The next week was a blur of planning and numbness. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much of what happened in the weeks immediately following my Mama’s passing. I know I planned a funeral somehow. I know I put on a brave face for the people of the town who loved my mother so much. I know I managed to part with a few tiny vials of her ashes to those closest to her.
What was left of my Mama was sitting on the mantle in our now quiet house. It felt like I was living in a museum of all of her goodness. The house was filled with the tacky decorations my mother loved so much, and little remnants that she was there. A half-finished afghan sat in her crochet basket, along with her multitude of yarns of varying colors and the giant chains of stitches that proved she had attempted to teach me to crochet.
Her bedroom door was open, and the room itself was exactly as she had left it, right down to the next day’s scrubs folded on her dresser. I couldn’t bring myself to enter and destroy the false sense of normalcy.
The Bryant’s granted me six weeks leave of absence from my endless care of Lilie. I was upset at first. After all, I was fine, right? But after the funeral I realized that I was lost. I still expected to see her everywhere. I’d catch myself beginning to yell when her shows would come on, only to realize no one would answer me.
I know there were visitors. I couldn’t tell you who came by or what was said, I only know that I didn’t have to cook for two weeks because of the constant stream of casseroles and tamales and cakes. I know my few, precious friends came and sat with me in silence while I chain smoked enough cigarettes to keep American Spirit in business singlehandedly.
I’m sure everyone in town thought I had lost my senses. I went on walks just to get away from my Mama’s ghost. I swear, I heard her Irish lilt in that house every day, and it was driving me bonkers.
One week turned to two, and two to a month. In the back of my mind I knew I should have been making some progress with my grief, but instead I found that I was stuck in denial. The ever looming monster of my social anxiety loomed larger than ever, and wandering around the town to be free of my Mama’s ghost turned to hiding in my bedroom from all of the evil in the world. I fully believe I would have withered away in my bed were it not for Shilah.
Oh, Shilah.
He was the epitome of all things good in my eyes. Shilah was all I ever wanted, and yet all I couldn’t have. He was born to Navajo parents on the reservation and raised in their ways; ways I won’t pretend to understand. His father pastored one of the small churches in town, and that was where I met Shilah. I was in kindergarten at the time, and he was in the fourth grade. It was at VBS. The leaders had picked one child of each gender from each grade to perform one of the songs on stage for all of the parents on the last night, and we were both picked. I was forgetful even then, and when I forgot some of the motions during the performance, he pretended to forget, too. I know it was pretend because he winked at me.
I was stuck to him like glue from that point on.
I had watched him grow from the compassionate boy he was then into the always collected man he was now. I had watched him go from chunky kid into gangly teen into lithe and handsome man. I had called him my best (and oft times only) friend the majority of my life. I had felt the love of friends grow into something so much more, something that I had never shared with anyone. I had watched him come home from college with both girlfriends he had in those four years, and had helped him pick up the shards of his too caring heart when they demolished it. I had watched him glow with joy when he was given the job of high school History teacher my senior year. I was forced to call him “Mr. Natonaba” with the rest of the class.
He was the only person I distinctly remember being with me in the weeks after my Mama passed.
It was a Wednesday five weeks after my Mama passed. I had moved the urn with her ashes into my bedroom, along with the microwave and a minifridge stocked with the casseroles and Dr. Pepper kind folks brought me. I had an ash tray and fan set up in my window seat, so that I could smoke without making my room reek. I spent my days in that window seat, chain smoking cigarettes, chugging Dr. Pepper, and reading sappy romance novels.
Shilah came every day after school and sat with me. Sometimes we spent hours in complete silence, Shilah acting as the anchor rooting me in reality while I stared at the desert outside of our house. Other days he distracted me with stories of students.
That Wednesday, though, something changed. He came into my room, his 6’2” frame filling my doorway with impending change.
“Aislin,” his deep voice bubbled through the room like oil through a pipe, “it is time to stop this. You need to talk, or cry, or just come back. You’re fading.”
I took a long drag on my cigarette as I stared at him.
“Aislin.”
“Shilah.”
We stared at each other for a moment before he moved to sit on my bed.
It was quiet for a long while as we sat in our battle of wills. If it weren’t for his modern dress shirt and tie he would have looked like a photograph of one of his stoic ancestors. Today he wore his shoulder length black hair loose, though it was ordinarily in a ponytail, and it somehow added to the calm stillness he was emanating. If I hadn’t known him well, it would have gone completely unnoticed by me that he was pinching his thumb between his other hand’s index and middle fingers — a sure sign he was mulling something over.
“Tell me about your mother, Linn.”
I slammed my cigarette out in the ash tray, and shot him a look with all the sass I could muster.
“Really, Shilah? Really? You’ve known her since you were nine.”
His broad face lit up with a smile for a split second, before he schooled it back to collected indifference.
“Yes, but she was not my mother. Surely you can tell me something about her that I don’t know. I never heard her speak of her family, or Ireland.”
I opened my mouth to shoot out a witty answer, and then realized I had none. My brown furrowed as I thought. I had never heard my mother speak of her past. The one time I had asked anything of her family she had broken down into tears. I knew nothing.
“Shilah, you know as much as me. I know she was born in 1962. I know she moved her when she was six months pregnant with me. I know my father had brown eyes, because I do and my mother most assuredly did not.”
Saying the words out loud hurt me. I knew nothing about my Mama. My Mama, whom I loved more than anything in the world, had hidden twenty-nine years of her life from me. I felt my world caving in, and the panic attack creeping towards me.
Shilah sensed it, too. Before the hyperventilating could start he had his strong arms around me, and he was shushing me like the baby I felt.
I’m not sure how long we sat there with me sobbing, but eventually he pushed away and tilted my face up.
“Listen, Aislin. She loved you very much. Whatever she was hiding from you, I’m sure it was for your own good.”
I sniffed and rubbed at my eyes, before croaking,”But her family. There’s a whole family of — of Irish me’s that loved her and would want to know she’s gone, and — and — and…” I trailed off into wailing hysterics again. “I don’t even know their names!”
Shilah stroked my hair, before he said softly, “It’s a good thing your best friend is a history teacher, huh?”
