Reflections in a Rearview Mirror

We were children together, though she was so much older she seemed more an honorary adult at the time. Six years is a big age difference when you’re little, almost a generation. On the first day of first grade, she was the big girl who held my hand.

Her name was Madeline. She had long, black hair and a face as serene and round as the Blessed Virgin’s. Sometimes my mind mixed her up with the Blessed Virgin, because she seemed the way a kid might be if she were a saint and no one had told her yet. She never spoke harshly, never gossiped, let me actually hold her gorgeous, new red-and-blue pom-poms on the day she made the cheerleading squad.

Strange, the images that stay with you: Her long pale arms, carrying her sophisticated high school books. The way she’d smile lopsidedly if her brothers teased her, or snap her gum and roll her eyes to seem tough. Once she went out on a weekend and her mother needed a sitter for Madeline’s baby sister. When the child fell asleep, I tiptoed to Madeline’s bedroom, a gangly sixth-grader gazing at a teenager’s amazing stuff.

It seemed enchanted, that bedroom: There were snapshots and pennants. Piles of dirty laundry. Her red, gold and white varsity jacket, heavy and smooth. I sat on her ruffled bedspread, playing her Beatles records, dreaming of big games and boyfriends. That was the first time I heard “Sgt. Pepper,” in Madeline’s room.

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There are loved ones you don’t even think about as loved ones, until you’re too far away to see them for what they were. The past recedes like scenery in a rearview mirror: You don’t catch that little warning about objects being closer than they appear.

It was a day off, late morning. We were chasing our kids through the house, messing up bedroom after bedroom, when the phone rang the week after Christmas: She was dead. It had been sudden. Her liver, maybe, though the doctors weren’t certain. She’d collapsed into a coma. She had three teenage children. She was my age, plus six.

It had been maybe 25 years since I’d seen her. The kids were squealing and pelting each other with stuffed animals. My husband was laughing and playing monster. I held the phone in a daze.

And decided, on the spot, that it hadn’t happened. Pictured that world where we’d grown up together, and her resolutely still there. Told myself that, after all, she was just a face in the rearview mirror, that the past would wait until the present was ready to draw it near.

*

Days passed. New Year’s. Relatives called and left messages. The funeral had been packed. It was standing-room only, my mother reported from the other side of the country, more people than had come to Christmas Mass.

The calls went unreturned. The new year started. Monday morning. Back to work. The thin winter sunshine revealed much to do and many deadlines. The better to stay in the present. The better not to think.

But thoughts came. One day in the kitchen, a far-off breeze evoked the cookies-and-Windex smell of her mother’s house. We channel-surfed past some TV show with a priest, and a memory flickered: Madeline’s white-lace chapel veil. That night, I dreamed of her. We were in her room, and she was in her varsity jacket, smiling that beatific smile. I started to say something, but suddenly, she was outside the nighttime window, her black hair hanging, her round face pale as moonlight, far away.

“What was your life like?” I wanted to ask her. Was it all I’d imagined? Was it as blessed as it seemed to my younger eyes? Did you know more than I did how a lifetime can fly by, and never dim the warmth of the big girl’s hand that wasn’t too big to reach out once to a frightened child?

Did you know that when someone dies, a whole world goes with them, a world whose loss will matter more than anyone would know?

My eyes pressed shut, but they couldn’t stop the awakening that finally came now, far from Madeline’s room.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.