“Can’t you stay? There are so many parts of the Tunnels left to map. And I don’t know what Aunt Mercy and Aunt Grace are going to do without you.”
“That’s why I wanted ta talk ta you. It’s important, so you pay attention, ya hear?”
“I’m listening.” I knew there was something she needed to tell me, something none of the others could know.
Aunt Prue leaned in on her IV and whispered. “You gotta stop ’em.”
“Stop who?” The hair on the back of my neck was standing up.
Another whisper. “I know exactly what they’re fixin’ ta do, which is invite half a the town ta my party.”
Her “party.” She’d mentioned it before. “You mean your funeral?”
She nodded. “Been plannin’ it since I was fifty-two, and I want it ta go just the way I want. Good china and linens, the good punch bowl, and Sissy Honeycutt singin’ ‘Amazin’ Grace.’ I left a list a the D-tails underneath a my dresser, if it made it over ta Wate’s Landin’.”
I couldn’t believe this was the reason she’d brought me here. But then again, it was Aunt Prue. “Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s all about the guest list, Ethan.”
“I get it. You want to make sure all the right people are there.”
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “No. I want ta make sure the wrong ones aren’t. I want ta make sure certain people stay out. This isn’t a pig pick at the firehouse.”
She was serious, although I saw a sparkle in her eye that made it seem like she was about to break out into one of her infamously unharmonic fake-opera versions of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
“I want you ta slam the door before Eunice Honeycutt sets foot in the buildin’. I don’t care if Sissy’s singin’, or that woman brings the Lord Almighty on her arm. She’s not havin’ any a my punch.”
I grabbed her in a hug so big that I lifted her tiny crocheted feet right off the ground. “I’m going to miss you, Aunt Prue.”
“’Course ya are. But it’s my time, and I got things ta do and husbands ta see. Not ta mention a few Harlon Jameses. Now, would you mind gettin’ the door for an old woman? I’m not feelin’ like myself today.”
“That door?” I touched the metal vault in front of us.
“The very one.” She let go of the IV stand and nodded at me.
“Where does it go?”
She shrugged. “Can’t tell you. Just know it’s where I’m meant to go.”
“What if I’m not supposed to open it or something?”
“Ethan, are you tellin’ me you’re afraid ta open a silly little door? Turn the durned wheel already.”
I put my hands on the wheel and yanked on it as hard as I could. It didn’t move.
“You gonna make an old woman do the heavy liftin’?” Aunt Prue pushed me aside with one feeble hand and reached out to touch the door.
It sprang open beneath her hand, blasting light and wind and spraying water into the room. I could see a glimpse of blue water beyond. I offered her my arm, and she took it. As I helped her over the threshold, we stood there for a second on opposite sides of the door.
She looked over her shoulder, into the blue behind her. “Looks like this here’s my path. You want ta walk me a ways, like you promised you would?”
I froze. “I promised I’d walk you out there?”
She nodded. “Sure did. You’re the one who told me ’bout the Last Door. How else would I know ’bout it?”
“I don’t know anything about a Last Door, Aunt Prue. I’ve never been past this door.”
“Sure ya have. You’re standin’ past it this very minute.”
I looked out, and there I was—the other me. Hazy and gray, flickering like a shadow.
It was the me from the lens of the old video camera.
The me from the dream.
My Fractured Soul.
He started walking toward the vault door. Aunt Prue waved in his direction. “You goin’ ta walk me up ta the lighthouse?”
The moment she said it, I could see the pathway of neat stone steps leading up a grassy slope to a white stone lighthouse. Square and old, one simple stone box on top of another, then a white tower that reached high into the unbroken blue of the sky. The water beyond was even bluer. The grass that moved with the wind was green and alive, and it made me long for something I had never seen.
But I guess I had seen it, because there I was coming down the stone pathway.
A sick feeling turned in my stomach, and suddenly someone twisted my arm behind me, like Link was practicing wrestling moves on me.
A voice—the loudest voice in the universe, from the strongest person I knew, thundered in my ear. “You go on ahead, Prudence. You don’t need Ethan’s help. You’ve got Twyla now, and you’ll be fine once you get up there to the lighthouse.”
Amma nodded with a smile, and suddenly Twyla was standing next to Aunt Prue—not a made-of-light-Twyla but the real one, looking the same as she did the night she died.
Aunt Prue caught my eye and blew me a kiss, taking Twyla’s arm and turning back toward the lighthouse.
I tried to see if the other half of my soul was still out there, but the vault door slammed so hard it echoed through the club behind me.
Leah spun the wheel with both hands, as hard as she could. I tried to help, but she pushed me away. Arelia was there, too, muttering something I couldn’t understand.
Amma still had me in a hold so tight that she could’ve won the state championship if we really were at a wrestling match.
Arelia opened her eyes. “Now. It has to be now.”
Everything went black.
I opened my eyes, and we were standing around Aunt Prue’s lifeless body. She was gone, but we already knew that. Before I could say or do anything, Amma had me out of the room and halfway down the hall.
“You.” She could barely speak, a bony finger pointing at me. Five minutes later, we were in my car, and she only let go of my arm so I could drive us home. It took forever to figure out a way to get back to the house. Half of the roads in town had been closed off because of the earthquake that wasn’t an earthquake.
I stared at the steering wheel and thought about the wheel on the vault door. “What was that? The Last Door?”
Amma turned and slapped me in the face. She’d never laid a hand on me, not in her entire life or mine.
“Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
12.19
Cream of Grief
The cream-colored paper was thick and folded eight times, with a purple satin ribbon tied around it. I found it in the bottom drawer of the dresser, just like Aunt Prue said I would. I read it to the Sisters, who argued about it with Thelma until Amma stepped in.
“If Prudence Jane wanted the good china, we’re usin’ the good china. No sense arguin’ with the dead.” Amma folded her arms. Aunt Prue had only been gone two days. It seemed wrong to be calling her dead so soon.
“Next you’ll be tellin’ me she didn’t want fun’ral potatoes.” Aunt Mercy wadded up another handkerchief.
I checked the paper. “She does. But she doesn’t want you to let Jeanine Mayberry make them. She doesn’t want stale potato chips crumbled on the top.”
Aunt Mercy nodded as if I was reading from the Declaration of Independence. “It’s the truth. Jeanine Mayberry says they bake up better that way, but Prudence Jane always said it was on account a her bein’ so cheap.” Her chin quivered.
Aunt Mercy was a mess. She hadn’t done much of anything but wad up handkerchiefs ever since she heard that Aunt Prue had passed. Aunt Grace, on the other hand, had busied herself with writing condolence cards, letting everyone know how sorry she was that Aunt Prue was gone, even though Thelma explained that it was the other folks who were supposed to send them to her. Aunt Grace had looked at Thelma like she was crazy. “Why would they send them ta me? They’re my cards. An’ it’s my news.”
Thelma shook her head, but she didn’t say anything after that.
Whenever there was a disagreement about something, they made me read the letter again. And Aunt Prue’s letter was about as eccentric and specific as my Aunt Prue herself.
“Dear Girls,” the letter began. To each other, the Sisters were never the Sisters. They were always the Girls. “If you’re reading this, I’ve been called to my Great Reward. Even though I’ll be busy meeting my Maker, I’ll still be watching to be sure my party goes according to my specifications. And don’t think I won’t march right outta my grave and up the center aisle a the church if Eunice Honeycutt sets one foot into the building.”
Only Aunt Prue would need a bouncer for her funeral.
It went on and on from there. Aside from stipulating that all four Harlon Jameses be in attendance along with Lucille Ball, and selecting a somewhat scandalous arrangement of “Amazing Grace” and the wrong version of “Abide With Me,” the biggest surprise was the eulogy.
She wanted Amma to deliver it.
“That’s nonsense.” Amma sniffed.
“It’s what Aunt Prue wanted. Look.” I held out the paper.
Amma wouldn’t look at it. “Then she’s as big a fool as the rest a you.”
I patted her on the back. “No sense arguing with the dead, Amma.” She glared at me, and I shrugged. “At least you don’t have to rent a tuxedo.”
My dad stood up from his seat on the bottom stair, defeated. “Well, I’d better go start rounding up the bagpipes.”
In the end, the bagpipes were a gift from Macon. Once he heard about Aunt Prue’s request, he insisted on bringing them in all the way from the Highlands Elks Club in Columbia, the state capital. At least, that’s what he said. Knowing him, and the Tunnels, I was convinced they came from Scotland that same morning. They played “Amazing Grace” so beautifully when folks first arrived that nobody would walk into the church. A huge crowd formed around the front walkway and the sidewalk, until the reverend insisted they all come inside.
I stood in the doorway, watching the crowd. A hearse—a real hearse, not Lena and Macon’s—sat parked out in front of the building. Aunt Prue was being buried in the Summerville Cemetery until His Garden of Perpetual Peace reopened for business. The Sisters called it the New Cemetery, since it had only been open about seventy years.
The sight of the hearse brought back a memory, the first time I saw Lena drive through Gatlin on my way to school last year. I remembered thinking it was an omen, maybe even a bad one.
Had it been?
Looking back on everything that had happened, everything that had brought me from that hearse to this one, I still couldn’t say.
Not because of Lena. She would always be the best thing that had ever happened to me. But because things had changed.
We both had. I understood that.
But Gatlin had changed, too, and that was harder to understand.
So I stood in the doorway of the chapel, watching it happen. Letting it happen, because I didn’t have a choice. The Eighteenth Moon was two days away. If Lena and I didn’t figure out what the Lilum wanted—who the One Who Is Two actually was—there was no way to predict how much more things would change. Maybe this hearse was another omen of things to come.