“What? It’s the truth.”
Billie frowned. “But she’s in the ground.”
“Yes,” Bianca said. “But she doesn’tfeelbeing in the ground.”
I turned in my seat and looked at Billie. “Your mom isn’t cold, sweetheart.”
Billie considered that for a long moment, her lips puckered. “Because she has heaven blankets?”
CJ’s face shifted. He looked at me, then at Billie, then down at the flowers.
“Sure,” he said. “Heaven blankets.”
Bianca opened her mouth, but I caught her eye and shook my head slightly. She closed it again.
Small mercies.
When we got out of the car, Billie grabbed my hand. Bianca walked on my other side, shoulders slightly hunched, scanning the rows of headstones with academic focus. CJ led us, clutching the flowers to his chest. He knew the way by heart.
I clenched my jaw. An eleven-year-old shouldn’t know the way to his mother’s grave. A nine-year-old shouldn’t know about a body’s temperature once placed in the ground. A five-year-old shouldn’t have to build an idea of her mother out of photographs and borrowed memories and whatever fragments the rest of us managed to hand her without breaking apart.
But there we were.
Jade’s grave was near the back, beneath a maple tree that had been mostly bare the day we buried her. There were a few old leaves caught around the base of the stone now, and a tiny purple weed growing near one corner. I made a mental note to pull it, then didn’t. Jade had loved a colorful weed. She would’ve called it ambitious.
CJ knelt and put the flowers on the grass in front of the headstone with more care than I ever used for anything. His mouth pressed into a line while he arranged the stems.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
I looked away for a second and focused on Billie’s hand in mine.
She squeezed my fingers. “Do I say hi too?”
“If you want.”
She looked at the headstone. “Hi, Mommy. I found a worm yesterday, but Bianca wouldn’t let me bring it to breakfast.”
“That was a reasonable boundary,” Bianca said.
Billie decided she should clarify. “It was a breakfast worm.”
“No such category exists.”
CJ sat back on his heels. “There could be.”
“There shouldn’t be,” Bianca said.
Billie looked up at me. “Do worms go where people go when they die?”
I exhaled through my nose. “I don’t know.”
“Where do people go?”
Bianca shifted her weight. “It depends on what you mean,” she said. “If you mean physically, then it depends on how someone is interred. Buried means the body goes into the ground. Cremated means the body is placed into an incinerator and reduced to ash through high heat.”
Billie stared at her. CJ closed his eyes.
I squinted in Bianca’s direction. “Maybe we don’t need the full technical breakdown right now.”
