoped they might mean to me. I think I’ll keep my journals for her from now on. I mean, just in my head. I think I’ll pretend I’m writing to Mom, so she can peek in at my life. I’m only thirteen. Most of my life is ahead of me. I can’t truly share it with Mom, but maybe I can imagine her beside me, sharing my days.

  And now I better get ready for bed. Tomorrow we are going to scatter Mom’s ashes. It’s all decided. We’re going to leave early in the morning.

  Am I ready for this?

  Was I ready for anything that has already happened?

  Sunday 3/28

  7:42 P.M.

  I am so tired.

  I feel like a wrung-out washcloth. But somehow this isn’t a bad thing. I also feel cleansed. Or something. I’m not sure how to describe it.

  Dawn came over at 8:00 this morning. She looked nervous, almost as nervous as she’d looked on the morning of the funeral. I couldn’t blame her. She looked like I felt.

  I pulled her upstairs to my room. “Dad and Aunt Morgan are packing a picnic basket,” I whispered to her.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

  “Not really. This is supposed to be a day in honor of your mother, isn’t it? She loved picnics.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.” This was another of those things that just didn’t feel right.

  Soon we were in the car, pulling out of our driveway. Dad and Aunt Morgan sat in the front, Dawn and I sat in the back. The picnic basket was between us. At my feet was the urn containing my mother’s ashes. I stared at it for awhile. I poked at it with the toe of my sneaker. I edged it away from me. Finally, I said, “Aunt Morgan, can you take this, please?”

  Aunt Morgan turned around. “What?”

  “That.”

  I pointed to the urn. I didn’t want to touch it with my bare hands.

  “I’ll take it,” said Dawn. “Put it over here.”

  “I can’t.”

  Dawn didn’t say anything. She reached down and picked up the urn. I saw that her hands were shaking.

  The car was silent until we left Palo City behind us and headed up the coastline. Then Dad said, “Your mother wanted us to play her favorite music today.” He stuck a cassette in the tape deck. Joni Mitchell. One of the tapes Mom had listened to over and over while she was sick. Even so, I still like it.

  “She wanted us to sing along,” Dad continued.

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. I had to sing around a lump that had formed in my throat. Everyone else seemed to have lumps in their throats too. But one by one, we were able to join in.

  When the tape ended, I said softly, “It feels like Mom is here in the car with us.”

  “It’s a nice feeling,” said Aunt Morgan.

  We put on another tape.

  After that one ended, no one bothered to put on another. We sat with our thoughts for awhile. I remembered other picnics and outings that Mom and Dad and I had gone on. I remembered a time when Mom’s bathing suit had fallen off while we were swimming in a lake. But for some reason the memory didn’t make me laugh, even though Mom and Dad and I laughed for a very long time when it happened.

  At various times on the car ride I would notice that one or another of us was crying. Then we began telling stories about Mom and soon we were laughing. Then we put on another tape.

  Almost three hours went by before Dad said, “We’re almost there.”

  “A special place?” I asked.

  “The place where I proposed to your mother.”

  When Dad said that, part of me wanted to cry, and part of me wanted to laugh. Since I had done so much crying lately, I decided to let myself laugh. And I exclaimed, “Dad, I can’t believe you and Mom were so conventional! You proposed to her? Like in the movies? That’s so old-fashioned. It sounds like something Mom’s father would have done.”

  “It’s exactly what your father did,” spoke up Aunt Morgan.

  “But somehow it just felt right to us,” Dad said. “It was very romantic.”

  “How did you propose to her, Dad? Tell us everything.” Mom recorded her wedding in one of her journals but not Dad’s proposal.

  “Let’s wait until we’re there and I can show you.”

  “Okay.” Even though what Dad was going to show us would be sad, I was awfully eager to see how he had asked Mom to marry him.

  8:51 P.M.

  Dad pulled off the highway at a rest stop, and we parked in a lot. We were pleased to see that only two other cars were there. We unloaded our things and Aunt Morgan was about to lock the car when I said, “Um, Dad, the…” I gestured toward the urn.

  Dad took it and we walked through a small wooded area. When we stepped out of the trees we found ourselves on a rocky cliff above the ocean. The cliff wasn’t too steep, though, and a wooden staircase led to the beach below, where waves crashed on more rocks.

  I heard Dawn suck in her breath. “Ooh. It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

  It was stunning. At first, none of us said a word. We just gazed out at the ocean. Finally Dad said, “Let’s have our picnic up here. We’ll go down to the beach later. That’s where Mom wants her ashes scattered.”

  “Before we eat, will you show us how you proposed to Mom?” I said. I just couldn’t let go of that. I was dying of curiosity.

  Dad smiled. “All right.”

  Aunt Morgan spread a blanket on the ground and she and Dawn and I sat on it.

  Dad stood by the edge of the cliff. “Well,” he began, “your mother was sitting here, Sunny, with her legs dangling over the edge. And I tiptoed up behind her and stuck a yellow rose in front of her. When she turned around to look at me, I said, ‘Honey, there’s something I want to ask you.’ I think she knew what it was, but she said, ‘Yes?’ very seriously. And then I got down on one knee, like this —”

  “Dad, you didn’t!”

  “Yes, I did. And I was proud of it. Then I pulled a box out of my pocket, opened it up, and showed your mother the ring inside. I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And without thinking about it for even a moment, she said, ‘Yes.’”

  “How long did you wait before you got married?”

  “Only a few days. We’d already been living together, so it wasn’t a big deal, really. We came back here to get married.”

  That much I had suddenly figured out, thanks to Mom’s journals, but Dawn said, “Back here? To the cliff?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean you brought the minister and everyone here?”

  “Right here,” said Aunt Morgan.

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said. “You were in the wedding. It was your reconciliation.” Dad and Aunt Morgan looked at me, and I added, “I’ve been reading Mom’s journals.” I paused for a moment. “She wrote all about the wedding, but not about how you proposed to her.”

  “She was funny about the journals,” said Dad thoughtfully. “She only wrote in them sporadically. She’d go for weeks without writing in them, and then she’d write in them furiously for days.”

  “I’m still getting a pretty good idea about her life,” I said.

  Dad told Dawn a little about the wedding, and then we set out our picnic. I think we had all thought we wouldn�
��t be able to eat, and then we all realized we were starved. So we dug in. And we talked about Mom some more.

  When we finished eating, Dad looked out at the ocean. “Well,” he said, “I guess we should put our things away and go down to the beach.” He looked so sad that I put my arms around him for a moment. Then, wordlessly, we set everything back in the picnic basket, and Dad cradled the urn in his arms. We made our way down the wooden stairs to the sand.

  We stood in a line at the water’s edge. I realized I didn’t know what to do, so I looked at Dad and Aunt Morgan. They looked like they didn’t know what to do either.

  After a moment, Dad said, “Let’s just think about your mom for a bit.”

  So we did.

  Even though I have been doing nothing but thinking about Mom practically forever, I stood on the beach then and thought about her some more.

  Dad said, “Any last things anyone wants to say to her?”

  Dawn whispered, “Good-bye.”

  Aunt Morgan murmured, “My sister. I’ll see you in the next life.”

  I said, “I love you, Mom.”

  And Dad said, “Our connection can’t be broken. We’re together for eternity. Good-bye.”

  At that point, when I heard Dad’s words, the tears I’d been holding in during the picnic flooded out. In a moment all four of us were crying — sobbing and hugging. When we had calmed down, Dad opened the urn, waded into the ocean, and scattered some of the ashes over it. Then he held it out to me. I did the same, followed by Aunt Morgan, and then Dawn. I noticed, though, that Dawn was careful not to empty the urn completely. With some ashes still inside, she handed it to Dad again, and he scattered the last of Mom over the Pacific Ocean. Then he turned toward the beach and we waded ashore and climbed the stairs to the top of the cliff.

  On the way Dawn said to me, “Your mom told me to take care of you.”