“Corbin!” I grabbed the stick and tossed it into the street. “You could get an infection.”
“And die,” Owen said. “We were at Mia Wong’s birthday party just before she died. She had a lion cake. And party hats with polka dots.”
“I ate too much cake and barfed,” Corbin said.
“That robin died.”
“So did the rat.”
“We buried them,” Owen said. “Is Mrs. Patel going to be buried?”
“Cremated.” I didn’t want to talk about any of this. And I didn’t want ice cream, either. Mostly, I wanted to throw up.
We were outside the ice cream shop, and all of a sudden I did not want to go in. Mrs. Patel’s favorite kind of ice cream was mango. She sometimes sent me to buy a small tub of it from here. Not when she was slumped by her chair with her hair sticky with vomit and the soap opera blaring. No! I will never leave you! No matter what you do! I don’t care! Come back! Come back! I love you!
“You two go ahead.” I gave them my wallet. “Get whatever you want.”
“When you die, do you want to be buried?” Corbin said. “I want to be burned up.”
“I want to be buried,” Owen said.
They looked up at me, waiting for my answer.
Over two million people died in the US each year.
That meant about six thousand five hundred people every day.
Two hundred thousand people died in Canada each year.
Thirty thousand people died in British Columbia each year.
That was only eighty-two people a day.
Should I count myself at risk for the American statistics? Or could I adopt the Canadian risks while I was there?
“Maeve?” Owen took my hand as Corbin pushed ahead into the store with his good arm. “What kind do you want?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
People swerved around us on the sidewalk. A pair of Chihuahuas tied to a parking meter yapped and yapped, straining at their leashes. A car honked. Someone was screaming at a cyclist to get off the goddamn road and use the bike path.
“If I was dead,” Owen said, “I’d look down on you and hope you had some good ice cream.”
“Thanks,” I said. “If I was dead, I’d look down on you and hope you’d have some good ice cream too.”
When we got back to the building, there was a moving truck parked out front and a guy smoking a cigarette while he arranged furniture and boxes in the back. Another two men ferried a couch through the courtyard.
“That’s Mrs. Patel’s!” Owen waved his arms. “Hey! Stop!”
The movers carried Mrs. Patel’s tired old couch up the ramp and into the truck.
“Watch out, kid.” One of the men patted him on the head as they strode by, heading back to Mrs. Patel’s.
“You can’t take her stuff!” Corbin raised his casted arm like he might clobber them with it.
“Yes, they can.” I pulled the boys away from the ramp. “Her family probably arranged it.”
The movers came back again, this time with Mrs. Patel’s china hutch wrapped in blankets.
“Let’s go inside.” I took the boys’ hands.
“No!” Corbin pulled away. “I’m not going inside. I’m going to make sure they don’t break anything.” He faced the truck, hands on his hips. “You better not!”
“Me too,” Owen said quietly. He sat on the curb and chewed on a finger.
So I went home by myself, but I didn’t quite get there. One of Mrs. Patel’s sons was sitting on a kitchen chair outside her door, talking on the phone in Hindi. He motioned for me to stop as I walked by.
“Maeve, hi. Hold on.” He ended the call. “How are you?”
My hands started to shake so much that I had to shove them in my pockets. “I’m okay.” My voice trembled. The thick weight of guilt I’d felt for days pressed down even harder. I wanted to tell him. I killed her, Bandhu. I loved your mom, and it’s my fault that she’s dead. I deserve to be haunted by the stench of shit, spilled samosas, and blaring soap operas. I love you! Damn it, I love you! And Mrs. Patel slumped on the floor and the vomit and the playing cards scattered all around.
He was talking. Saying all the things he should. I’m so sorry that you found her like that. Thank you for giving the police my number. It must have been so hard for you. And then he was saying something about her pink cardigan.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s funny that she died in that sweater.” He smiled a little. “But it’s no surprise.”
How could he smile like that? How could he just stand around and talk on the phone and talk to me and watch the movers take his mother’s things away? And where would those things go? To Goodwill? To the dump? To his house?
“I gave her a new sweater every year on her birthday,” he said. “And every year she folded it so nicely and put it in her drawer with a piece of tissue between it and the sweater I bought her the year before. She only liked the pink one. That was the first one I bought her. I wasn’t much older than you.”
I was thinking of gin rummy, and how she never let me win. I was thinking of her slippers, worn right through. I was thinking of her cupboard full of jars of loose tea. I was thinking that it was all my fault.
“I’m so s-s-sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” he said. “How are you coping, Maeve? I know it must’ve been very upsetting. I can only imagine.”
I was not coping. I was terrible. I kept seeing her dead body over and over again. I kept hearing that soap opera, and in my head it was always even louder than it actually was. It was deafening. I love you! No, no! Don’t leave!
“I am so, so s-s-sorry,” I whispered.
We stood out of the way for the movers to go back in.
“You know, we told her to get one of those buttons she could wear around her neck, to call for help if she fell or if she was sick,” he said. “There were a few times that she was almost unconscious from the diabetes. But she always said that when her time came, she didn’t want to miss it.”
Diabetes?
She died from sugar? Not from my wishing anything on anyone?
Diabetes killed more people each year than breast cancer and AIDS combined. I knew that much. Insulin. Glucose. Something about carbs and proteins.
“Diabetes?”
“Yes. There is a history in our family.”
I could feel a shift.
“It had gotten much worse lately,” he said. “She might have had many more years if she had agreed to get one of those buttons.”
“That’s what happened?” I felt lighter all of a sudden. “That’s how she died?”
I gripped the railing with both hands. I was so weightless that I could float away. I could soar overhead and look down and everything would look tidy and perfect from above. And it would be. I hadn’t killed Mrs. Patel. Of course I hadn’t killed her. Ruthie would’ve been the one to stop all of this from happening in the first place. If I’d been able to talk to her, she would’ve made me realize what a stupid idea it was. Science. It’s always about science. Empirical evidence, Maeve.
Science or superstition, it didn’t matter.
I hadn’t killed her. That was all that mattered.
—