She went out on the landing to do it. Going by the careful soothing note in her voice, Phil was up to ninety. “I know, I know, but we can ring them and . . . Because it didn’t occur to him till now. He probably thought you knew— Yes, he’s positive . . . No, Phil. He’s not. What, out of nowhere? He’s not . . .”
Her voice faded down the stairs. Bleak autumn sunlight fell across the floorboards. After a while I went over to the wardrobe and started taking out clothes and picking off lint and arranging them, very neatly, on the bed.
* * *
The day of the funeral was gray and cold, wind blowing long sheets of rain back and forth in the street. My black suit was baggy on me; in the mirror I looked ridiculous, lost in some stranger’s clothes and some stranger’s very bad day. Someone had organized long black Mafia-looking cars to ferry us from place to place, funeral home, church, crematorium, all of them out in unfamiliar bits of west Dublin, in no time I had lost my bearings completely and had no idea where I was.
“Where’s Melissa?” Leon asked, in the car on the way to the funeral home. His rush-bought suit was too long in the sleeves so that he looked like a schoolkid, and he smelled faintly but unmistakably of hash. Our parents either hadn’t noticed or had decided not to.
“She’s not here,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring umbrellas,” my mother said, leaning over me to peer out the window. “I knew there was something.”
“We’ll survive,” Oliver said. He looked awful, face sagging where he had lost weight, shaving cuts in the folds. “Not like we’ll be out in the cemetery.” He threw me a baleful look; apparently I was in his bad books about the cremation thing.
“But if it gets worse,” Miriam said, a little wildly. She was wearing a drapey black cape thing that, when she came out of their house into the wind, had looked like she was about to take off. “Waiting outside the church, there’s always all that standing around—”
“No worries,” the driver said peacefully, over his shoulder. “I’ve umbrellas in the boot if you need them. Ready for anything.”
“Well then,” Miriam said, triumphantly and obscurely. “There you go.”
No one had anything to say to that. Leon was still eyeing me. I turned my head away and looked out the window, at bare scrawny trees and boxy little houses whipping past.
The funeral home was spotless and neutral, nothing that could possibly make anyone feel any worse, every detail so discreet that it slid out of my mind the second I looked away. Off to one side of the room, shining in the tasteful soft light, was the coffin.
Hugo looked, bizarrely, more like himself than he had in months: hair smooth and neatly trimmed, cheeks filled out and ruddied by techniques I didn’t want to think about, the look of unruffled absorption he had worn when he was at work and on an interesting trail. A flash of memory hit me out of nowhere, Hugo bent over my finger with a needle and that same absorbed look, digging out a splinter. Cold sunny day and his hair all dark back then. Yes it will hurt but only for a moment—look, here it is, that’s a big one!
My father and the uncles, faces fixed in grim remote endurance, moved around shaking hands with people I half-recognized. A big bosomy woman cried, “Oh, Toby, you look dreadful, you must be devastated,” and enveloped me in a fragrant hug. I caught Leon’s eye over her shoulder and shot him a panicked stare; he mouthed Margaret, which wasn’t a lot of help. “Toby,” my father said quietly, in my ear. “Time to go.” It took me a moment to understand what he meant.
The sheer weight of the coffin was stunning. Up until then the day had felt completely unreal, just another bad dream to be stumbled through—I hadn’t even considered taking this on without Xanax—but the bite and grind of the wood into my shoulder was savagely, inescapably real. My leg shook and dragged, I couldn’t stop it, a jagged catch in the slow march, everyone watching— Sliding the coffin into the hearse, rain driving down my coat collar, I tripped and almost went on one knee on the tarmac. “Whoops,” Tom said, catching my arm. “Slippery out here.”
Ugly concrete church, long faux-homemade banners hanging