The Angel of Death and The Demon of Life

She knows what a funeral is. She knows that you wear black and it smells like flowers from an old lady’s perfume and you sit awkwardly in a pew of a church you feel more familiar in than your own home. She knows because she’s been, and she’s had to wear that uncomfortable dress her mom makes her wear every time, and even more uncomfortable shoes that are half a size too small, but they don’t replace.

Something’s different this time. Something that makes her realize why everyone hates funerals, and not because of uncomfortable clothing or pungent perfume.

There’s this deep sadness that hangs around not just the people around her, but her as well. She doesn’t really recognize the pit in her belly or the weights strapped to her ankles until she realizes that this is grief. This is what the woman at her elementary school told her about, the weight and the murkiness and the feeling of cotton in her mouth.

“Things are changing, Lilly,” she’d said, her brown eyes glinting in that pity she sees in everyone’s eyes when they look at her now. “And that’s strange and new to you, and you might not know what life will look like now. You might feel sad, or something you haven’t really felt before. People call that grief.”

“I know what grief is,” Lilly had huffed, because she’s heard the word a hundred times and she’s seen a hundred people deal with it. She attended every funeral her church had ever put on, because that was mom’s job. And what mom does, she’s usually dragged along to, because nine years old is too young to stay home alone.

“But Peter’s there,” she’d wined when she was old enough to care.

Mom shook her head. “Peter’s not really there.” She hadn’t understood at the time, at the ripe old age of six, but nine year olds are much smarter, in her opinion. So now she sees how quickly Peter got out of the house when he turned eighteen, and how he took any excuse he could to leave even when he was there. It’s not that he doesn’t care, per say, it’s that… Well, he cares about himself. “Peter’s not really there,” had meant that he wouldn’t be there to kiss her scraped knee, or make dinner, or tuck her into bed. That’s just not Peter, and she knew it. She knew it by the way he doesn’t make eye contact and doesn’t get her a birthday gift, doesn’t even show up to her little birthday party in their living room with three girls from school she doesn’t really know all that well anyway.

But Peter holds her hand now. She doesn’t remember ever doing so, but she grips his calloused hand tightly.

Even in his too-wide suit jacket, too-short black dress pants, and wrinkled dress shirt, Peter has the stench of something earthy and woody that might be cologne wafting from him. She thinks his hand is shaking, or is that hers?

The pastor speaks. His words feel hollow. Nobody can describe mom, not even her. Because nine might be old enough to be left home alone, but it’s not old enough to see everything, even she knows.

“Do you want to see her?” Peter asks once the service is over. There’s something empty in his eyes. Like losing mom made him lose something else, something that shows by turning his golden eyes a muddy, murky brown.

Lilly shakes her head. “She’s dead.”

It sounds like it hurts him to say, “I know.” Peter strokes a thumb over her hand, and it makes her squirm. It’s strange, foreign, but she needs the comfort. “But they have an open casket. You can see her one last time.”

“It’s not her.”

It doesn’t matter if the corpse at the front of the room has fiery red, curly hair, or a round face, or the same wedding band she refused to take off even though Lilly’s dad left before she was born; the woman with too much makeup to make her face look alive is not her mother.

Lilly’s mother has a smile that shows more gums than teeth. She has two towels by the sink, and heaven forbid you use the wrong one when you dry your hands. Her hands gesture wildly when she speaks, and her eyes sparkle in the same golden brown Peter’s used to.

Peter knows this. That is why he walks away, hand in hand with his little sister even though she doesn’t think they’ve had a full conversation in… months.

That doesn’t matter anymore. Because Peter is all Lilly has left of mom, and she’s not sure if she can go on without mom.

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He’ll be honest— and, when it comes down to it, he doesn’t mind doing so— the girl beside him seems so little now that he’s holding her hand at their mother’s funeral. The way her eyes dig straight into the pew in front of them, and instead of crying or screaming or grieving, like a nine year old should when their mother dies, she has this sort of determined air to her that makes it seem like she’s forcing herself to move on.

Will she ever really grieve? Or will this determination sit with her until one day she realizes that she never let her mother go? Will it change her, mold her into something dark and broken and empty without her ever really seeing?

It hurts him just to think about how easy it was to ignore Lilly. Because now he can’t take his eyes off her. Now, when kind-hearted old ladies swarm around them as soon as the service is over, Peter instinctively tucks her close to him, politely waves off the women, however well-intentioned. He knows she needs to just… not be here. He does too, probably.

“Ice cream?” he asks her when they make it safely to his sedan. He’d gotten it cheap enough on a farm salary.

(He knows mom would love him no matter what he chose to make of his life, but he can’t get the relief on her face when he told her he was going to start working on her brother’s farm just outside the city out of his mind anyway.)

The way her eyebrows scrunch in confusion as she buckles herself into the passenger seat nearly makes him smile. She tugs at the dress she’s wearing, and it must be uncomfortable, but it’s the only black dress he could find in her closet. “Why?”

“Well, I’m not feeling all that great, and I can’t imagine you are either, and ice cream is a six-dollar fix.”

Something like a smile crosses her face. “Yeah.” She flicks a piece of hair out of her eyes, and for a moment Peter could swear it’s the exact way mom did.

(It probably is.)

He doesn’t think ice cream will change things, not really, but she smiles a little, and he thinks he’ll become accustomed to the joy he feels bubbling in his chest as soon as she does.

He hopes he doesn’t give her a reason not to.

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Their house doesn’t feel right. Lilly thinks it won’t feel like home for a while. She’s not quite sure why, but it’s the way the kitchen feels too dark and too quiet that makes her mouth feel like cotton again.

“I haven’t gotten all my stuff back in,” Peter tells her, kicking his shoes in the corner beside mom’s. “But My buddy Rex said he’d help me tomorrow while you’re at school.

Oh. School.

If she complains, she’s sure Peter will tell her something about normalcy, and getting back into routine, but she doesn’t know if she can stand more of those stupid pitiful looks she got from the woman who tried to teach her about grief. She’d pulled her out of the classroom, settling her in a quiet room in a soft chair before explaining the car crash, waiting for her to react.

She hadn’t. Is that strange?

“Okay,” Lilly replies instead of arguing, but she thinks he understands anyway by the way his face falls into something less neutral and more sad.

“Why don’t you get out of that dress,” he tells her, pulling off his own jacket. “It can’t be comfortable.”

And, despite his indifference, he notices things. Mom didn’t really notice, too busy trying to keep them in their apartment on an underpaid nursing home job, and still have enough to put food on the table that didn’t come from a soup can. But even wearing the same itchy, weirdly-fitting black dress for a year, Mom never said, “I’m sorry,” or “I wish you could have a different dress,” she always told her to stop fidgeting and to leave her dress alone.

Peter smiles at her in that way that tells her it’s hard to smile, but he’ll do it for her.

She’ll do it for him, too.

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There’s not a lot he can move from his and Rex’s, technically-one-bedroom-but-has-a-curtain apartment, but it still takes an hour to load up the cars and a little less than that to unload it in his old bedroom. It’s barely ten minutes after he and his now-former roommate have crashed on their sofa with cheap coffee from the corner store they’d walked through three inches of fresh snow to get, after discovering none in the house, that Peter’s phone rings.

“I know the number,” he tells his friend. “It’s not in my phone though.”

Rex leans over Peter’s shoulder. “It’s the grade school. I’ve had to pick up my brother too many times not to know the number.”

Something drops in his stomach as he answers, muttering a quick, “Of course it is.” The woman on the other line speaks almost cheerfully, like an elementary school teacher would, he supposes.

“Is this Eliza Tennant?” comes her too-cheerful voice.

“This is Peter Tennant.”

“Hello Mister Tennant, my name is Megan, I’m calling from the elementary school. Lilly is having a bit of trouble, and we were hoping you or her main emergency contact, Eliza, would be able to speak with her, and decide whether or not to pull her out of school today.”

“Put her on the phone.” Peter steals a glance at Rex, concern etching his features in the way only a big brother’s can. He wishes he knew from experience. When soft breathing begins over the other end of the phone, he gives a soft, “Lilly?”

“Hey Peter.” There’s something quiet in the pain he hears in just her soft words. “Sorry for making the school call you.”

He doesn’t think he has it in him to be at all annoyed. What’s made him so forgiving? Has the loss softened his soul to love? Has it made her keep what he has left closer, even if it kills him?

It’s just a little past eleven. She’s only been at school a little less than three hours, but trouble, and what he thinks is that hidden grief he dreads, finds her anyway. “What happened? Do you want me to come get you?”

“I’m fine,” she tries to tell him. “Kaden just said something stupid, and I yelled at him, and apparently teachers only like people expressing their emotions when it doesn’t end in yelling.”

Peter finds it in himself to smile at what sounds exactly like something he can picture her doing, and is sure he would have said himself. “Kids are stupid sometimes,” he says, and she agrees despite the fact that she happens to be a kid too.

Her breath hitches, and that’s when he reiterates, “It’s okay if you want to call it a day. I’m not mad.”

“You’re not?”

“Not in the least.”

It takes her a moment, but after one final quiet sigh, she says, “Okay.”

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The teacher looks at her funny when she hands back the phone. It’s not that look that she keeps getting from every adult around. All the flowery-smelling ladies at church had that look, so did the counselor who took her out of the classroom last Wednesday when everything changed, but this isn’t it. This is just… strange. She doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be.

“Is your dad coming?” she asks with a southern accent that sounds foreign to her Massechusettes ears.

It doesn’t really even make her sad. Just angry. “Peter’s my brother,” she tells the woman. “He says he’ll be here.”

The secretary brushes a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear, at least looking a little sorry for the mistake. “Of course, my apologies, hun. Why don’t you sit down over by the door, and we can wait for him, okay?”

“You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a baby,” she huffs, crossing her arms but sitting down anyway.

“Young lady, you should watch how you speak.”

Lilly rolls her eyes. “You should watch what you assume.”

Yes, Peter finds them that way ten minutes later, the secretary staring a hole in Lilly’s head, and Lilly defiantly staring at the ground with angry tears gathering in her eyes. A few more words had been spoken that probably would have been smart to keep inside.

The little electronic doorbell startles her into throwing her gaze towards the door, where Peter stands patiently waiting for the angry southern secretary who should have stayed in Georgia to let him in.

Not one, but two people walk in. Peter, followed closely by Rex, a friend she remembers seeing around her childhood when her brother still lived with them. Peter comes close, but Rex smiles at her from a distance. “Hey, ladybug,” Rex tells her, the nickname rolling off his lips like it’s natural.

Maybe it is. He’s a big brother too, after all.

Peter’s gaze shifts when he meets her eyes. He kneels down by the deceivingly not-plushy chair she sits in, and takes her hand in his. “Rough day?” he asks, despite knowing the answer.

Lilly doesn’t let him make eye contact anymore, but she nods anyway. Peter nods along, running a hand through her hair more comfortably than he should. He’d never felt more… familial, than he has in the past few days, and something deeply selfish inside her wishes it didn’t take mom’s death for him to figure it out.

He smooths back her wild curls which he’d tried to help tame that morning, but didn’t really know how, one last time before standing again. “I’m going to talk to Miss Megan, but why don’t you and Rex head out to the car, okay?”

She nods along even though everything in her wants to hold his hand instead, hug him around the waist and let him hold her not unlike how mom would. She lets him slip his hand from hers and walk towards the desk, while Rex guides her to hop off the chair and out the doors.

It’s not quick enough to keep her from hearing, “I need to be changed to Lilly’s main emergency contact.”

“I’ll need confirmation from the original contact,” Megan, her name is, says oh-so-smugly.

Before Lilly can mentally bite back, and just before she goes out of earshot, Peter retorts, “I have a death certificate if that’ll satisfy you.”

It’s dark, and morbid, but it still makes her hold back a snicker.

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“Everything’s changing,” Lilly tells him after they drop Rex back off at his apartment; it’s not brash, not even all that sad, just… true. Plainly and simply. Like it’s a fact she reads in her textbooks at school and not two words that have been plaguing humanity since the beginning of time. “I don’t know if I can handle that.”

“I don’t know either,” he replies.

“Why not?”

Peter can’t help but be amused at her curiosity. No, not amused. Impressed? It’s easier to focus on than her question as he answers. “Change is weird. Sometimes you think it’s good, and then it turns out bad, and the other way around. It doesn’t really act like it should. I think, in this case…” Peter sighs, taking a sip of his now cold coffee. “In this case, we didn’t have a say in the change, but it’s something we can deal with, together.”

He used to have whole arguments with their mother about his responsibility, back before he promised to change. Before he promised he’d do better, if not for himself, than for mom.

That’s when he started to realize that maybe he’d messed up. And now, however awful it is, he at least recognizes that mom would be proud of him.

“But mom’s always here,” Lilly continues through his own thoughts. “And I don’t know who I am without mom.”

That’s what hurts, isn’t it? He’s grown up with mom. With dad, even, until he was a teenager. He’s been his own person.

But Lilly, amazing, determined, loud Lilly, gets all of that from her mother. Who is she, really, if she doesn’t have that part of her? Their mother is so deeply intertwined in her identity at such an age, he doesn’t know if she’ll just unravel without her.

“I wish you didn’t have to deal with this.” Peter sits a little closer to her on the sofa that’s been around since he was at least her age, if not younger.

She shrugs like it doesn’t bother her. “It’s how it is, right? It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Sadness spreads deep throughout him, as he suspects he’ll get used to, but it’s softened by a fondness for the girl beside. Peter lets himself breathe in, out.

Change isn’t inherently bad— what would the world be without it— and he wishes, not for the first time, he could have more control than he does, but with Lilly by his side, a reason, a purpose, to everything he does, he thinks they’ll be able to do it.