Ashes to Ashes

Alice

I can’t rip my eyes away.

The priest stands behind the gaping hole my mother’s casket is about to be lowered into, his voice a monotone drone of sadness I can’t even comprehend. Around me, sniffles fill the air as my mother’s friends and my stepfather’s family members mourn the passing of Sarah Voss, but I can’t help but stare at that box, the one she lies inside. The one she’ll lie inside forever.

Another tear springs to life, dripping soundlessly down my cheek. Like the others, I don’t wipe it away. Unlike the dramatic cries from those around me, my sadness is real. The pain in my chest cuts so deep, I feel my heart must be torn in two. I try to picture her face the way she was last week, when we were playing the piano together, but all I can see is the pale representation of her I stared at this morning while this same priest went on and on inside the chapel behind me about how God only takes us when it’s our time.

I don’t know how it could be her time. My mother was only forty-two. She was active and healthy. She was a good woman, the kind of person children are told they should aspire to be. Now, she’s lying in a decorated cedar box, the gash across her abdomen caused in the car crash hidden beneath layers of blue taffeta, the pain on her face disguised by thick red lipstick in a shade she never owned and blue eyeshadow that edges on garish.

Finally, the priest ends his mournful address. While his words seemed heartfelt, they could’ve easily applied to the last person he sent off to meet their maker. He could likewise use them again tomorrow. He didn’t know my mother. In fact, if I were to pull my eyes away from the casket and scan the ground, I’d dare say no one here knew her–not even her husband.

No one knew the Sarah Elizabeth Wilson Heathe Voss the way that I did. And now, no one ever will.

Wails and sobs increase as the casket is lowered into the ground. Beside me, Henry, my stepfather, clutches at his chest, doubled over in pain I know he does not feel. It is an act, a way to gain sympathy from those who might be watching. It’s not above him to do whatever he can to try and manipulate the crowd into thinking he is greatly vexed when just the day before she died, he slapped my mother across the face and called her a “worthless bitch.”

I pull my eyes away from the ornate casket just as it disappears beneath the surface and stare up at him. His eyes are bloodshot, but that could be from liquor. The tears look real, but they’re not from the heart. He never loved my mother; he only wanted her money. When my father died, he left behind a considerable fortune. Now that Mother is gone, it will all go to him. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked to see a wolfish grin hidden behind the handkerchief he shields his face with.

The priest beckons the family forward to toss roses on my mother’s grave. Henry takes my arm like we are father and daughter and leads me forward. We pluck red blooms from a vase and stand with our toes on the edge of the abyss. I don’t see her smiling face beneath the lid of the coffin–I only see the cartoon they painted her to be. We toss our roses in, and they land with a thunk on the cedar lid that echoes out of the hole and dissipates in the wind.

With a deep breath, I let Henry lead me away from my mother toward the black limousine that will take us back to the mansion he bought a few years ago–using my father’s money. I drag my feet, not because I want to linger in the cemetery but because I don’t want to be shut up in the vehicle with him. I don’t want to go home to a massive house that seems completely empty without her laughter.

I don’t want to leave her behind in a dark hole in the earth, covered with six feet of dirt–and a handful of dying roses.

As soon as the driver closes the door on us, Henry cackles, shaking his head. “Well, I’m glad that’s over with.” He wipes his nose on the handkerchief my mother embroidered his initials on last spring and shoves it into his jacket pocket, his eyes roaming over my face. “Wipe those tears away, Alice. There’s no use crying for her. That won’t bring her back.”

Rather than reaching up to wipe my tear streaked face, I turn my eyes toward the window and watch the cemetery as it fades from view.

That’s when I see him.

A man, tall, dressed in black, like nearly everyone else, stands on the fringes of the crowd that’s slowly dissipating around my mother’s grave. I can’t see his face from this distance, but he’s pale, almost luminescent. His dark hair is slicked back. I have to strain to keep my eyes on him as we go around a bend in the road. Just before he’s out of my line of sight, he lifts his head and looks right at me, and even though he’s at least two hundred feet away, and I’m behind a tinted window, I feel like he’s staring right into my soul.

I shudder and look away, praying I never see that man again.

Next to me, Henry makes a nasty remark about how it’s just as well we aren’t having people over after the funeral. The last thing he wants to do is continue to put on a show for everyone, sobbing and blubbering. “It’s pathetic, really,” he murmurs.

I say nothing, only fix my gaze back out the window, absently playing with strands of blonde hair the same shade as my mothers. And as if the heavens themselves weep for my loss, the skies open up, a torrent of rain beating down on the windowpane, the trees, the cemetery, the partially buried casket–but not my mother. No, she’ll never feel the rain again.

And I’ll never feel her, or a love like hers, again.