Butterfly Gardens And Red Roses

“Aimee, it’s Brittney,” Mom said as she handed me the phone.

I took it from her only to chirp, “Hey What’s up?”

Mom slipped out the door, shutting it behind her because she was beginning to understand the way her new teenager was working.

I had hit thirteen that past summer, was going to be fourteen in about four or five months. I was in seventh grade.

“Where have you been?” she asked. She sounded tired. “I was trying to call you all Friday night and Saturday.”

Suddenly, I was very confused. I stared hard at the now off-white carpet, my brow creasing in bewilderment. There was a stack of papers, folders, and a binder in front of me, no more than two or three inches worth. Just the last of what needed to be put away in order for my room to be clean.

“Why?” I was kind of afraid to ask. Something about the way she was talking made me want to put the phone down and leave it.

“Ashley died Friday night, a little after midnight.”

I swear that everything stopped. I didn’t breath, there were no thoughts running through my head, no sarcastic comments from the characters I had created, not even a shiver. I don’t know what possessed me, but I know that for a minute, I was not me anymore.

“Can you hold on a minute?” I asked, too calmly at the time.

Brittney replied, “Yea, sure.”

I stood up, carrying the phone out with me, my thumb over the part that picks up noise. My bedroom door opened and I walked out, stood in the middle of the room glancing at my brothers and Dad playing with a train set.

Mom must’ve looked at me from where she was at the desk because she asked, “Aimee, what’s wrong?”

My brothers and dad looked up at me. And the weight of the situation hit me. Hard.

“She’s dead,” I cried. The tears started and wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t help it. It hurt, somehow it hurt. And it wasn’t that brief little pain I felt when my first guinea pig died one day while I was in kindergarten. This pain wasn’t something I had felt before, not to this magnitude.

I don’t remember my mother getting out of her chair. I do remember that she took the phone from me, tossed it in the wooden cradle my father made that now held blankets instead of babies. I was buried in her, sobbing and saying it over and over and over again with her asking me, “Who?”

For some reason, I don’t think Dad knew what to do. Drew, my youngest brother had no clue what was going on; Ryan… who knows?

Finally, I managed to blurt, “Ashley, She’s dead! She died Friday, and I wasn’t there.”

Why did I suddenly feel guilty?

“Shhh…” Mom started to rock me from side to side, holding me tighter than before. Dad was there now, too, petting my hair.

After I’d calmed down quite a bit, swallowed it all back and forced the tears to at least come less and my sobs to stop shaking me, I pulled away. I used the back of my hand to rub the liquid trails from my face and sniffed. Mom handed the phone back to me.

“Go talk to Brittney, ok?”

I took the phone and went back to my room, the rest all but forgotten.

Forgotten. No, I can’t forget Ashley, or Tyler, or Nate, or anyone else I knew that died in later years. None of their deaths hit me as hard as Ashley’s had though. None of them left me feeling so empty and cold, so heartless. I still cry when I think about Ashley, that day in particular. But I don’t when I think about Tyler and Nate, two guys from my class who died a few years later.

Sometimes, I think the shock hasn’t worn off yet, that the realization is waiting outside the little fence I penned myself in and everyone else out. It’s just waiting for me to let someone get too close to me like some black, empty monster patiently trying to pry its way in so it can come crashing down on me again.

Maybe that’s why I still think Tyler and Nate are right behind me in the halls, but when I turn to look, it’s only someone who sounded like them. Maybe.

My grandpa Smiley clipped out the newspaper article. It was the small piece that was placed in the obituary as a small contribution to Death’s young claim.

Five years later, when it doesn’t hurt so much anymore, Mom’s talking on her cell phone to dad. “No, I haven’t told them. I was going to wait.”

I know I’m not supposed to listen in on other’s conversations, but I can’t help myself. “Tell who what?”

Mom glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, driving the straight backcountry road to get home. “Yea… All right. See you when we get home.”

She hung up. Ryan leaned forward. And, for a long moment, we rode home in silence. Something that bugged me to no end.

“Hey, guys,” Mom said something, finally.

I looked at her.

Ryan asked, “What?”

Very quietly, as though she was trying not to be heard over the car, she said, “Mam’ma died Sunday.”

I was in shock, just like I had been with Ashley right before I completely broke down. I found the only thing my mouth could spout was, “How?”

“In her sleep. She’d been sleeping about twenty hours a day for about two weeks. She wasn’t in pain or anything. Her body just couldn’t keep up anymore.”

The rest of the car ride was pure space. That was probably the first time in my life I could sit in silence and not think anything of the lack of noise.

When we got home, I went to my room, acting like typical hermit me. The first thing I grabbed was a soft, plush, white teddy bear with a little plaid bow around its neck. It was going to be Mam’ma’s Christmas present, the one thing she could remember me by when she went back to Arizona. I held on to it, no tears, no pain, no nothing. There was just that empty feeling again.

I stayed like that, hugging the white fluff tight to me for no apparent reason. After a while, I put it back up on the shelf next to my little treasure box of all the keepsakes I’ve kept over the years. And there it stayed until Christmas before it was given to someone else because I couldn’t open my closet anymore and see my broken promise on the shelf.

I ended up demanding to go to the funeral. I wanted to make sure all of it was true, everything. I had never been allowed to go to Ashley, Tyler, or Nate’s funerals.

In a way, I’m glad my parents had never let me go.

No one laughed at the funeral except Grace, a barely walking one year old who I babysat on occasion. I played with her, watched people I was related to but didn’t remember or know come in and look in the casket. A few sobbed pitifully. No one led them away like you see on TV. They did that themselves.

“It doesn’t look like her. They did her hair all wrong.” My step-grandmother was complaining about how they had made Mam’ma look. “Her hair’s too short. And it was never styled like that. She didn’t style it…”

She continued. I blocked out the conversation, focusing completely on the little blonde girl grabbing onto the chairs to keep herself on her feet.

I smiled a little at her when she looked back at me, grinning. She didn’t understand. She wouldn’t for a long time, and I hoped at that moment, she never would.

The little speeches started. I sat back in one corner of the room on a love-seat, curled up. I remember my grandpa Smiley, one of Mam’ma’s sons, going up to the podium with that little limp from when he broke his hip. He said a few words that I all but tuned out. For some reason, I couldn’t hear what they were saying even though I was listening.

The pastor signaled the family out of their chairs. We all stood, filing in one long, depressing line until I wasn’t but a few feet from her.

She didn’t look like my Mam’ma. Grandma Dottie was right, her hair wasn’t right. She didn’t look like my Mam’ma.

It’s not her. That’s not my Mam’ma, I kept repeating that phrase over and over in my head. That’s not my Mam’ma.

I was standing over her, Dad’s hand on my shoulder. And without thinking, I grabbed her hand, the little kid in me wanting her to squeeze it reassuringly like she always did when I saw her.

But she didn’t. And I kept silently asking her to squeeze my hand.

That black monster, that horrid and empty thing, crashed into me. It wrapped itself around my chest and throat, squeezing hard. Hot, wet tears rolled down my cheeks as I clamped my jaw. I wouldn’t cry.

After that part was over, my father having to usher me away from her, I crawled into the back of Mom’s car and stayed there until my family climbed in. I wiped away the tears that had been streaming down my face.

All I could think about at that moment in time was how I hadn’t kept my promise to her. I promised, and Dad did too, that I would see her before she went home. She had wanted to see me so badly, but I was sick at the time. It’s easy to guess that I never saw her before she left. Some family members I don’t know very well came and took her a day early in the morning when I was at school.

I still feel guilty about it even though I know it wasn’t my fault…

The procession led to the actual funeral where she was buried next to her parents. Flowers covered the casket, and as a memento, I took three roses. One for each of her great-grandkids. One for Drew, one for Ryan, and one for me. My brothers didn’t keep theirs, but I hung mine from a shelf and let it dry out. It now sits in a small vase my Mom’s grandmother gave to me as a memento. I’d hide them both to keep them safe, but I don’t want to forget.

I feel that if I forget, then so will everyone else, if they haven’t already. And in my mind, being forgotten is worse than being dead. Being forgotten is like saying you never existed just because there is nothing to mark your long and brief passage in life.

I know that no one wants to be forgotten. I know that death marks the end of a life and the start of a downward spiral of long gone promises, broken feelings, and unspoken words.

There’s a butterfly garden behind my old junior high school. It was created my last year there as a memento for a friend who left an undying mark on people.

There’s a box of things I’ll take out of my closet every once and again just to pick through old memories. So I won’t forget.

There’s a dried and dead red rose on my shelf, meaningless to those who don’t know how it got there. Meaningless to those who don’t know for what a red rose stands.

“Remember…”