Don't Cry at My Funeral

The funeral was over by eleven, but the arguing went on past noon. I stood beside the passenger door of my father's new SUV and watched my mother press her keys into her palm until the metal left a red mark. She had worn a black dress I had never seen before, silk and expensive, and the man waiting in her car wore a suit that cost more than my grandmother's entire house. "I can't take her this week," my mother said. "Derek and I are closing on the house in Marbury. It's a mess." "You're always closing on something," my father said. He looked tired. He had looked tired all morning, rubbing his eyes during the eulogy, checking his phone during the burial. "You know what my situation is. Angela's kids are already doubled up in the bedrooms. We don't have space." I was fifteen. I could hear exactly what they were saying, and I could also hear what they were not saying, which was louder. Neither one of them wanted me. My grandmother had wanted me. She had raised me in her small house on Fremont Street for eight years while my parents built new lives with new spouses, and now that she was in the ground, the two people who had made me were trying to hand me off like an overdue bill. "Then she can go with you," my father said. "You married a rich man, Marissa. Let him pay for something for once." My mother's face changed. It went smooth and hard the way it did when she was about to say something true and cruel. "And you got all that lottery money, and what did you do with it? Bought Angela a house and a car and a life. So don't tell me about paying." I remember this part exactly, because this was where I made the choice the first time. The first time, I looked at my father's tired face and felt sorry for him. I thought he was overwhelmed. I thought that if I chose him, if I made myself small and useful, he would remember he loved me. I told my mother I wanted to stay with Dad, and she looked relieved for exactly one second before she covered it with concern, and then she drove away with her new husband and her new house and I did not see her for a year. I chose my father. I was fifteen, and I had a talent for numbers, the kind of talent that made my math teacher at Fremont High call my grandmother and tell her I should be in the accelerated track. My father did not know about that. He did not know I had already been buying lottery tickets for him for a year, small ones, at the gas station on the corner, because he liked the ritual and I liked being useful. The night after the funeral, I picked his numbers the way I always did, from birthdays and the calendar and a pattern I saw in the drawings that no one else seemed to see. He won eleven million dollars. He bought Angela a house in Sunridge with a pool and a tennis court. He bought her two children each a car on their sixteenth birthdays. He bought himself a boat and a watch and a membership at a club where the annual dues could have covered a year of rent for me and my grandmother. And when I started getting headaches, the kind that made me see spots when I stood up too fast, he handed me a bottle of generic ibuprofen and told me to stop being dramatic. When the headaches got worse, I asked for the good medicine, the prescription my grandmother used to get, the one that was a few hundred dollars. He said no. He said money doesn't grow on trees, which was funny, because it had grown on a ticket that I had picked. I died in a room in that house at nineteen. The tumor was in my brain and nobody caught it in time, and I spent the last four months of my life on a mattress in the back bedroom while Angela's kids played tennis outside. I could hear the ball through the wall. I could hear them laughing. And then I opened my eyes in the church parking lot, and my mother was pressing her keys into her palm, and my father was saying, "She can go with you." The second time, I did not feel sorry for him. I stood there in my black dress and I counted the seconds. My father had his phone out. My mother had her new husband watching from the car. Both of them wanted the same thing, which was for me to disappear into the other one's life, and I understood in that moment that I had been given something. I had been given the morning of the day my grandmother was buried, and I had one chance to make a different choice. So I said the thing I had not said the first time. "Dad," I said, "I'll stay with you." He looked up from his phone and his forehead wrinkled, and then he did the exact thing I had been waiting for. He frowned. He sighed. He shook his head like a man carrying something heavy, and he said, "Sweetheart, I don't know. Your mom's got it good now. You'd be more comfortable there. We've got the kids, and the house is small, and honestly, I don't know how I'd manage." I wanted to laugh. In the first life, I had said yes to him and he had taken me because it cost him nothing. In this life, I said yes to him and he refused me, because refusing me was easier than loving me, and this time I got to see it happen in the daylight. This time I got to see that it was never about space. It was never about Angela's kids or the bedrooms. It was about the fact that I had always been the one who was willing to be useful, and now, for the first time, I was asking him to choose me back. He chose the other thing. He always had. "Then I'll go with Mom," I said. It took her a second to catch up. "Honey, we're closing on the house, it's not a good—" "I'll go with Mom," I repeated. I looked at my mother and I let my voice go flat. "You married a rich man. You said so yourself. He can pay for something for once, right? That's what Dad said." Her mouth opened. Her new husband rolled down the window of the car and looked at me over the top of his sunglasses. He was a man named Derek Voss, and I had met him exactly twice, and I already knew more about him than my mother did, because in the first life, after my father's money ran out and my face got worse, I had gone looking for her, and I had found out what kind of man he was. Or what kind of man he became, when no one was watching. I got into the back seat of Derek's car that afternoon, and I watched my father walk back to his SUV and drive away without looking once in the rearview mirror. I was fifteen years old. I had a second chance and no grandmother and a headache building behind my right eye, the small one, the warning one. But I also had three things. I had the drawings. I knew every set of numbers that would win in the next four years, because I had memorized them from the first life and I had a memory that refused to let go of anything, ever. That was my gift and it had been my curse. Numbers stuck in me like burrs. I had the timeline. I knew exactly when my father was going to buy the ticket, exactly when he was going to win, and exactly what he was going to do with the money. And I knew, more importantly, what he was not going to do. And I had the truth about what was growing behind my eye. Not yet. Not for two more years. But I knew the symptoms, and I knew what a doctor's visit cost, and I knew that if I ever wanted the medicine and the surgery and the life that my grandmother could not afford to give me, I was going to have to pay for it myself. Derek's car pulled out of the lot and headed for the highway. My mother turned around in her seat and gave me a bright, nervous smile. "So," she said. "You'll love the new house." I looked out the window at the church, at my grandmother's grave, at the small stone that would be there in a few weeks with her name on it. In the first life, I had never gone back to visit it. I had been too busy keeping my father's house clean and washing Angela's dishes and dragging myself to school with a headache I thought would pass. In this life, I was going to visit it every week. I owed her that. And I was going to do something she had never been able to do for herself, which was to want more. "Sure," I said. "I'll love it." And I meant it, in a way. I was going to love it because I was going to use it. A rich man's house has a lot of rooms, and a lot of rooms have a lot of papers in them, and if there was one thing I had learned from eight years of living with a woman who clipped coupons and read every fine-print line of every bill, it was that everything a person owns leaves a paper trail. My mother had married Derek Voss for his money. Derek Voss had married my mother for something too, and I was going to find out what.