* * *
Forrest Lawn was a half hour drive from my parents’ house, so I gave myself forty-five minutes to get there, just in case. My parents loaned me their car and waved goodbye from the driveway.
I rolled down the window before I left. “You’re sure I can’t convince you to come?”
“Miranda, go,” Dad said, too forcefully.
“We’ll see you when you get back,” Mom added.
I watched her as I reversed out of the driveway, waiting for a crack in her facade that would reveal the pain she’d covered with foundation and blush. She shooed me on as though I was dressed up for prom rather than her only brother’s funeral.
When I arrived at Forrest Lawn, the cemetery’s wrought-iron gate looked like it belonged on the east coast, harboring an exclusive country club. Despite leaving early, I was late. Twenty-two minutes late to be exact, late even by LA standards, where everything started ten minutes after it was supposed to on account of the pesky traffic.
“The Silver funeral?” I asked the guard. He pointed up Cathedral Drive toward a hill in the far corner of the property, away from the famous names that lined the more prominently located gravestones.
A crowd of forty people was gathered around the open grave. They were younger, hipper and more diverse than I would have expected, dressed in black jeans and T-shirts, tight dark jersey dresses. I tugged at the collar of my knee-length black dress, feeling acutely conservative and undeniably east coast.
I stood behind the row of people that lined the grave, searching for someone I recognized. I didn’t know whom I expected to be there. My grandparents had died before I was born or old enough to remember them. Mom and Billy didn’t have other siblings. Their uncles had died on the beaches of Normandy and in the Pacific. No cousins or extended family to speak of. No lifelong friends that had been stand-ins for family. Still, I scanned those young faces hoping for someone familiar, perhaps an old girlfriend of Billy’s that I’d forgotten about or Lee the manager or one of the pretty girls who had worked at the café in Prospero Books, now in her forties. Only a few faces looked older than my own. A plump woman in her sixties with plastic-framed glasses and a wiry man with a white goatee and bifocals. The only other person who stood out was a man in a pinstripe suit who, like me, hadn’t gotten the memo on funeral casual.
The crowd shifted as a guy in a hooded sweatshirt and faded black pants walked toward the microphone behind the grave. He swept a mop of hair away from his face, his eyes downcast as he dug into his back pocket to retrieve a sheet of notebook paper.
“This is a Dylan Thomas poem that Billy liked.” He cleared his throat before reading “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” As he read about fighting the dying light, I studied Billy’s tombstone. The dark granite listed his name, Billy Silver, his birth in 1949, his death three days ago. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the life and soul of history must remain forever unknown. Only the facts—the eternal facts, he called them—were passed down to subsequent generations. These were the external facts of Billy’s life, stripped of any details that made him someone to remember. Why wasn’t he buried with my grandparents in the Westside? Why did he choose to be buried here, between the equally anonymous gravestones of Evelyn Weston and Richard Cullen, in what appeared to be the singles’ corner of Forrest Lawn, wallflowers even in death?
Billy’s friend finished reading the Thomas poem and stared solemnly at the crowd. His gaze circled the rows of people, until it stopped on me. His eyes were clear and so unnaturally blue they caught my breath. They were stunning but cold, making me feel like even more of an interloper than I already did. What was I doing here? I’d told myself I’d come home out of duty and decency and grief. Really, it was because of the card my uncle had sent, the prospect of another one of his scavenger hunts. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t deserve to be beside these sad, beautiful people, commemorating someone I’d practically forgotten.
“You want one?” The girl beside me held a plastic cup in my direction. She was younger than I was, Latina, her sinewy arms covered in ink drawings and Spanish calligraphy. “There’s whiskey or whiskey. I’d recommend the whiskey.” I took the cup and watched as she poured liberally into it.
The older man with the goatee walked behind the microphone, holding his red solo cup toward the crowd. He shut his eyes, and began singing, “Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.”
The plump woman in her sixties arrived at the goateed man’s side, and threw a freckled arm around his shoulders, swaying his body with hers as she joined in the old hymn. When they finished singing, the man angled his glass toward the open grave, then the sky, before bringing the cup to his lips.
“‘To the nights we’ll never remember with friends we’ll never forget,’ as Billy used to say,” the girl said, angling her cup toward mine. “You from the neighborhood?”
“What neighborhood?”
“Silver Lake. I haven’t seen you around.”
“No, I’m Billy’s niece.” It sounded like a foreign word—niece—all accented and blunt. Still, I was Billy’s niece. He’d sent me a sign before he died. He’d been thinking of me. We remained something to each other. “How did you know my uncle?” I asked, emboldened by the fact that I was family and these people weren’t.
“I work at Prospero.”
“Prospero Books,” I said longingly. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said the name aloud and it still hit me with the amazement it had when I was a kid, the sorcery of Prospero, the magic of his books.
The whiskey changed the mood, and everyone started chatting energetically. Laughter carried across the open terrain. The man in the pinstripe suit announced, “If you’d like to continue the reverie, we’ll be convening at Prospero Books.”
“It was nice to meet you.” I waited for her to add, I’ll see you at the store, but she nodded and made her way toward the wild-haired man who had read the Dylan Thomas poem. She whispered to him and they turned to look at me, an inscrutable expression on their faces, or maybe it wasn’t inscrutable; maybe I didn’t want to decipher the hard truth of their stare.
I sipped my whiskey even after there was nothing left in the cup, watching everyone walk toward the mass of cars collected on the side of the road.
“You wouldn’t happen to be Miranda?” The man in the pinstripe suit approached me, his hand extended. He was older than he’d appeared at a distance, his sandy hair lightened with peroxide in place of youth. “I was hoping to see you here. I’m Elijah Greenberg, Billy’s lawyer.”
I was about to ask him how he knew I’d be here. Billy must have told him about me. He must have known about The Tempest, the quest that lay ahead.
“I’m so sorry about Billy.” He escorted me toward the two cars left on the side of the road. “Are you coming to the celebration?”
“The celebration?”
“Of Billy’s life. Strange way to put it, I know. That’s how Billy wanted it. ‘I don’t want any of this sad business,’” he said in a deep voice that I assumed was supposed to be Billy’s. “‘That shouldn’t be your last memory of me.’”
I wanted to go, but I could still hear the girl’s tone as she’d said, “Nice to meet you,” like she wouldn’t be meeting me again. I could picture her facial expression, and that of the big-haired man as they regarded me from afar, the absentee family arriving too late. I couldn’t stand the thought of their continued disapproval, no matter how much I wanted to go to Prospero Books.
“My parents are expecting me home,” I said.
“Why don’t you come by my office tomorrow?” He handed me his card. “There’s the matter of the will to discuss.”
“The will?”
“Your