Thelma still hadn’t quite recovered after they returned to Van Nuys. Her heart was full of a mother’s love, but her soul told her not to get her hopes up. After all, Debbie was quite ill. They had sat in the manager’s office after Debbie lost interest and wandered away, all so they could hear her medical update that said,“She’s slowly declining. We don’t know when it will be, but she may be tested for cancer soon.”Thelma discovered that dementia and cancer often went hand-in-hand, and often it was the cancer that killed someone before malnutrition or an accident did. To keep herself from crying out of grief, Thelma told herself that it was at least a blessing that she got to see her daughter before she passed.At least she got to see me again.So far, Debbie was the only one who truly saw her asThelma,a woman who had loved her children.
“Fine,” Robbie said halfway home. “It’s on the way.”
Thelma hadn’t said anything for a while, but knew what he meant. He whipped into a florist’s shop and said he’d treat Thelma to whatever flowers she wanted. While Megan waited in the car, still glued to her phone, Thelma politely asked the florist for a few white peonies, and after hearing what they were for, the florist tossed in some baby’s breath and greens. Thelma held the small bouquet in her lap when they got back in the car.
She didn’t know what she expected, since Bill had been buried at the National Cemetery in West Los Angeles, a place of honor for a war vet like him. And, indeed, he had been buried in a plot that Thelma would have never found on her own, even knowing the nameWilliam Van der Graaf.
Seeing his gravestone wasn’t what stabbed her in the throat, though—it was seeing that the spousal spot next to his was taken up by aMary Van der Graaf.
“That was our stepmom,” Robbie said as they stood out in the full sun, gazing down at the clean and plain burial spots. “I always hated that he remarried, but I also understood why he did it.”
It was one of the only personal things Robbie had said since Thelma came back into his life, and she held the bouquet of white flowers and greens to her chest as she saw Bill’s date of death in 1983 and imagined him spending those precious final years with a woman she had never met.And now I never will.A part of her desired that—to know the woman Bill had fallen in love with after losing Thelma. Was she pretty? Was she kind to him? And was he kind to her? Had Thelma’s disappearance hardened him? Or did he get on with his life the best way he knew how?
“You couldn’t have been buried here anyway,” Robbie said before going off to look at something else. “You’re legally dead, but there’s no body. Now you’re legally somebody else.”
Thank you, Robert.Thelma kept that comment to herself. There was no point antagonizing him after he had already extracted himself from her quiet moment.
The bouquet rustled against her sweater.
“Hello, Bill.” Why was it so awkward to talk to a man she had just kissed a couple of months ago? “Surprise. It’s me. Thelma.”
She inhaled a whiff of the peonies and baby’s breath. The scent almost soothed her.
“Maybe the dead have insight into these things, but the reason I went missing that night is because I somehow time-traveled into the future. Yes. Me and the Impala. Just drove right into a fog that brought us forward into 2018. Can you believe it? I had no idea that was a thing. Oh, Bill, if only you had seen what happened. I’ve just been in such a state since then. Having to shut down all of my emotions so I can…”
She sniffed.
“…So I can carry on and pretend that everything is all right. That I’ll learn everything there is to know about this modern world while I see our son old enough to be my grandfather and our daughter on her last leg because ofdementia.I’m so glad you didn’t have to see this, Bill, but I guess you also didn’t get to meet our granddaughter, Megan. She’s a very lovely young lady. You have no idea she’s Robbie’s daughter until she’s standing up to him and putting his cranky behind back into place.”
After a few minutes of silence, Thelma swallowed the lump in her throat and knelt in front of her late husband’s grave. She pulled out the cover for the flower receptacle and gently shoved the bouquet inside. Once she was done ensuring it looked nice, she remained kneeling on the grass, grateful for denim jeans.
“There’s something else. Maybe you figured it out in the wake of my disappearance, but there was someone else that I loved besides you. I’m sorry, Bill. Maybe it’s for the best I was gone. You were able to move on with someone who could be fully devoted to you.”
She knelt there for a long while, neither staring at Bill’s grave nor taking in the entire cemetery around her. Not the large American flag flapping in the Los Angeles breeze. Not the bright blue sky full of invisible angels. And not the carefully manicured grass beneath her legs.
She stared into the past. Into a decade that seemed like it should be right in her grasp, but was whisked away on the windbefore she had a chance to close her fingers on the tail-end of the 1950s.
Her childhood.
Her adolescence.
Her motherhood.
They were right on the tip of her tongue, because toher,they had happened all in the span of a few years. From watching her mother make flavorless fried dough to give to the Okies who lived in shanty towns on the edge of Californian farms, to giggling with her friends at school, to getting into trouble with Sandy, to meeting Bill and deciding to embrace the safer, easier life…
Ah, there it was. The reason she knew God had sent her this adversity.
“You thought you could avoid it. You thought you could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. You cheated on your husband. You sinned with another woman. You risked your children’s futures if anyone found out. You harlot. You devil woman. You Jezebel.”
Maybe Thelma had died that night. Gotten into a brutal car accident just outside the supermarket and died instantly.
This was purgatory. This was hell. Her just punishment, where she faced what her actions had wrought to those she loved.
Her husband was dead. Her lover was dead. Her daughter was feeble and dying. Her son?
Her son wanted nothing to do with her.
Thelma found herself gazing into the empty blue sky again. It was her only calm, Godly companion. It didn’t judge her like the trees and the grass could.
