Work Text:
Mom is holding her hand. The whole room is watching her.
It’s felt like that in every room I’ve ever been in with her.
When I was really little, she would let me tug on her long red hair and laugh when Mom or Aunt Julia or Aunt Stella tried to pull my hands away. She always seemed so at ease. She’d toss me in the air and place me in her lap, in between her and her guitar, while she strummed. She’d sing me songs that she and Grandpa had written. Except sometimes I would ask for a new song and she would instead explain how she couldn’t get a verse quite right and so she couldn’t play it for me just yet. I knew what a bridge was before I learned how to tie my shoes, if only because I knew Grandma didn’t sing me songs that didn’t have a good bridge.
She didn’t mind my cousins running all around her and Grandpa’s house, or me toddling after them. She did, however, seem to mind when Grandpa would tell her that we all got our inability to sit still from her. She’d tilt her head or roll her eyes and Grandpa would grin and I could see, even then, how much he adored her. I liked that he said we got our restlessness from her because I knew if it was from her, it was good. At Grandma and Grandpa’s house, I felt like everything about me was good.
The days were so long there in the summer. The sun wouldn’t start to set until bedtime and I begged every night to stay up a little later, just until my cool older cousins went to bed. And then all of us would beg together for a little bit longer.
Sometimes after Mom finally tucked me in and turned the lights off, when I could still hear the adults put a record on and laugh over a card game, I would venture out of my room just to listen from upstairs. Not eavesdropping, really, just wanting to be around. Once, Grandma found me asleep on the floor right outside my bedroom door. She tucked me back in and softly brushed the hair from my forehead and told me that I had to go to sleep so I could dream some great dreams and tell her all about them the next morning.
Grandma was always asking us about our dreams, always telling us she believed in us, always looking at us like we were miraculous.
Sofia wanted to be a journalist, Isabela wanted to be an architect, Violet wanted to be a professional horseback rider, Henry wanted to be an author, my little brother Liam wanted to be a mailman, and I wanted to be Sofia or Isabela or Violet or Henry. Grandma said that all of our dreams sounded wonderful and that she was sure we were capable. She waited until later, when it was just me and her in the kitchen, to tell me, “I don’t want you to be one of your cousins, Lena, I want you to be you.”
When I was seven, she let me dig through her closet for the first time. I touched everything, because all of her clothes had the same essence that she herself does, this thing that keeps every eye in the room on her. I fell in love with an auburn coat with fluffy cuffs and she helped me slip it on. It felt heavy and it swallowed me up, but Grandma said it looked great on me. Grandpa said I looked just like her when I wore it. Mom didn’t get Grandma’s red hair, but I did, and nothing made me happier than hearing Grandpa say I looked like the woman he clearly thought was the most beautiful person to ever live.
As I got older, people would tell me that I looked like her – people that, I was pretty sure, had never even met her. I don’t really remember exactly when I realized it, but I started to understand that it didn’t just feel like everyone in every room was watching her. Everyone really was.
Grandma’s red hair got lighter and Sofia started bringing her boyfriend to our family weeks and we had to stop running around the house for a whole week because Liam knocked over one of Grandma and Grandpa’s Grammys and it shattered. Neither of them seemed to care, but Mom was mortified. My cousins didn’t really run around the house anymore anyway and I didn’t really mind. It was still Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Mom and her sisters were still all there and everyone still laughed all through dinner and my cousins and I still wrote songs on guitars that we didn’t know had been played in arenas halfway around the world. I still woke up at 6 o’clock each morning because I couldn’t wait to tell Grandma about my dreams. Everyone was still there, for a full week, every summer. Being there with my family felt so right, it felt important.
I always cried when we had to go home, not because home was bad but because Grandma and Grandpa’s was magical. Grandpa always looked like I was breaking his heart by crying, which only made my tears come harder. But Grandma would wrap me in her arms and tell me, “You can’t come back if you never go home, darling girl. Don’t you want to come back?” I would pout that I just wanted to stay and she would tell me, “Lena, I think seeing you again is the best feeling in the world.” She was right, of course. I loved coming back. I would come back a little bit taller, knowing myself a little bit better, with more questions to ask and more appreciation for the time I got to spend with them. And they were always there to come back to.
Later I began to realize that not everyone heard their grandparents’ voices on the radio. I asked her about it, in bed one weekend when she stayed with us while Mom and Dad were away.
“I don’t think I like that everyone knows you. I want you to be just ours,” I had told her.
“Oh, darling, I am. I’m yours,” she assured me, “Lots of people know the songs we put out. But who gets to sit on my lap while I work out a bridge? Who knows every song I’ve ever written?”
When I didn’t answer immediately, she nudged me gently, “Who does, huh?”
“I do,” I smiled shyly. And just like that, she had made me feel like the only girl in the world again. I had her auburn coat and Aunt Julia’s girls had some of her jewelry and all six of us kids had her whole heart.
Grandma kept her hair long but didn’t try to prevent the white that came on. She’s one of those women who can pull it off. Of course she is. Our week-long trips started to get a little shorter, because some of us had sports or dance or camp or piano. I grew into her coat a little bit more. We talked more, not just about my life but about hers. I learned that Grandma’s parents never really spent time with her. I realized that the way she made us feel so special wasn’t learned or taught or inherited, but this innate thing that came from her and only her. She must have just been born with this glowing light that poured out of her. I learned that she met Grandpa when a man named Teddy brought her in to sing with his band and I learned that something happened to break the band up and she went a very long time without seeing Grandpa again. I learned that in all that time, Aunt Julia was growing up and Aunt Stella was born and sometimes Grandma would see Grandpa at a wedding or a funeral or an award show but they could never really spend very much time together. I learned that the whole time, all along, Grandma loved him.
“Did Grandpa love you that whole time, too?” I asked her. I remember the way Grandma’s eyes glistened when she nodded, “He did.”
I learned that Aunt Julia was the one who gave Grandma’s phone number to Grandpa and that Grandpa called and they made a date, but then Grandpa showed up at her front door four days early. I started to understand why Grandma believed so deeply in the beauty of coming back.
When I was fourteen, the whole family, including Sofia’s husband, went with Grandma to the Kennedy Center to watch her be awarded for a lifetime achievement in performing arts. She fought Grandpa about using the cane that he seemed to think she needed, teasing him that he just wanted her to match him. He relented and later that day I watched him beam at her on stage. I noticed for the first time that their voices sounded like they were made for each other and I wondered for the first time if there was a voice out there made for mine. I thought about how many people loved my Grandma and I didn’t feel jealous anymore, I felt lucky. Lucky that out of all the people who loved her, I was one of the few who got to really know her. I was wearing a necklace of hers and I knew every song she’d ever written. And if everybody at the Kennedy Center knew all of those songs, I was sure they would find a way to give her twenty more lifetime achievement awards.
When I was sixteen, I came home from school and Mom’s eyes were red and raw and I knew by the way she hesitated to speak that it was Grandma. A stroke. I don’t remember feeling scared. I was old enough to understand that I probably should be scared, but Grandma was not fragile. She was 86, but she was also too magnetic and lively and gracious and all-encompassing to let a stroke take her.
When Grandma woke up, like I knew she would, she wrapped her arms around me and whispered into my hair, “I’m not going anywhere, darling girl.” I nodded, I knew that.
Grandpa and Grandma both thought I was asleep in the chair across the hospital room that night. All those years later, I still wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, I was just tired and I didn’t want to leave Grandma and I figured I could close my eyes right there. I was almost sleeping when I heard Grandpa remind her that this was the third time he’d almost lost her. They didn’t talk a lot about it, but I knew that Grandma had almost died all the way back in the 70s when she and Grandpa were touring. Then again when Mom was born, it was rough on Grandma and for a little while they thought she wouldn’t make it. Grandpa’s voice was so unsteady, so scared when he told her that he had mourned her three times now and that he couldn’t bear to do it a fourth time. His voice was pleading when he asked, “Let me go first, Dais, ok?”
I realized that day that my magical, legendary grandparents, who belonged to the whole world but really belonged just to me and my family, were not invincible. They would have to leave one day.
Still, I didn’t think it would be so soon.
I didn’t think Grandpa would slip away in his sleep just before my eighteenth birthday. I didn’t think I would see my Aunt Julia sob at the wake or that I would find mine and my cousins’ own stony faces on the cover of tabloids. I didn’t think I would ever have to hear morning show hosts who were reminded of his existence by his absence dissect his and Grandma’s relationship like it wasn’t the greatest love I’ve ever witnessed. I didn’t think a news chyron could ever make me feel nauseous, but something about the words “Billy Dunne Dead At 91”, so cold and crass and violent, made me want to vomit. I had to tell Mom to turn that shit off and I had to hold her while she cried over her father. She was so young still.
We still went to Grandma’s this past summer. Everyone managed to stay for a full week, just like when we were little. Liam missed a soccer tournament and Violet skipped a college reunion and Isabela flew in from a job site in Japan. The magic was still there, just a little bit duller. Grandma was still magnetic, but there was a little less life in her. The part of her that was him was in the ground.
The night before we left, I asked Grandma if she could sing me something and she told me quietly that she hadn’t written anything. She admitted, “I don’t have much left to say, darling,” and it knew it then. I could see it in her eyes.
Can see it in her eyes now.
She kept her promise, she let him go first. But she never promised not to follow soon after him.
Most couples paid some kind of dues to the universe in years apart at the end. But Grandma and Grandpa weren’t like most couples. They have already served their time, they have already spent decades separated. Some people still owe the universe all the things they’ve left unsaid. But Grandma isn’t like that. She spoke when she had something to say and loved when she had someone to love. Not one of us in this room would ever doubt how deeply she cares about us. Grandma has given and given, paid her dues to the universe and made her family feel divine. She has no debts.
Mom is holding one hand, Aunt Stella is holding the other, and Aunt Julia is perched on the bed clutching Mom’s free hand. It’s too quiet. It’s all these people who laugh all the way through dinner and there is no good reason to be quiet now.
“I think we should sing,” I say.
Mom nods softly and Aunt Stella turns to Grandma and asks, “Any requests, Mom?”
Grandma has written a million songs and has loved a million more. Songs for me and my brother and my cousins, songs for Mom and her sisters, songs for friends and loved ones and people out there who don’t have anyone to write them a song. And then, of course, songs and songs and songs for Grandpa. Songs they wrote together in the band before almost anyone in this room was born. Songs they wrote while they were apart. That one song Grandma told me about, that they’d written together when they were reunited one weekend in the 80s. Songs they wrote after they came back to each other. Songs that Grandpa thought had too many metaphors and songs that Grandma thought were devoid of imagery. There are a million songs to sing. I don’t know how Grandma could possibly choose, but she doesn’t take long to think before she makes her request.
Her voice is scratchy, breathless when she speaks, “Look At Us,” she inhales, struggling to finish, “Now.”
I know it, of course. It’s from their first album. I don’t get it, though. It’s not what I would’ve picked. But Mom and her sisters all seem jolted by it, like there’s more to that song than I understand. I want to ask her about it and I realize I can’t. I can’t ask her. I know every song that she’s ever written but it’s not enough. I need her for longer, I’m still realizing things I need to ask her. Why this song? What does this line mean? No, what does this line really mean? What do my dreams mean? How do I make my dreams real? How can I keep making you proud? How can I be me, like you told me to all those years ago? How should I wear that auburn coat and how do I style my red hair and how can I know when to wait for someone I love? How do I find someone who makes me feel as special as you and Grandpa do? As you and Grandpa did. It’s now that I want to collapse into tears, but Mom and her sisters and my cousins are singing already. Liam slips his hand into mine and squeezes.
Grandma closes her eyes. She looks peaceful. Beautiful.
And somewhere among all of our shaky voices, she leaves.
Mom and her sisters cling to each other and I think about every other time Grandma and I have left each other. How she assured me that even though I hated leaving, I would love coming back. I think about how Grandpa and I would both cry. Now, she is leaving me, but she is coming back to him.
I feel hollow.
But oh, how she must love seeing him again.