The Funeral Guest

It rained on the day they buried my grandmother. Not the hard kind that rattles rooftops and sends people running for shelter, but the quiet, persistent sort that seeps into wool and bones alike. It felt like the sky had taken up the same soft voice the priest used, and together they were asking us to keep our heads down. Be good. Be small. Be done.

Inside the little church, lilies crowded the altar. I sat in the second pew with my knees pressed to the polished wood. The casket looked lighter than wood should look. My mother's hand was flat on her handbag, fingers splayed as if to hold everything inside in place. She nodded in that composed way she had trained into herself and into me. This is how we do things. We don't make a scene. We eat, we thank, we leave.

I tried to keep my eyes on the hymnal, but they kept sliding off the notes. I thought about the last time I had brushed my grandmother's hair. I had done it gently, with the soft brush that lived on her vanity, the one with the mother-of-pearl back. She had been half asleep, drifting, and I had counted strokes under my breath. Twenty for luck, she used to say. Twenty for shine. Twenty so the night knows your name.

The priest's voice rose and ebbed. People nodded. A baby fussed and was carried out, and the sudden absence of the small sound felt sharp, like someone had broken a stick in the middle of a sentence.

That is when I saw her.

She stood in the back, in the soft shade of the last column where the brick darkened. She wore a pale dress, the sort of clean, pared-down cut you see in old photographs. Her hair was pinned up in a twist. She wore my grandmother’s face. Not the face in the hospital bed. Not the face that had taught me to tie knots or shell peas. Younger. Twenty. Cheekbones like clean lines. Eyes clear as a winter stream. The resemblance was not close. It was exact.

Every part of me went still. My lungs forgot the trick of oxygen. She wasn't in any of the families I knew. She wasn't from the neighborhood. I would have remembered that face anywhere, because it was the face that sat on my grandmother's dresser in sepia, wearing a wool coat and a brave ribbon at the throat, labelled in my grandfather's careful hand. Margaret, 1946.

The woman at the back looked at me. Not at the casket nor the priest. Me. Her eyes did a small, unhurried sweep across my face as if to take inventory. And then she smiled. Not a cruel smile, not a kind smile. A smile not for anyone else.

I heard the priest say amen. People stood. My mother's fingers pressed down on the handbag a little harder, and then she rose. We filed past the lilies, the casket, the bowed heads. My grandmother had always hated lilies.

Outside, umbrellas bloomed and bumped one another. We moved through the wet like a dark, slow snake. I kept turning my head to check that she was still there, because some part of me knew there would be a relief in finding that she wasn't. She was. The priest read from his book and the wind lifted the pages as if it were trying to help. My grandmother's name was said in full. It had a middle she never used and a maiden she had kept folded at the back of a drawer.

I looked around. The woman in the pale dress stood near the gate, beneath a yew, her hands lost in the light fabric. She watched the earth open. She watched it with the kind of patience of people who never rush because time, for them, is a room they live in and not a hallway they pass through.

"Claire," my mother murmured. "Stand up straight." I adjusted my shoulders. I didn't take my eyes off the woman. Our eyes met. She lifted one corner of her mouth. It happened so slightly I might have called it a tic if I hadn't felt the ripple of recognition that went through me.

For a second I knew the exact weight of my grandmother's hand when it rested on my hair after a bad dream. I could hear the whisper she had used the night she took me into the kitchen for warm milk because thunder had unstitched the sky. Names are doors, she had said. Never open one when you don't want to see the other side.

They covered the grave with planks and then with earth. People came forward and dropped flowers. My mother took a lily and placed it gently. She smiled at the priest. Efficient grief. A skill honed to a fine sheen. When we turned away, I glanced back. The woman had not moved.

"She looks like Peggy," said a voice behind me, hushed and amused. Aunt Louise. She leaned on her cane the way a queen leans on the arm of a throne.

"Louise," my mother warned.

"What?" Aunt Louise said, still soft. "I didn't say anything. Best not to stir up old things."

The words slid under my skin and lodged there like small stones.

The parish hall smelled like coffee and wet wool. Folding tables were arranged with a logic that suggested hope for order and a deep familiarity with defeat. There were sandwiches where nothing inside could escape. There were squares cut so precisely someone must have measured them. People stood in groups and touched each other's elbows and said the names of casseroles with reverence.

"Sit," my mother said, which sounded like law. I sat. The chair was cold under me.

"How are you doing, Claire?" asked Mrs. Hargreaves, who had taught me to spell chrysanthemum in third grade.

"I'm fine," I said, which was a word that means very little and can be filled with anything.

"She loved you," Mrs. Hargreaves said. "Peggy did."

"She did," I said, and the past tense pulled in my throat like a stitch.

"She told me once," Mrs. Hargreaves continued, "that every woman in your line had a visitor at some point. Said it like she was talking about the weather and whether the plums would be early." She chewed a bite of sandwich as if this, too, belonged to the same part of the day as gossip. "Said there was a debt in the family. Said it wasn't money."

"Who was the visitor?" I said, too quickly.

"Oh, you know me," she said, and patted my arm as if she had knocked over a glass and wanted to smooth the spill. "I mix things up."

My mother's mouth thinned. She sat her cup down so gently it did not make a sound. "Claire," she said. "Don't start."

"Start what?"

"You know what."

Aunt Louise drifted over. "Leave the girl be," she told my mother. "Peggy told her stories same as she told us. Girls need stories. They need to know what to call what they see."

My mother looked at the floor, which is sometimes easier to win an argument with. Then she gathered herself and carried a tray of leftovers to the car. Her shoulders set. "You can come by the house," she said. "If you want to help me pack up some things."

"I'll go to Gran's," I said.

"You don't need to tonight."

"I want to."

She pressed her lips together and did not argue, which is a kind of argument. The harder kind to win.

The house smelled like lavender and the sweet ghost of something that had baked there often. The door to my grandmother's room was open. Her vanity held its small congregation. Brush. Comb. Little glass dish with two hairpins and a button that had lost its shirt. I sat on the stool and touched the brush. I pulled open the top drawer. Handkerchiefs. A small envelope left unsealed. My grandmother had often started letters and left them unfinished when her mind moved faster than her hand.

Inside the envelope was a single page, yellowed at the edges, written in tidy script.

"To whomever finds this, to the girl I love who will not be a girl when she reads it. The debt must be carried. I tried to refuse her once. I tried to pretend I did not know her face. But she always comes back. She wears my face so I cannot deny her. I saw her in the mirror the night your mother was born. If she smiles at you, it is already too late. Do not bargain. It makes the owing worse. Stand up and call your name back to yourself and keep walking."

I remembered the day at the lake. I had been seven. The water was steely and looked calm on top, but the under had its own plans. I stepped off the rock just to feel how the shallow makes a child brave. The under took hold of my ankle with two quick hands I could not see. There is a very clear blue sound that happens when the world becomes more water than air. I would have been just another story told to frighten cousins except that my grandmother pulled me out by the straps of my bathing suit. She hauled me across the rocks and into the grass and told me in voice like a wire to breathe. Breathe now. Breathe again. When I had, when I coughed and shuddered and clung to the ground as if it might run away, she stood. She looked at the lake. She lifted her chin and said calmly, to the empty air, "it's paid then."

After that she made me drink tea with lemon and sugar and told me I had good lungs. She told me to count to twenty when I brushed my hair. She kissed my forehead and said my full name as if it were a charm.

I put the letter back in the envelope and slid the drawer closed. I didn't want to be the person who brought it to my mother and asked for a family meeting where everyone had to choose a side between sense and whatever this was. I stood up. I put on my coat. I told myself I was not going back to the cemetery. My body walked there anyway.

I didn't have to look for her. She stood where I knew she would stand, at the edge of the new earth. The pale dress did not show dirt.

"You shouldn't be here," I said. It came out like a line I had practiced and not like a line I believed.

"I've always been here," she said. "Before her. After her. And after you."

The ground under me felt loose. "Who are you?"

She smiled, "I am the one your grandmother made a bargain with when she wanted something she could not afford. She wanted a life to turn out differently than it was supposed to. She had her reasons. Everyone does. Reason is poor currency. We trade in names here."

It occurred to me that this would be a good time to run. I didn't. My feet sank a little into the soft ground as if the earth itself had decided to keep me for a while. "What did she ask for?"

"You," the woman said. "And other things. A son to come home. A daughter to be born breathing. Little things. Big things. Time. People always think time is a cheap thing because you cannot hold it in your hand. They are wrong."

The back of my neck prickled. "And what did she owe you?"

The woman watched the grave. "She owed me the carrying." She tilted her head. "We all carry something. You will, too."

"I did not make a bargain," I said, and heard how young I sounded and hated it.

"You didn't." She nodded. "And yet here you are. Names are doors. Blood remembers how to find keyholes."

"Why her face?" I asked. The woman in the pale dress took a small step forward and for the first time I saw something like frailty in her. Not weakness. Fragility. Fine porcelain can be stronger than clay.

She said, "I wear what is owed. I wear what you trust. I wear what you cannot help reaching toward. If I wore a stranger you would refuse me. You'd call me a dream. If I wear your own, you look twice, and that is all I need. The second look does the binding."

"Binding to what?"

"To the line," she said, and smiled. "To the thread that holds your family together even when its people do not speak to each other for years. You think the thread is a recipe or a holiday or the way you all tilt your heads the same way when you think. It is that. It is also me."

I wanted to say that wasn't fair. But the words sounded childish even in my head. The night did not have room for tantrums.

"What do you want from me?"

"Not much," she said. "Not yet." She reached out and very gently touched the sleeve of my coat. "When the time comes, you'll wear my face too." It frightened me more than any threat could have. It sounded like a kindness. Like a promise offered in good faith.

"You don't get to choose," I said. It came out part question.

"Everyone gets to choose something," she said. The trick is understanding which small things are actually the big ones." She leaned in. I smelled nothing on her breath. "You can choose the words you use to call yourself home. That matters. Choose them now. Say your name."

I said it. I said the name my grandmother had used when she wanted me to come in from the yard at dusk. I said the name my mother used when she was proud, and the one she used when she was angry. I said all the names I had. The woman watched me as if the sound were a pattern she was checking against a blueprint. When I had finished, she nodded once. “Good.” She stepped back. “Go home, Claire.”

She tilted her head again, that precise motion that somehow felt like a clock. “Do not bargain,” she added. “If you can help it. But if you must, ask for small things.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said.

“You will,” she said, without malice. “Everyone does. It’s all right.” She looked at the grave again. “Tell your mother the lilies should be taken away tomorrow.”

“She hates lilies,” I said.

“I know,” the woman said, and for the first time there was something like tenderness in her voice, not for me, but for my grandmother, and that, more than anything, undid me.

I slept badly and all at once. I woke before the sun. My mother called to ask if I would come to the house later. I said yes. She said she would make coffee. We both pretended this was new, special, impractical. We were both oddly pleased by the pretending.

At the house later, my mother had already removed the lilies. “They were making me sick,” she said. The air felt better without them, somehow. She made coffee and set a cup in front of me. She almost touched my hand.

“She told me once,” my mother said slowly, surprising herself, “that the women in our family learn to carry things young. She said that was the good news and the bad news all at once.” My mother took a breath. “I thought it was the kind of thing people say when they want to sound wise. Maybe she just wanted me to stand up straight.”

“She did,” I said.

We went through drawers. We made piles. Keep. Donate. What on earth is this? We worked until the afternoon found us. My mother touched the doorframe as she left each room, a quick tap. I recognized it. I had done the same thing every time I left my grandmother’s house as a child. A little bargain with a house. Take care of them. I’ll be back.

I went to the mirror. Not because I expected anything. Because expectation is a door too and I didn’t want to hold it open by mistake.

The face was mine. I smiled to see what the smile would do. It did what a smile does when you are alone in a room and there is no one to manage it for. It came all at once and then it softened. Something in the glass shifted, a feeling, the way air changes in a room when someone opens a door down the hall. The hair on my arms rose. I thought, quietly and without drama: I will carry this. I don’t know what it is, not exactly, but I will carry it. I said my name again, once, because it seemed polite.

I closed my eyes. For a moment I felt a hand slide over my hair the way it had when thunder stitched the sky shut and my grandmother opened it again with tea and counting. The hand paused. It felt like permission. It felt like a weight shared. I did not ask who it belonged to.

In the morning the kitchen light made a bright square on the table. Outside, the rain had finally moved on to bother another town. I looked up and the window over the sink caught my reflection. It smiled at me. It was a small smile. It was the same one I had seen in the church, and in the graveyard, and in the mirror, and on photographs that had sat for years

She smiled, and I didn’t know whose smile it was anymore.