* * *
Time passed, and though we no longer talked about Marilyn every day I couldn’t stop thinking about her. When I went to the beach, I’d drive by the house of her MNB, and I’d remember that last weekend and wonder what she’d been doing.
Sometimes my route would take me by Marilyn’s house. This was always startling. Her small white car was still in the driveway, parked where it always had been, and it was impossible not to imagine that Marilyn herself was inside the house, perched on one of the couches across from the large coffee table where she did her work on her laptop while fielding calls.
And sometimes I’d pretend that Marilyn was still here. I’d tell myself that she went away for a couple of months and she’ll be back soon and I’d think about all the things I’d tell her. Like the news that MNB and I are still together. And that Tilda Tia has given up dating and is only going to concentrate on her career but still has hopes of a picket fence love someday. And mostly that Sassy bought a new house on our favorite street in the Village. It has a view, and it’s right across the water from Kitty’s house. There’s been lots of talk about paddle-board parties that we both know will never happen because Sassy hates wearing bathing suits and Kitty refuses to exercise.
And then the day came when I passed by Marilyn’s house and her car was gone.
And that, I thought sadly, was that.
Except it wasn’t.
Sassy and I had some of Marilyn’s ashes.
Marilyn’s brother had given her MNB her ashes and her MNB had given some of them to us. They were in stacked, clear plastic containers that Marilyn, an ace organizer, had given to him just before she’d died, back when she was cleaning things up to airbnb her house. “Here,” she’d said to him. “You might need these someday.”
Now the containers with the ashes were resting in a large, silver-plated urn in the front parlor of Sassy’s house. The ashes themselves were dark gray and flecked with white grit that might have been bone. Sassy had to pass by them every day.
At least once a week, she’d call me up. “We’ve got to do it,” she’d say.
And so, on what Sassy called a navy-blue day at the end of September, the kind of day on which Marilyn had hoped to get married, instead of scattering rose petals, we would scatter her ashes.
Or at least we thought we would.
Tilda Tia came and stayed with me. She said, “How are you?” And I said, “I’m doing fine,” even though Marilyn’s was the second major death, including my dad’s, that I’d had in six months.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one. Two months ago Tilda Tia had lost one of her childhood friends to cancer. She’d been there when it happened and had held her friend’s hand.
We hugged.
And that’s one of the things you learn from MAM. How to accept loss and keep going.
We walked over to Sassy’s new house, where we met up with Kitty, who had just learned she was going to become a grandmother, and Queenie, whose daughter had gone off to college.
We talked about how great it would have been if Marilyn were there with us. How she would have loved seeing all her friends together. How, partly thanks to her, we’d all ended up in the same place.
And then we walked to the end of the dock on the bay where Marilyn had first landed in the Village just three years ago.
Sassy and I each carried a container of the ashes. The idea was that we would open them and everyone would take a handful and when the ashes were scattered, we would light sparklers.
Immediately, there was a glitch. The ridges in the tops of the containers were embedded with the dust of Marilyn’s ashes and were stuck. No amount of gentle prying was going to get them loose.
For a moment we stood there, wondering what to do. This, we agreed, was very Marilyn. As Sassy said, she’d always had a stubborn side. She’d usually do the opposite of what everyone told her to do. A trait, frankly, that could be applied to all of us, in this group anyway.
“It’s a sign,” Queenie said. “She doesn’t want to go.”
And so we brought Marilyn’s ashes back into the house.
I was relieved. There was something about the ash scattering that didn’t sit right with me.
The week before, I’d run into Marilyn’s MNB on the beach. He’d just gotten the toxicology report and it turned out that Marilyn had been taking the proper medications all along.
In short, she’d done everything right, and somehow it still wasn’t enough. We’ll never understand the reason for her death.
But that wasn’t the only mystery. There was the disappearance of those bills on the day she died. Someone mailed them and it wasn’t me, because days after Marilyn’s death, I was getting angry calls from creditors over the checks I’d had to cancel.
I couldn’t help but wonder if somehow Marilyn—or her spirit anyway—was involved.