Excerpt of The Firelight Girls by Kaya McLaren

ETHEL 2012

Ethel sat across the small table, eating cornflakes and talking to Haddie’s urn, which now sat where Haddie’s food used to. A few months ago, Ethel had found the urn to be a bit impersonal, and so she had drawn a face on it with a Sharpie marker and tied several lengths of black yarn to the lid as a makeshift wig. Recently, she had acquired a hand-knitted wine bottle cozy that she fashioned into a stocking cap for the urn. After all, it was beginning to get cold outside.

“Are you ready to go to camp today?” she asked the urn.

Adjusting to Haddie’s absence after sixty years had been unfathomable—so unfathomable, in fact, that Ethel hadn’t adjusted to it. There had been several traumatizing moments associated with the passing of Haddie: the moment Ethel realized what was happening and that she could lose her, the moment she had to tear herself away from Haddie’s pleading eyes and tight grasp to make the phone call Ethel had hoped would save Haddie’s life, then returning to Haddie’s lifeless body after the call, knowing she had abandoned her best friend and companion during her final moments of life. And then there had been that moment Ethel had picked up Haddie’s urn from the funeral parlor.

“I can do this, I can do this. She’s not in here, she’s not in here, she’s not in here, she’s not in here…,” Ethel had quietly whispered to herself as she walked into the funeral parlor. She had settled the final bill and then was handed this urn. It was much heavier than she had expected, and although that caught her off guard, it seemed appropriate that the weight of her loss should be so great.

In the days prior to picking up the urn she had imagined Haddie in heaven, but after Ethel held what remained of Haddie in her hands, the physicality of ashes began to seem more and more real than spirit. It wasn’t instant. As she walked out of the funeral parlor on that day, she was still repeating, “This isn’t her, this isn’t her, this isn’t her, this isn’t her.”

Ethel had paused on the sidewalk for a moment and looked at the world around her, this world that had never understood the love Haddie and she had shared, this world that had at times been so unkind. Was she really supposed to plan a memorial service and invite to it people like Haddie’s religious family—people who had no idea who Haddie really was? People who would have called her a sinner and banished her if they had? A feeling washed over Ethel, something she hadn’t felt with that intensity since they were young—that feeling like it was Haddie and she against the world. She gripped the urn tighter and slipped into the safety of her car, where she placed the urn gently on the passenger seat.

As she drove down the road, she found her hand resting on the urn as if it were Haddie’s leg, only significantly colder and harder. Maybe that had been the turning point in Ethel’s attachment to the urn—that moment that had simply allowed Ethel the comfort of habit.

Now, almost a year later, Ethel chatted at the urn across the table from her while she ate her cereal and made a list of things to remember. “Oh yes, good thinking,” she said to the urn when a new idea popped into her head. She continued to talk to the urn while she washed her dishes and while she packed her things, and then she tucked it into her coat and headed out the back door.

Crunchy vine maple leaves littered the brick stairs from the cabin down to the lake. As Ethel descended the steps, she dragged her old green army surplus duffel bag behind her. Everything she could possibly need fit into it. A couple of times, it picked up speed, so that she had to step aside and let it go. After it hit a tree and stopped, Ethel resumed dragging it down to the dock. On her hands and knees, she rolled the duffel bag into the canoe and set Haddie’s urn comfortably on top. Then Ethel made four more trips back up for jugs of water.

Ethel loved this charming cabin Haddie and she had shared since they had retired. It was just two miles down the south shore from Camp Firelight, which had been their home for over forty years. Although significantly quieter, it had still felt like home. Almost every morning they had kayaked past camp as if they were its guardians, which was exactly how they had felt.

On this day, since she had such a large load, Ethel took the canoe instead of her kayak. She sat on the dock and gently eased herself onto the seat. It was the first time she could remember taking the canoe out all by herself. It felt so empty without Haddie in it.

As Ethel paddled down the south shore, she wondered if anyone would show up at all. She’d always thought camp was important to many people, but maybe she was wrong. After all, had it really been that important, it wouldn’t be going defunct. Maybe she would be all by herself out there this week. Sometimes she liked having camp all to herself, but under these circumstances it would be like having a funeral for someone she cherished and having no one else come. She looked at the urn. Yes, it would be just like that. There was comfort in being in the presence of others who knew what was lost. She couldn’t bear to go through another loss without that.

When she paddled around a little point, she saw her neighbor, Walt, floating in a cove in his rowboat. It was hard to miss his red plaid wool coat and matching cap with earflaps. He was around her age and had lost his wife about a year before she had lost Haddie, and something about just seeing him was a comfort to Ethel—perhaps that he was proof a person could somehow endure this heartbreak, or perhaps that he was proof she wasn’t as alone as she felt most of the time. She saw him fishing on every calm day like this one. On most days the lake was windy chop and on those days he often didn’t bother, but these calm days were not to be taken for granted. He missed not a one.

She paddled right up to him. “Good morning, Walt. Any luck?”

He held up two perch. “Dinner is served.”

“Well done, sir,” she replied.

“You look like you and Haddie are going somewhere.” He was the only person who knew about Ethel’s attachment to the urn. The first time he saw it, she knew it needed explanation and, since he had recently gone through the same thing, she knew he would understand rather than judge her.

“We’re off to close up camp. They’re shutting it down for good.”

“No,” Walt said.

“I know. I can’t believe it either.”

“It seems like just yesterday I was twelve and getting pelted by the mud balls you Firelight Girls threw at us whenever we’d sneak out of the Boy Scouts camp and try to raid.”

Ethel smiled as she remembered making mud balls.

For a moment, both of them were silent. Then he asked, “How long will you be there?”

“A week.”