"Ajar," Theo said. "Yes. That is more than this family gave his mother, and he knows it, and he did it anyway." He rose, and put the chairs back where they belonged, an old man's tidiness that was also a prayer. "Come Friday, Julian. Stand in the back. And go somewhere first, and pick something."
Chapter 18: Bringing Miriam Home
They buried Miriam Ashford on a Friday morning in late October, in the family plot on the hill at Mount Auburn, where her parents lay under a stone that had carried two names and a space no one had ever explained to the children now standing in front of it. The space, Jonah understood when Theo told him, had not been intended for her. It had simply happened — a stonecutter's margin, a width of granite left over — and for twenty years Theo had visited his parents and looked at that unlettered width and hated it without knowing why. "I know why now," he said, on the drive out, with Jonah's hand in his on the seat between them. "It was holding her place. This family kept one thing for her by accident. It's the only thing we kept. It'll do."
The plot stood under an old copper beech whose leaves had turned the color of weak tea and old coins. Below the hill, the Charles moved the way it had moved when Miriam was a girl riding her bicycle too fast down Brattle Street with her hair coming loose — Ada's detail, delivered the night before over dishes, with her hands in the water and her eyes on the middle distance. Ada had known her as a girl in and out of the old kitchen. Dana knew her at the end. Between the two women, Jonah had been given almost a whole mother back, in stories, in the weeks before this morning; and he carried their two versions carefully, like cups filled to the brim.
The urn was plain, because Theo had stood in the city facility's office and understood that his sister, who had cleaned other people's hotel rooms for a wage and raised a son on it, would have been embarrassed by mahogany. It was ceramic, gray as harbor water. He carried it up the hill himself. He was sixty-four and the slope was not kind, and when Marcus Webb — there in a dark suit, standing at the exact distance of a man who had been hired to find facts and had stayed to witness them — moved as if to offer an arm, Theo shook his head once. Eleanor walked on his other side with her hand resting, not holding, at his back, the way you accompany a man carrying something that is both light and the heaviest thing in the world.
The gathering was small, and Jonah had helped choose it, a fact he mentioned to Dana when she arrived with her arms full of lilies from the shelter's garden beds — the ones Miriam herself had planted along the Harrison Avenue fence, in a spring when planting anything had been an act of defiance.
"She'd say these are showing off," Dana said, kneeling to arrange them. "She'd say it and then she'd cry about them. She cried about tomatoes once. Said anything that comes back after winter deserves a minute."
Ada stood with her rosary in her coat pocket and her hand on it. Colleagues from the Foundation did not come; that had been Theo's one instruction to the world, and for once the world had complied. Harold Voss was not there either, being beyond invitation and beneath condemnation in his narrow room outside the city, though Theo had sent word through the care home, because the family had decided — Eleanor's phrase — that the record should be complete even for him.
At the very back, apart, stood Julian. He held no shop flowers. He held a fistful of late asters and one branch of bittersweet, picked that morning from the fence behind his own building, the berries orange as traffic lights, and his hands were scratched from the brambles along the alley wall. Jonah saw him. He did not wave. He nodded, once, the nod of a person confirming a kept arrangement, and Julian nodded back, and that was all, and it was enough to be getting on with.
The minister from Eleanor's church kept it short, at Theo's request, and read no verse about dust. Theo had asked for that. "She was not dust to us for one day of her life," he had said, "and I won't have her introduced as it now." Instead the minister read the Twenty-third Psalm, because Miriam had underlined it in a Bible Dana had kept, in pencil, at nineteen, in a hand that still believed underlining things made them true. Then there was quiet, and the beech leaves came down one at a time like something being counted out, and Theo stepped forward and spoke to his sister's name on no stone yet — the new stone would take the winter to cut — and what he said was not an apology and not a speech. "You wrote to us," he said. "That is now on the record of this family, Miriam. You wrote, and you were owed an answer, and the answer is forty years late and it is yes. Yes, come home. Yes, we kept — " his voice broke — "we kept a place badly, in the wrong ways, but it is yours. Rest beside them. They are being told about you. If there is any errand left in the universe, that one is mine."
Then it was Jonah's turn, and the adults rearranged themselves around the small, unbearable fact of him: ten years old, in a coat that Eleanor had bought and he had chosen, the cord of the ring at his collar, and in his hands a letter in a plastic sleeve, to keep the rain of some future day off it.
It was the last of Miriam's unsent letters, the one from Dana's box marked in her hand: For Jonah, when he's grown. Theo had judged — and Dana, consulted, had agreed with tears standing in her eyes — that grown was not an age but an errand, and the boy had run the errand. He would read the first page aloud, as much as he wanted, and keep the rest for his life.
He unfolded it with a care that made Ada turn her face away.
"'My dearest boy,'" he read. "'If you are reading this, then something I planned for did not happen, and I want you to know first that it is not because I didn't fight to stay. I fought. Remember the soup nights and the library and the window plant — that was me fighting, with everything I had.'" His voice held. "'Second: I never once wished you were anyone else, or anywhere else. You were not the hard part of my life, Jonah. You were the reason the hard parts were just parts.'"
He stopped. The wind moved in the beech. Dana made a sound she did not apologize for.
"'Third: if you ever find them — my family — don't go in angry for me. I spent my anger. It bought nothing. Go in the way I taught you to go into the shelter office when we needed something: chin up, papers ready, and assume they're people until they prove it.'" Jonah laughed, one wet syllable, shocked out of him. "'And if they're kind, let them be kind. Don't protect me from kindness that came late. Late isn't nothing. Late is just late.'" He lowered the letter. "'Love, Mom. P.S. The ring was your great-grandmother's silver before it was mine. It has always pointed home. So have you.'"
Jonah folded the letter along its original folds — he had been practicing on a photocopy all week so as not to wear the paper — and put it back in its sleeve, and laid his palm flat on the urn for a long moment while the earth was still open to receive it.
"Mom," he said, not for the gathering, in the voice he used in his room at night, which the house had learned to pretend not to hear. "This is them. They're okay. You can stop holding the door from your side now. I got in."
They lowered his mother into the ground beside the parents who had closed that door first, in a century that was ending, under leaves that kept arriving one at a time. Jonah dropped the first handful of earth himself, and then, remembering the arrangement, looked back through the small crowd to the far edge of it, where Julian stood with his picked asters, and jerked his chin — go on — and Julian came forward, alone among that family, and laid the wild branch on the earth of the woman who had knocked, and stepped back to his distance with his scratched hands clasped, weeping without a sound, not forgiven and not refused, only — at last — answered.
Chapter 19: The First Birthday Party