Things Left Unnamed

Mara found the town as if someone had left it sitting on a window ledge and dusted off the corners while she was gone. The road from the highway narrowed, then turned to the old two-lane that stitched the houses together like stitched ribs. Salt air pressed at the car windows. The houses leaned toward the sea and toward one another in that particular way small towns do, as if proximity were a kind of protection. She had not been back in ten years, not since she left for a job whose busier streets and anonymous file rooms were supposed to swallow memory whole. Grief had pulled her back: a phone call, a sudden ache in a voice she knew so well, her mother finally finished. There was a funeral to attend and a house to take apart, and part of her supposed returning was ritual—paperwork, signatures, the pragmatic economy of death.

She drove slowly past the bakery that never baked in the summer the way it used to, past a row of summer chairs folded against the porch rails, past a laundromat frozen with a dozen blinking machines. People stood in the streets as if they were statues at a parade. Faces she knew by family lines and small habits looked up and then looked away, the recognition passing like a breeze that did not settle. At the funeral home she could feel the seams of the day: floral arrangements like soft barricades, tissue boxes, white programs resting on the pews that smelled faintly of citrus and dust. She took a program and folded it in her hands while people said the right things. She learned how to be mechanical in grief; she mouthed what she remembered her mother would have liked.

The program's paper was cheap and the printing slightly off-register—a small town's modest expense for the words that held personal lives together. Mara traced the typed names with the tip of one thumbnail without studying them. Then she saw it: a line where a name should have been, a blank that stopped the rhythm of the list. She blinked and tilted the program in the shaded light. Around her, voices hummed like insects. No one seemed to notice the omission. The blank sat between birthdays and a short sentence about being "beloved" as if it had always been a line of white to be read and accepted. That blank was obscene in its neatness: not an omission by error but an assertion of absence dressed in the polite language of the printed page.

She kept the program folded and went through the motions—flowers, the coffin lid lowered with a noise like a small machine, people saying little else except "I'm sorry" and "If there's anything"—until the car's engine hummed and Jonah was leaning against the hood waiting with a thermos she had always associated with the summers of her thirteenth year. He had not changed as much as she thought he would: hair shorter, hands rougher, the same tilt of humor when life was a little cruel. He greeted her without ceremony and did not ask why she had gone away. They drove to her mother's house as the sky pulled at itself like a bruise.