Page 40 of Life Out of Order

Alba: Tomorrow is Lucinda’s court date, the long-awaited day when Celia can finally adopt her. But this afternoon Celia had an emergency foster placement situation, and the Gomolinskis, Mama and my present-day self are busy cooking and decorating at Celia and Lucinda’s house for the party, so even though in my present I am supposed to be playing Scrabble with Zach and Rosa on a cold, rainy evening in May 2044, I am luckily here instead, accompanying Lucinda as she runs a few last-minute errands. I’m standing in a dry cleaner’s shop in Edgewater, waiting for Lucinda to emerge from behind the changing room curtain wearing the dress she’s chosen for her party tomorrow night. She’s always been tall for her age, but recently she had another growth spurt and she’s suddenly 5'10" and a little more filled-out around the hips, so the dress had to be adjusted. Watching Lucinda try on the altered dress for the seamstress, I think about her future 2044 self and am relieved to see that she’s still a child, unfinished, a girl. She’s in an oasis of time between her complicated, tragic childhood and her transformative, radical future.

It’s weird that Celia’s not here, but it must be weirder for Lucinda that her birth mother is not the one watching her twirl in a magenta dress with a poufy tulle skirt that seems to levitate around her like a cloud. I feel like a poor substitute. Lucinda smiles at herself in the full-length mirror, catches my gaze and falters. “What’s wrong, Alba?”

“Not a thing, Lucinda. I was just thinking, you’re growing up fast.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess? You looked so sad.”

“Just nostalgic, that’s all.”

Lucinda doesn’t reply. She changes into her street clothes. We pay the seamstress. Lucinda drapes the plastic-wrapped dress carefully over her arm and we exit the shop. Then we strip off our face masks and stand on the sidewalk wondering what to do next. “If we go back to my house they’ll just put us to work,” Lucinda points out, correctly. “Let’s go to Rosehill.”

It’s a warm sunny day; you can tell autumn is coming by the slanted light, the hazy, heavy air; there’s no breeze at all. We buy ice cream cones at the shop on the corner—butter pecan for Lucinda, mint chocolate chip for me—and we walk west on Bryn Mawr Avenue, chatting about tomorrow, licking our rapidly melting ice cream. Lucinda is nervous about going to court tomorrow. “Court is just a place where I don’t have much say in my own life,” she says.

“Tomorrow will be different. Once Celia has adopted you, you know where you belong.”

“I wonder if I’ll feel different?” Lucinda says. “Maybe it’s like getting married? Suddenly you have a new family?”

“Maybe. But, Lucinda, you’ve been Celia’s daughter for years now, this just makes it official.”

“Celia asked if I wanted to change my last name to hers. I hope she doesn’t mind too much that I’m keeping my name?”

“She understands. Celia was a foster kid herself.”

“Yeah. But she aged out of the system. She doesn’t have any other family.”

“She has us. Celia says what’s on her mind. If she was bothered, she’d tell you. I think she wanted you to know that you could take her name if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want her to think I don’t want to be an Attley.” Lucinda takes the last bite of her ice cream cone, wipes her fingers fastidiously on a napkin and tucks it into her purse. She’s always been very tidy. “I mean, you know, it’s just that I hardly have anything left of my parents, except my name.”

“Lucinda Flowers is a beautiful name. I can’t imagine calling you anything else.” We turn onto Hermitage Avenue, into the welcome shade of old trees. The sun is in our eyes. I’m sweating through my sundress; Lucinda seems unbothered by the heat, though she shifts the dress from one arm to the other, peeling the thin plastic wrapping off her forearm with distaste. Just as I am feeling fed up with the humidity, the entrance appears at the end of the street. We cross Ravenswood and pass through the imposing English Gothic–style gate into Rosehill Cemetery.

Lucinda and I used to come here often, when she first came to live with Celia. Once she started high school our visits became more sporadic. But it seems fitting that we should visit today. Her parents are buried in an open area just north of the Firefighters Memorial. Rosehill is huge, 350 acres, and whenever we’re here in the afternoon I’m always anxious about getting lost and locked in. Fortunately, the Flowers family plot is not too far from the entrance. Soon we are standing at the flat, pink granite double-grave marker:

FLOWERS

Jasmine

3-8-1976—2-10-2014

Malcolm

11-2-1976—2-10-2014

I once managed to time travel to Lucinda’s parents, back in 2013, about six months before they died. Lucinda wanted me to try to warn them, and I did, though of course it did no good. They were killed in a liquor store robbery gone wrong; they’d stopped on the way to a dinner party to buy a bottle of wine. Lucinda went to live with her grandmother, Jasmine’s mother, but a year later there was a fire, probably from a gas leak. Her grandmother and both of her uncles died. Lucinda was at her first sleepover, at a classmate’s house. No one on her father’s side of the family could take Lucinda, and so she fell into the foster care system, into Celia’s care. I close my eyes and remember Lucinda’s parents—gentle, tired people who obviously thought I was a lunatic but were too polite to shut me down. Your daughter’s life turned out fine. She’s happy. She loves you. What else could I have said? We love her very much, they told me, bewildered by my urgency. At least I was able to carry that message back to Lucinda.

“Tell me again what they said?”

“‘We love her very much.’”

Lucinda nods. “Is it weird that I don’t remember them very well? I think all my real memories have been replaced by phone videos.”

“Seven is pretty young. I don’t remember my dad very well from regular life before he died. I remember him from later, when we time traveled to each other. What’s your favorite memory of your parents?”

“We were driving home from somewhere, at night. I was in the back seat. My dad was driving. They were holding hands and singing together.”

“What were they singing?”

“I couldn’t remember for the longest time, and then I heard the tune in a grocery store. It turned out to be ‘You’re All I Need to Get By.’ ” Lucinda starts to sing it for me. She has a nice voice, not powerful, but clear. She sings a verse, then stops and fans herself with her hand. I realize that she’s trying not to cry. I look away, at all the neat gravestones, all lined up in rows and clusters, so many of them. Finally Lucinda says, “It’s too hot here in the sun. Maybe we should plant a little tree over them?”