Ann Martin - Claudia And The Sad Goodbye

It must, I decided, be awfully difficult to be Corrie Addison.

Chapter 13.

After Corrie left, I went to my room and tried to catch up on some of the things I. was behind on, and to do over some of the things I'd done poorly in the first place. For most of the afternoon I felt like Mimi was watching me, and that was a good feeling. It was as if she were sitting next to me, patiently helping me, just like she used to do. She would say, "No, look at problem again, my Claudia. Read carefully. Slow down. You can find answer." Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — she used to climb the steps to the second floor, sit in my room, and watch me work on a painting, a collage, a sculpture, a piece of jewelry. Those times she never said anything. She just watched, and occasionally nodded or smiled. Maybe right now she was thinking about the Muses. Maybe Mimi would become my own personal Muse. Whatever she was, it was nice

having her with me. I felt as if she hadn't left us after all.

Our family ate dinner together that night, and I wondered whether the Addisons were doing the same thing, or if Corrie and Sean were eating alone while their parents got. dressed to go to a fancy party or something.

When dinner was over, Dad and I cleaned up the kitchen, Mom took the newspaper into the living room, and Janine disappeared, maybe to work on her computer. But those days, who knew? When the kitchen was clean, I left it to go back to my homework. On the way to the stairs, I passed Mimi's bedroom.

The door was open. The light was on. And Janine was sitting on Mimi's bed with the contents of Mimi's jewelry box spilled in front of her.

I was shocked. None of us had been able to go into Mimi's room since the morning she'd died and I'd closed the door.

"We'll give her clothes and things away to charities — to the Salvation Army, maybe — someday soon," Mom kept saying. "Then we'll turn this into a nice guest bedroom."

But no one had opened Mimi's door. We couldn't do it.

Now Janine was in there, pawing through Mimi's most precious things.

She looked up and saw me hovering in the doorway. "Oh, Claudia," she said. "Come here. Look at this pin." She held it out to me. "I think Mimi would want you to have it since she gave me her earrings."

I glanced briefly at the pin. It was a simple circle of pearls set on a ring of gold. It was not my kind of jewelry at all. But that wasn't the point.

"What are you doing in here?" I said with a gasp.

Janine sighed. "I knew you would ask," she replied. "It's time somebody did this. Look. Here's a ring I know Mimi wanted Mom to have. And here's a bar pin. Ooh, I bet Dad could have it made into a tie tack. Wow, look at this pin… Oh, I remember this bracelet. Mimi wore it to my eighth-grade graduation."

Janine was holding up one piece of jewelry after another. The clincher was when she found a pair of gold earrings and made a grab for them. "Wow! Here are the flower earrings. I'd forgotten about these. I always wanted them, ever since I was little. They'd look great with my white sweater."

Ha! Who was Janine kidding? She doesn't

care how she looks. Even Kristy pays more" attention to what she wears than Janine does.

I exploded. "Oh, my lord, Janine. How could you do this? How could you?" I didn't give my sister a chance to answer me. I plowed right ahead. "Mimi's hardly been gone at all and here you are picking through her things like someone with a fine-tooth comb."

"You're mixing your metaphors," said Janine through clenched teeth.

I ignored her. "You're like those awful people in A Christmas Carol who wait until Mr. Scrooge is just barely dead and then they go through his room and steal all his stuff, even the rings from his bed curtains, and sell them for practically nothing," I told her.

"I do not," said Janine haughtily, "have plans to sell Mimi's things. I just thought Mimi would want us to have them. Peaches and Russ, too."

"Well, I don't think you should be doing this," I shouted. My voice was getting louder and louder, but I couldn't help it. "Why would anyone want Mimi's dumb old stuff anyway? I hate Mimi. I hate her!"

"Hey, hey, what's going on in here?" cried Mom.

She and Dad had appeared behind me in

the hallway. I'm sure, from the way I'd been screaming, that they'd expected to find me murdering Janine. As it was, they were pretty surprised just to see Mimi's room lit up, and my sister on the bed in front of the open jewelry box.

"Nothing," I replied.

Needless to say, my parents didn't believe me.

"Into the living room for a family conference," said Dad.

We gathered in the living room. As we were sitting down, I saw Janine stuff something in the pocket of her skirt.

"All right," my mother began. "Would somebody please explain what was going on?"

Janine told Mom and Dad about the jewelry box, and Mom just looked sort of sad and said that we should have had the courage to go into Mimi's room long ago. I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it again.

After a moment of silence, Dad said gently, "Claudia? Is there anything you'd like to tell us? Your mother and I did hear you say that you hate Mimi. Um …"

I could see how uncomfortable he was, so I started talking. "Well," I said, "I didn't realize it at first. I mean, I didn't realize it until right now, but I'm — I'm sort of mad at Mimi." My voice had grown so soft that my family had to lean forward to hear me.

"Why?" asked Mom.

"Because …" (I was just figuring this out), "because she left us."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that she wasn't really sick. She was getting better. She was going to come home from the hospital — and then she died. It's like she just gave up. Like she didn't even care about us enough to stay around awhile longer." There. I'd said it. Even though I hadn't known it, I'd been carrying around that big, bad secret — and I'd finally let it out. No wonder I'd felt so tired lately. Keeping bad secrets takes a lot of energy. "I tried not to be mad at Mimi," I assured my parents and sister, remembering how comforted I'd felt that afternoon, feeling that Mimi was near me. "I really tried. Plus, how could I be mad at her when she should have been mad at me?"

Everyone looked puzzled again, so I had to explain about the horrible things I'd done that I felt guilty over. "I bet she thought she was a nuisance," I said. And then with horror I

added, "Maybe that was why she wanted to die. So she wouldn't have to be a nuisance to us anymore."

"Oh, Claudia!" exclaimed my mother. She jumped up from her armchair, crossed the room, and sat down next to me on the couch, enfolding me in her arms.

"Mimi didn't want to die," spoke up Janine softly, and we all looked at her. We watched her pull the something from her pocket that she'd slipped in there earlier. It was a rumpled piece of paper.

"I think she just knew her time had come and that she was going to die," Janine went on. "She was trying to accept it and deal with it. Look at this." Janine held the paper out to my mother. "I found this at the bottom of her jewelry box."

I peered over at it, and my father came to look at it, too. Written in Mimi's funny handwriting (she'd had to switch to her left hand after her stroke), was an obituary. Mimi had been writing her own obituary — all the stuff about where she was born and who she was survived by. But the weirdest thing was the date of her death. She'd included that, too, and she'd listed it as this year.