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The worst thing about death is the boxes. This was the brilliant conclusion I reached as I brushed aside the cobwebs and sat down on a steamer trunk labeled “Bermuda, 1962.” My parents’ attic was a dusty nightmare of bundled magazines, uncaptioned photos, and souvenirs from tourist traps that no longer existed. In the honest light of a single overhead bulb, a sea of boxes, crates, and old suitcases swept across the rough pine floor to the far window. The carton facing me had “Old Photos, New York” scrawled in black marker across three sides, as good a place to start as any. I pulled open the flaps and dug in. Near the bottom of the first stack, I uncovered a faded snapshot of my father. He was standing under a theatre marquee and kissing a woman I didn’t recognize. As I swiveled to move the photo closer to the light, my cell phone rang. It was Rob MacDuff, my favorite undertaker. “Where are you?” he said. “We need to talk.” “Over at Green Street, sorting through her stuff. Well, trying to, anyway.” In the photo, Dad was smiling. He had one hand on the woman’s butt. Hmm. I wedged the cell phone between my shoulder and ear. “What’s up?” “Your mum's gone again,” he said. I dropped the phone. “S’okay, I know it’s not your fault!” I yelled as I fumbled to retrieve it. I began to toss photos back into the carton. “Couple of things to do first. Don’t leave before I get there!” I muscled “Old Photos, New York” down the rickety stairs and heaved it onto the kitchen table, dug through six inches of junk mail for my car keys, jumped into the van, collected my kids from middle school, left them at home running up a phone bill, returned a stack of library books, bought a loaf of bread at Speedy-Mart, and finally ended up at the Auld Lang Syne funeral home staring into an empty casket. Mom had always hated frills, so I’d opted for the proverbial plain pine box, but my attempt at Yankee austerity was somewhat undermined by the fringed tartans Rob MacDuff used to line his caskets. “Receiving blankets for the life hereafter,” he called them. Alas, Mom was a Buchanan, and I, for one, would be tossing and turning in my eternal rest if I had four yards of Buchanan plaid screaming at me. Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” floated above me, creeping out of the wall speakers and drifting room to room. A formidable sympathy arrangement from the Norfolk Bridge Club dominated the viewing parlor. I was drowning in freesia. “This doesn’t usually happen, lass,” Rob said, spreading his hands apologetically as he walked over to join me. “Terrific, I feel so much better.” I rested my elbows on the side of the casket, my head in my hands. The first time Mom skipped I thought it was a joke. Ha-ha, very funny. Rob found her an hour later, sitting on the garden bench behind the funeral home. That was two days ago. Yesterday, the stationmaster waylaid her just as she was about to board the 3:27 to Penn Station. He called Rob, and then, presumably, helped himself to a stiff drink. “Look on the bright side, lass. We’ve managed to find your mum twice before.” Rob sat me down in an overstuffed chair and handed me a cup of tea and a scone. He lowered his six-foot-plus frame to look me in the eye. “Now then, where would your mum go d’you think?” “God knows.” I rubbed my temples. “If you were a dead body, where would you go?” To his credit, Rob pretended to give this question a good ten seconds of careful consideration. Then he suggested, “Let me call Pete Martin, okay? Maybe his Scouts can search the state forest for us.” “Sure. Fine. Good idea,” I said several times, as Rob squeezed my shoulder and left the room in a swirl of tartan. When Mom died, everyone expected me to go with Hammond and Sons again. They’re the outfit that handled my dad’s arrangements: sonorous, understated, inoffensive, and entirely forgettable. But this time around, I wanted a funeral all of us would remember. I figured any undertaker who wore a kilt and sporran on the job was my kind of guy, which is the main reason I threw the family business to Auld Lang Syne. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I’d had a thing for Rob’s accent and calf muscles ever since he set up shop. “It’s Rob MacDuff, isn’t it?” I asked the empty casket. Yup, that was the reason Mom had gone AWOL, had to be. Never mind the fact that Rob was single and charming, loved my kids, and didn’t run off with redheads half his age like someone I could mention. Nope, I knew what Mom was thinking, wherever she was: Her daughter was sleeping with the undertaker. The word would get out. The neighbors would talk. “So was it the shoes, Mom? You really, really, wanted your black pumps, and we stuck you with hiking boots, was that it?” That’s right, hiking boots. They were Rob’s idea, what can I say? She could be halfway to Gordontown by now, maybe further. I knew how far I could walk in two hours through April mud. But Mom was a dead woman on the lam, another story entirely. She could be flying like the Ghost of Christmas Past or decomposing step by step. Neither image was appealing. “The Scouts are on their way,” Rob announced as he returned. He began to rub my shoulders. “Good, that’s good,” I mumbled, then spun around to face him. “Why, Rob? Why her? Why me?” “Hard to say, lass. But I suspect she’s simply not ready, y’know.” “Ready for what?” “Ready to let go.” “Oh, really?” I said, biting off my words, one by one. “Well, seems to me she probably should have thought about that just a teensy-weensy bit before she had that humongous stroke, don’t-cha think?” In one corner of my mind, a sweet little voice told me I was being a royal bitch, talking like this about my dear departed mother. From another corner, a raucous contralto told the sweet little voice to stuff it, and hadn’t she ever heard of black comedy, for God’s sake? In the third corner, a patient and hypnotic tenor reminded the other two that I’d been under a lot of stress, and probably needed to express in a cathartic and uncensored manner the grief and anger I undoubtedly felt, or perhaps I simply required more time to creatively process— “It’s a battle, isn’t it?” Rob said. I had no answer. I grabbed the rest of my scone and bit into it. “Trying to keep it all straight,” he continued. “Life. Truth. Whys and wherefores. Point A to Point B. Most people finally give up on it, but then some don’t.” Rob talked like this a lot. When we started dating, it was a huge adjustment for me. My ex-husband was a trial lawyer and a real smoothie. Everything he said made perfect sense at first, but a couple of days later, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why. Rob, on the other hand, often talked in riddles, but a couple of days later, something he’d said would fit the final piece into one of the many puzzles that seemed to run my life. The current puzzle was still rearranging itself when I pulled out of the Auld Lang Syne parking lot. The vanguard of Pete Martin’s Explorer troop was just arriving, packs on their backs and topo maps in hand. Nothing like the prospect of finding a dead body to rouse a crew of teenage boys to prompt and enthusiastic action. Rob’s idea about searching the state forest was a good one, which is why I headed up Greenwood Road toward the ranger station. I’d wait there for the Scouts, do some deep breathing, try to calm down. But right smack at the corner of River Road, something turned my car away from the forest and east toward Passaic Park. It was already half past four. The natives would be getting restless. “Evan, can you hear me?” I said into my phone. “No, I’m not calling from the ER. You still have to do your homework. Honey, I’m afraid Grandma’s sort of, um, disappeared. No, sweetie, it is not cool. And we still have to look for her, so I’ll be gone a little while longer. What? No, you may not call ‘Ghost Hunters,’ give me a break! What? Yes, pizza’s fine. Let me talk to Karen, okay? Thanks, pal. Love you. That you, Karen? Yes, it’s true about Grandma. Well, I don’t know if it’s humiliating, exactly. What? Your new gym shorts? Hmm. Check the dryer, maybe. Yes, before dark, I promise. Big hugs. Love you, too.” I slipped the phone into my jacket pocket, swung a tight left past the empty attendant’s booth at the park entrance, and braced myself as asphalt gave way to rutted gravel. Running the length of the west fork of the Passaic River, the park began with a small picnic area and ventured into a marshy expanse that was one of the best spots around to view herons. Odd that there were no other cars in the lot, but then, most people avoided the park during mud season, especially after a heavy rain. It was a different story in March when our skies were wing-to-wing with migrating birds. Wielding binoculars and high-powered viewing scopes, the Highland Birding Society would be lined up all the way from the trailhead to the nature center. At 70, Mom had been one of the youngsters of the group, as well as the designated driver. I half expected to see her old green Volvo peel in filled with tweed and blue hair. I parked the car. Only a couple more hours until sunset, but I figured it would be a quick visit. Either Mom was here, or she wasn’t. Past the wood-framed entrance map, I took the Blue Trail toward the Hillside Nature Center. The path was still wet from the weekend’s cloudburst. With each step, my sneakers coaxed hungry slurping sounds out of the muck. Let’s face it: She hadn’t been a perfect mother, and I hadn’t been a perfect daughter, but I slogged along in the fading daylight because I had to find her. Because this one last proper-burial thing—well, it seemed like the least I could do. After half an hour, I knew I’d taken the wrong turn somewhere. I should have been skimming the east bank of Trout Pond, and instead, I’d lost the beaten path and was sloshing through glop and slide alder on a trail I suspected was a figment of my imagination. I saw the rain-slicked rocks a moment too late. When I came to, the sun had set, and the half-light of that golden time just before dark was rapidly dropping through the top branches of the pines. I sat up and rubbed the huge goose egg on the back of my head. When I reached into my pocket for my cell phone, my hand came out the bottom, through a hole I must have ripped open when I fell. By now, I couldn’t see a damn thing. A full moon would’ve been a big help at this point. What time was moonrise anyway? Would there even be a moon tonight? Some Girl Scout I was. No flashlight, no First Aid kit, no water, no compass. Just wet leaves and the rustling of night creatures I prayed were small enough for me to take in hand-to-hand combat. And my cell phone, my only link to civilization, was probably buried in a foot of mud, and would stay there for years until it was finally discovered (mere inches from my bleached bones) by an archaeology class from the local state college. As I stumbled to my feet, the pounding of my heart gave way to distant drumbeats that somehow pulsed in time with a deep windy alto, as if the woods were breathing. A flute, maybe? Sure, why not? Nothing odd about a flute in the middle of Passaic Park on a dark night, nothing at all. A light too dim to be the moon flickered through the branches. Closer to it, I recognized the floodlight that perched above the nature center’s main entrance. Along the front of the building, the log benches usually clogged with school children on field trips now shimmered with dark shadows that resolved into suggestions of faces and torsos and arms and legs. On the end of the bench to the far right, one of the shadows looked up. Its jeans and down parka melted into the rough-hewn siding of the cabin, its heavy boots idly scuffed the wet ground in front of the bench. “Mom?” It was the boots that clued me in. Her face was no help at all, because it kept shifting, donning and discarding the expressions of all the Moms I’d ever known, as if she hadn’t yet found one that pleased her. And the weight! Next time you see a ghost in a movie, all faint and gauzy and insubstantial, let me tell you: It’s a big fat lie. My mother’s weight was all wrong. Even ten feet away from the bench, I was struck by the heft of her specter, by its unnatural relationship to mass, as if Earth and Jupiter had swapped gravitational fields. No longer bearing the burden of water and muscle and bone, my mother’s form now swelled with a lifetime of memory. I labored to breathe. I’d found her, and suddenly, I had nothing to say. My mother stood up. The flute trilled. “Wait, Mom, don’t go!” I burst out. Now! Now was my chance, that golden opportunity to say what I somehow couldn’t say when she was too tired to listen, when I was too angry to call home, when she was all wired up in the ICU. “Mom, I never told you—” “Well, I certainly hope you’re enjoying yourself,” my mother said, her voice bouncing from branch to branch and coming to rest somewhere inside my head. “Enjoying myself? I don’t understand—” “All your running around and hysteria and getting piles of sympathy cards in the mail, not to mention—” “Hey, wait a minute—” “And the cute jokes; talking to my casket, honestly! If you have something to say to me, Margaret, say it to my face.” “C’mon Mom, I tried, really. I mean, frankly I wasn’t expecting—” “And I was? Your grandmother lived to be 90. You think I saw this one coming?” “Wait. The casket. How did you know about—” “Where have you been? You’re covered with mud.” “Dammit, Mom, I’ve been looking for you!” “Really, honey? Whatever for? Oh right, I’m messing up your plans. You want to have the funeral and forget all about me, figure everything’s finished.” “What? Oh no, it’s not like that at all. It’s just that—” “You want this to be a happy ending, right? You figure we’ve got a second chance to say all those things people wish they’d said before someone dies, like in a really hokey TV movie?” “Well, I had hoped—” “Okay, have it your way. I go first. For starters, you have always been full of yourself, as if the world revolves around you. You’ve never fully considered how your actions affect other people, and let me see now—” She pulled a small memo pad from the pocket of her parka, and started flipping through the pages. “Oh yes, here we are: You’re an indifferent housekeeper, have dubious taste in men, spoil your children, don’t use proper salutations when you’re writing thank-you notes, forget to update your Christmas card lists, and spend entirely too much money on nonessentials.” This was not going the way I’d hoped. Maybe Mom would calm down in her casket. Sheesh, what was I saying? Definitely time to get help. There was a phone by the back door of the nature center. I headed around the end of the building. “Just a minute, young lady, I’m not finished with you.” Like the slap of a beaver’s tail, her words threw me to the ground. That did it. My mother hadn’t always been sweetness and light, but she’d never struck me. I flung myself at her shadow, expecting to pass through her and slam into the cabin wall and, oddly, not caring in the least. Instead, I dived into a pool of darkness, reached for something solid to grab, found something warm and yielding, and fell back to the ground holding between my hands a dark beating heart. “Oh jeez, Mom, I’m sorry!” I screamed. She was still standing in front of the log bench, apparently unaware of the gaping hole in her chest. I could see the vague outlines of blood vessels, and pale curves that might have been ribs. Bits of goose down drifted through the torn edges of her parka, floated into the cavern where her heart had been, and stuck to the back of her chest wall. “Margaret,” she said, suddenly quiet. “I’m sorry, really I am. But I never wanted this, any of it.” “Any of what?” I was losing my grip on both my mother’s heart and my own fleeting sanity. In my hands, the heart was still beating, dripping a mixture of blood and clear mucous that was strangely cool and not repulsive, the way the slick vernix coating of a newborn baby looks beautiful to his parents. “You always, always wanted me to be something I wasn’t.” “Mom, it’s still beating. How can it still be beating?” “You never knew, did you? But no, you never would have believed it anyway. Oh, honey—” She shook her head and sighed, part breath, part wind, part flute. “It, you, all of it? It was all a mistake.” I dropped her heart. It hit the wet leaves with a splat. “I wanted to be a professional dancer, can you believe it?” “Really?” I said, feeling in the dark for my mother’s heart. “Why didn’t you?” “Honestly, Margaret, sometimes you are so naive. How was I supposed to dance with a baby at home? Honey, if you left the line for even a few years, there were always a dozen people waiting to take your place. And finally when you were older, well,” she paused, “so was I.” “But the cookies?” I could barely hear myself. “The cookies and milk every day after school?” “I did what I had to.” “And all the home movies you made? And helping me with my science projects? And staying up nights holding my forehead while I was puking in the toilet? Shit, Mom, you were always there!” “Don’t swear, Margaret. It’s coarse and unattractive.” She looked away for a moment, hiding her face from me. “Funny, I’d forgotten about the science projects. So many things fade away, so quickly.” “But why, Mom?” I asked, as I pawed through the wet leaves, searching. “Why did you keep walking off?” “Did I? But you just said I was always there.” “I meant after, Mom, you know—” “No, Margaret, I don’t know. Oh, you mean climbing out of my casket?” I nodded. I’d torn my jeans, and cold mud was oozing in through ragged holes in both knees. “Well, why didn’t you say so? Hmm. I guess I had some things to figure out,” she said. “Maybe I just wasn’t ready.” That stopped me. I looked up. “Really? That’s what Rob said.” “Rob? Oh, right, your Scotsman.” I held my breath. “He has good hands, doesn’t he?” “Yes,” I whispered, and slowly exhaled. “These last few days? I suppose I’m sorry you’ve been put out,” she said, “but it wasn’t about you. It was never about you.” Then she took off her parka and boots, and straightened up taller and thinner than I remembered, scattering age and pain with the wet feathers that floated and settled on the ground beside her. She was dressed in a black leotard and tights, and a long net skirt. As the moon rose, a dark veil slid across the hole in her chest, and her cropped gray hair darkened to russet and grew longer and longer, until it reached almost to her waist. And I recognized her. “It was you, wasn’t it?” I said. “In the photograph, kissing Daddy by some theatre. I found it in the attic.” “Really?” she said to no one in particular. “Oh yes. In front of the Belasco. We were in love.” My left knee bumped against her heart. It was nestled in a clump of wet maple leaves, still wobbling, still beating. The heart glistened in the moonlight as I offered it to my mother. She smiled at me. At least I wanted to believe that she did. “Keep it, Margaret. In spite of everything, it’s yours, you know. Always has been.” “Oh, Mom—” “I have to go now.” As I stood there with my mother’s heart in my hands, the other shadows on the benches rose and took shape. I recognized Sophie Baxter from Baxter’s Hardware, who’d died the day before yesterday, and Joe Smalley, who sold me my van. The rest were strangers, but I knew, or wanted to believe, that all of them would be missed by at least one person. The drums beat faster, shook the loamy earth, and called the flute to pick up the counterpoint. And the shadows began to dance, in twos and threes, twisting and turning and spreading their arms wide. “So long, honey. Be good,” my mother said as she joined the end of a ghostly conga line. “And by the way, when people ask you what my last words were?” “Yes?” “Why don’t you just make it up? Isn’t that what you’ve always done?” “Oh, Mom,” I whispered, to no one in particular. The next time you see movie ghosts dissolving gracefully, burning off like morning fog, let me tell you: It’s a big fat lie. That night, in the shadow of the Hillside Nature Center, those drums pounded a rhythmic crescendo and, with a single shattering boom, brought down a curtain of silence. And just like that, I was alone. Only the fist-sized mass pulsing against my palms suggested that any of the rest of it had ever happened. I found my way back by moonlight. My cell phone was lying in the gravel next to my car. I wrapped the heart in my jacket, and laid it gently on the passenger’s side of the front seat. The phone was soaking wet, but it still worked. “Hi, Karen. Yes, honey, I’m fine. She was in Passaic Park, long story. What? Yes, the funeral’s still tomorrow. Rob’s cousin, Ian? Well, I would imagine he’ll be there, but don’t you think he’s a little old for you? We’ll talk later. Ask Evan to pick up the extension, okay? That you, pal? Yes, I found her. No it wasn’t gross at all, actually kind of beautiful. Very funny, ’ewww’ yourself. What? Hmm, let me think now. Oh, yeah....  ...She said being dead isn’t all that bad, but she already misses both of you, so she’ll try to drift by every once in a while to see how you’re doing. No, really, that’s the absolute last thing she said. Hey listen, hold the questions, okay? I’ll be home soon. Thanks, guys. Love you, too.” I hung up, rested my arms and head on the steering wheel, and burst into tears. The next morning, Rob and I filled a burlap sack with sand and wrapped it in a muslin shroud. Together, we lowered it into the plain pine box with the loud tartan lining. Rob secured the lid with a dozen wood screws, in case any of our younger guests felt the urge to peek. By the time we reached the cemetery, the sun had broken through the clouds, the puddles had dried up, and daffodils were blooming on the hillside between the graves. As funerals go, it was such a perfect event, I suspect that most of the guests would have forgiven the absence of a corpse. “Death is death, and that’s that, and we can’t do anything about it,” Rob said, as he put his arm around me. “But when we’ve loved someone, lass, what we can do is give them a memorable send-off.” “Can we play catch with Champ?” Evan yelled from the van, where our retriever was threatening to jump out the window. “Yes!” I called back. “But down by the river, away from the graves, okay?” Rob and I headed back to the car, to the sounds of barks and laughter. Our steps matched the dull rhythm of falling clumps of soil, as the grounds crew tossed the last piles of dirt over the casket. “It never happens the way we expect, does it?” I said. “No, darlin’, not that I’ve noticed.” The shovel heads tamped down the loose soil covering the grave, three shovels pounding in concert, the harsh metal muffled by the soft earth. “Last night, Maggie, was it drums or flutes you heard?” “Both,” I said. “I noticed the drums first, but then I heard a flute, I think. That’s what I followed.” “Ah, she’s on her way then. Not likely to get lost now.” I stopped walking and turned to him. “Okay, I know that’ll make sense in a few days, but right now it sounds like New Age baloney.” “Nothing new about it, lass, obscure Scots legend. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.” He grinned and pulled up a blade of grass, held it between his hands and blew, sending a whistle down the hillside to the river below. The whistle landed with a splash and skipped across the ripples away from us, toward the sea. I planted Mom’s heart under my Don Juan rose, the one that climbed the chimney and smelled like raspberries. I wish I could say the plant flourished and attracted mystified botanists from far and wide. But I can’t. It died that summer, as roses will, no matter what we do to prevent it.
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