“Oh, sure,” Toshio spits out. “Throw salt in the wound, make us all seem like idiots for wanting her to live. If we never gave her a chance, we’d regret it. We’d hate ourselves.”
“After a while there are no more chances,” Paul snaps. “Don’t you see that? This is the end for her, for us. We have to let her go. It’s the right thing to do, even if it hurts us.”
Toshio walks around the room, kicking the chairs. “I can’t…I can’t accept that.”
“Well you have to because we need to make this decision together. We need you to agree Toshio. You’ll resent us our whole lives if you don’t and we’re already so broken as a family, we won’t survive that.”
“Well what does Kayla think?” Toshio asks, pausing to shoot me a look. “She’s the one closest to mom. She should decide.”
The rest of my brothers’ heads swivel toward me with curious looks.
I shake my head. “No. Please don’t put this on me.”
“She’s right, she’s done enough,” Nikko says. “She stepped up when no one else would. But…still, Kayla, we need to know how you feel.”
“How I feel?” I repeat. “How do you think I feel?” I press my palm into my chest. “Sometimes I’m surprised I’m alive, that I even have a heart. The last three weeks I’ve been in a fog. I can’t see clearly no matter how I try. You know…I think about how I left it with mom and…I should have known something was wrong. Her hands, her hands were shaking you see and I should have said something, done something. I should have never gone to Scotland, I should have never left her.”
“She was shaking before that,” Toshio says quickly. “Her hands, her legs when she walked. It’s been going on for a while Kayla. I figured you saw that.”
I close my eyes trying to think but all my memories are blurred now. Now I just see her lying in the hospital bed, barely hanging onto life. “I didn’t notice,” I say quietly, feeling so much shame. And I thought we were so close.
“You can’t always notice things like that when you see the person all the time,” Paul says. “This isn’t anyone’s fault. Sometimes it’s just life and it does what it wants with you.” He sighs, running his hand through his thinning hair. “But us, the five of us here, we’re in charge of what happens next. Kayla. Please. We think it’s time to cut her off from life support. We think it’s time to say goodbye, to let go. What do you think?”
My chin trembles and I have to blink back tears. Such a terrible burden on one’s soul. I’m not God and I would only want to play God if I could bring her back.
But I know, I know in the deepest part of me, I know she’s not ever coming back.
That she’s made her choice to leave us. And that she’s waiting somewhere. On boat in the middle of a river. Us on one side, the love of her life on another.
I cry softly but I don’t wipe the tears away. I just nod. “Okay,” I choke out. “Let’s say goodbye. But…twenty-four hours from now. To give us all time alone with her. And for Toshio, just in case she comes back.” He gives me a grateful smile but I can’t return it.
I walk away from the waiting room and down the corridor to the outside. There’s fine mist in the air above the parking lot and even though it chills me, it feels better than being inside there for another minute.
I sit down on the curb and put my head in my hands and try to breathe. I can’t believe what I just said. I can’t believe what’s happening. In twenty-four hours, if she doesn’t wake up, I will cease to have a mother. I’ll never see her smiling face again, just as I’ll never see my father’s.
I will be an orphan.
An orphan.
A quiet sob rips through me and I start to shake. There’s too much loss in my life for me to even stay contained.
My hands shaking now like my mother’s once were, I take out my phone, ready to call Stephanie to tell her what’s going on.