Constant Weight

Short Story from my book Postcards originally posted here last November.

The remainder of Cassie came in the mail, to her own front door, in a plain white plastic box. She was small and dense. Scott closed the front door and carried her to the living room, measuring her heft, lifting the box up and down.

She was so slight a few weeks ago, the last time he carried her. He situated her on the couch and positioned himself on the adjacent cushion, adding his weight so she did not tip over. Plastic was not reverent enough for what was left of his heart, but it was practical.

“Where’d I put your pretty wood box?” he asked Cassie. She didn’t answer.

He traced the rim of the box with his finger, circumscribing her completely in the amount of space he used to trace a circle on her stomach as they lay in bed. Months ago. Cassie asked once if he’d still do that when she had a scar.

He stood and walked to their bedroom, past the cards standing open on top of the piano like kindergarteners in line. He lay down for a moment on the unmade bed, toes still touching the wood floor as if there were cinder blocks tied to his feet. He traced circles in the space next to him.

The dog nudged him on the hand that touched Cassie’s side and he met Abby’s eyes while he woke. She was the best dog ever. Lines on his arm showed the tangle of sheets, imprinted by deep and motionless sleep.

He stumbled to the closet and waited for a hint as to why he was there. He caught the scent of gardenias on her long grey sweater, patted the sleeve and held it to his face, resting his cheek on the soft cashmere. To the left of her sweater, on the shelf below her perfumes and the tin-bordered mirror, with her wedding dress and their love letters tied up in a burgundy ribbon, sat the small, burled wood box he’d bought two days after her death.

Cremation allowed procrastination. He didn’t know what to do with her still.

In the living room, he opened the wood box first, preparing to transfer her from temporary new body to permanent new body. The lid of the mailing container popped up without much force and inside was a bag with a metal twist tie and a round metal tag, like a dog tag, with “Chastain - January 20, 2013” stamped into it.

“I should have touched you more”

He opened the bag and put his finger into it, down far enough to touch her, then brought it up to his tongue and brushed it with the sandy ash. No taste, no smell. She felt gritty when he expected a powdery softness and he rolled her between his fingers, letting her fall back into the bag.

It didn’t mean anything, touching the remains. It wasn’t her, anyway. He retied the bag and placed her in the wood box via a hidden panel in the bottom and tightened the screw to seal it.

He made a space for her among the condolence cards on the piano, but the arrangement looked too much like an altar. Ashes on the mantle looked better, but it wasn’t quite wide enough, and he didn’t want her to fall and spill onto the carpet. He would have to vacuum her up, mixing her with the dog hair and dirt from the garden. He settled on the sideboard in the formal dining room. He could see it from the kitchen, but he didn’t ever sit at the lovely teak table Cassie bought three years ago.

Abby sat near her, staring at the box, and turning to look at him standing in the kitchen as if to say, “Do you know she’s in this box?”

In the weeks after her funeral, people who looked familiar asked how he was doing and said, “We’re sorry for your loss.” He counted the times he felt repulsed by Cassie’s scar and when he passed ten, he knew he was superficial and shallow.

Roses hung from a hook near the laundry room door, blackened by the years since Cassie cut and tied them with raffia. She scattered roses and gardenia throughout the house like a Monet painting. He kept the tied roses even though they were not the alive version. Cassie wasn’t the alive version either.

Cassie's best friend, Anna, came over on Sundays and Thursdays. She listened to his rants and sat silent when he sobbed. Cassie moved around the house as the weeks went by.

On a Thursday morning when Cassie was again on the piano, Anna rang the bell and roused him from a fretful sleep to join her at Bible Study. Glory to God in the Highest. They talked about making daily lists and writing down prayer to prompt change and healing. He promised to make a list.

“Let’s see it,” Anna said as he opened the door on Sunday.

“See what?”

“The list —you know — from Bible Study?”

“Oh.”

She followed him into the kitchen, and he slid it across the counter to her.

• get up

• feed dog

• make coffee

“That’s it?”

“Yep.”

“Needs a little work.”

Anna reached for two cups in the left-hand cabinet, kept her back to Scott and poured creamer in hers and coffee in both, adding a little at a time to make them even. “She was my best friend too. You cannot check out — you have to find a new life.”

“I don’t want a new life, thank you,” he said, as if refusing an offer of going to a play or the beach. He said the same thing about the funeral. It happened anyway.

“I’m going to wear my red bra when I see him,” Cassie said, smiling at Scott in the mirror, catching his eye over her shoulder. “It’s spread, they think. I’ll go tomorrow to talk to him in his office. We’ll go.”

At the funeral, Anna asked the mourners to write about a memory of Cassie and as he watched them drop the notes into a box near her casket, the small gestures they made toward her felt like they were stabbing her instead, and his chest wouldn’t let the air come in.

Some days were still crushing like the funeral, but for these past few months, he gave himself ten minutes in the morning to cry. The all-day tears were exhausting. And yet, some days, her pillow didn’t move from under his head, rendered flat by the constant weight of grief.

The next Sunday, he added to the list.

• Get up

• Feed the dog

• Make coffee

• Groceries

• Dust

• Prune the roses

• Find a place for Cassie

Anna found the list lying on the counter next to a box of raspberry coffee cake. “Your list has changed.”

“I can’t find a place in the house that seems normal.”

“Do you want her somewhere besides the house? A place you can visit?”

“But the ashes aren’t her. She’s here, not there.” Scott pointed to himself as the place Cassie was.

“Then where will you scatter her?”

“I don’t know.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth.

“Are you ready to read the notes from the funeral?” Anna asked the question every Sunday. He’d never said yes.

Scott got up and retrieved the notes from their place in the closet.

Anna sat on the couch and patted the cushion next to her. Scott sat, elbows on knees, hands clasped, shielding his belly and heart.

“Maybe we’ll find an answer in the notes.” Anna was always positive. He hated it at the moment.

The notes were blah and then crushing, comforting, and irritating all at the same time. He didn’t want to hear the words, but Anna’s voice filled the quiet with memory. The notes did not answer his question.

It had never come up in all the things Cassie talked about. It was like forgetting the centerpiece on a party table. Not essential, but always the finishing touch. She requested cremation, and he failed to ask where she would like to be afterwards.

Anna put down to note box. “Maybe she’d like to be everywhere?”

“You mean small amounts in different places?”

“Yeah, like a pilgrimage. Or delivery service.” Anna grinned.

“Not all at once like putting her in the ground.”

“Precisely. That’s your list for next week.”

The next Sunday he told Anna the few places he could recall and together they listed new destinations and discussed the pros and cons of both what they thought Cassie would like and logistical challenges to skirting the laws against scattering human remains. It was only tiny amounts. They planned for a week off their respective jobs, accounted for weather, and chose the last week in September, three weeks away.

Early on the first day, they put Cassie on the ottoman and spent an hour sifting her into small pill bags. They only needed twelve but packed fifteen, just in case. They placed her into a jewelry box with a hinged lid and she rode between them in Scott’s truck console.

In Yosemite, Cassie was caught up in a gust of mountain air when Scott opened the small bag and tipped it, not thinking that the breeze would carry her from the base of the tree he chose.

He freed her with greater care at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, and she settled at the feet of giant sequoias, their fluted trunks towering to the sky and watching over her.

She floated down the river at Sutter’s Mill, and he watched her flow, then eddy, then race over a rock until she dispersed too much to follow the water that carried her.

Lake Tahoe’s deep blue water held her in an ancient embrace.

Cassie entered the Pacific Ocean at The Golden Gate Bridge, mixing with the jade green water that flowed into and out of the bay.

She loved the gardens at Mission San Juan Bautista, and they spread her under a rose bush between the statue of Saint John the Baptist and the church built in 1797.

Anna and Scott walked on Moonstone Beach. He stared at his feet, making impressions in the sand while Anna looked for places further out.

“You know, grief makes you look short term, like looking down at your feet.”

Scott straightened and considered her, walking more than arm’s length, but beside him. He appreciated her intuitive sense of his space. “And if I look up?”

“Then you’ll see further down the road. I could always pick out my way when I could see exactly where I was going. Broad daylight, full moon, low tide. Remember to look up sometimes.”

They took Cassie to El Capitan State Beach for the summers she spent there, and to Malibu, because who wouldn’t want to be there for eternity?

They scattered her near the H in the Hollywood Sign, then headed to Griffith’s Observatory where Cassie went to a junior astronomy camp. Some nights in the summer when she was sick, Scott would find her out on the chaise in the yard with the blue and green blanket over her thin legs, lying back and staring at the stars.

Anna sat with him on a bench on the walkway to the Observatory and watched the sun go down and the stars peek out. Los Angeles glittered below, and they scattered Cassie near the bust of James Dean, below Venus in the evening sky.

The Lily Pond at Balboa Park was last on the list and was crowded with visitors.

“Should I pretend I am looking at the fish?” He asked as they sat on one of the cadre of benches on either side of the pond, meant for reflecting on something other than how to sneak ashes into the water.

“What if you poured her into your hand, so it doesn’t look like you are emptying the bag? Then just lightly touch the water and she’ll be gone.” Anna made a graceful pass in the air with her hand as example.

Scott knit his eyebrows at the last word.

“Sorry, I meant she would float into the water off your hand. I’m sure lots of people touch the water.”

“Like washing my hands of her.” It was logical. He hated it. He let her float as the Carillion chimed noon.

The house felt the same when he returned. Empty, sad, and an even smaller remainder of Cassie still sat on the sideboard in the formal dining room, in case he needed her. He’d left the bag of ashes out of the wood box, thinking he’d know what to do by the time he returned.

He put the bag in her grey sweater pocket, and she hung in the closet for a day or two until he bumped into her getting his tie from the rack and felt disrespectful, liked he’d bumped into her in the subway. Scott pulled her out of the pocket and walked around the house with her, asking her where the last of her would like to be.

The scattering hadn’t brought him peace. It was so useless. All of it. Her dying, her ashes going to places that were beautiful and fitting as a final resting place, but she would prefer being useful.

The smell of gardenias came in through the French door in the bedroom when he found himself back where he started. He could see the glossy green leaves and white flowers that always surprised him with their softness, because they looked like porcelain, and he expected them to be hard and cold.

He stepped onto the brick patio and reached to touch the blossoms, petted the velvet petals like he stroked Cassie’s hair on the night of her diagnosis. There were only two gardenias now where there had been three, the one nearest the door a casualty of moving day when the burly men crushed the delicate branches as they brought the hospital bed through the wide open white doors.

Cassie would like a new gardenia here.

He dug the hole like the picture on the tag from the nursery, tested the pH to make sure it was less than 7.0, and amended the soil with peat moss and Cassie. He placed the plant in the hole, careful to leave the roots undisturbed, and watered it, letting it drink until the soil was moist and dark brown.

He stood up, back aching from bending over and lifting the heavy plant. Water from the hose washed the loose dirt from his hands and he set all the tools back in their spots before going into the bedroom.

He lay down on the bed, the smell of gardenias drifting into his sleep, Cassie resting and useful not so very far away.

---

Peace,

Jo