meantime Sunny had booked herself into an exclusive boarding school somewhere in Vermont. The kind of place rich kids are sent to keep them as far away as possible from their parents’ lifestyles. It was the kind of place Sunny could go to reinvent herself. With Norma’s inheritance now going directly to her, there was no lack of money. Justin made no claims to any of it. He told her she was welcome to come home in the school holidays but they both knew it would be avoided if possible. She wouldn’t come back if she could be somewhere else, not for some years to come, anyway. She’d make friends at the school and go to their homes in the breaks. Sunny was, as Manny had reported, a very capable sort of a girl. She had never had the chance to be anything else.
Manny shuffled his way to the front and I readied myself for the big God speech from him. The old ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted’ or some other all-time funeral favourite, but he surprised me. Instead of stepping up to the microphone, Manny stood beside the coffin, one hand resting lightly on it as you do on a friend’s shoulder. He spoke simply about Karen and what he said was all the more eloquent because of it. He talked of little things, such as her love of ’sixties television shows, like Hogan’s Heroes and Doctor Who. Sunny squeezed my hand and when I turned to her she whispered, ‘I love Doctor Who.’ Her eyes were bright and it wasn’t just the tears. Manny talked of demons, but it wasn’t the pitchfork fiery-hell variety; he talked instead of Karen’s struggle to overcome the demons of her drug habit and he praised her for her eventual victory over it. He talked of the love she had for her children and how much she had been looking forward to spending time with Sunny again. I glanced at Sunny, expecting to see a sneer but she was looking at the coffin as if it was Karen herself speaking to her and she nodded. Manny was an honest and warm speaker and when he finished we were all smiling. Before walking slowly back to his pew he knocked three times on the lid of the coffin. I don’t know if it was a rehearsed gesture or what it meant. It may have been a simple tattoo of farewell or a private superstitious code. It didn’t matter. He’d earned the right to farewell his friend as he saw fit.
While we joined the minister in a tragically thin and tuneless version of ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’, Manny fumbled with the keyboard of a laptop. Sunny watched him, then pushed past me towards him. Robbie and I exchanged a look but let her go. She leaned across Manny and clicked confidently at the keyboard and then straightened up as an image on a screen at the side of the altar appeared. It was a photo of a young Karen holding a newborn baby, Sunny. Karen’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining as she held the brand new soft-cheeked being to her face and breathed her love onto her. The photo faded and was replaced with another and then another. I hadn’t seen any of the images before. Manny must have found them at Norma’s or maybe they were from a personal collection Karen had kept to herself. The hymn petered out and was thankfully replaced by the soundtrack accompanying the photos. It was a version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ that I hadn’t heard before. It was perfect. Sunny and Manny exchanged a look; this song was obviously Sunny’s choice and they’d organised this tribute of photos and music together. There were early photos of Karen with baby Falcon too; Sunny still a toddler leaning over to kiss his little scrunched-up new baby face. One by one, the images faded to be replaced by another. There were photos of Karen as a young girl. One was of her holding a rabbit almost as big as her; another of her on a three-wheeler bike, her head thrown back in laughter, a gap where her front teeth had once been. Sunny was transfixed by these images. Her mouth partly open, her eyes shining.