“Who are you trying to console at this exact moment?” I say.
Before we get back on the road, we use the restroom, which reeks of disinfectant, and I gag. A teenage girl grudgingly mops the handicapped stall. My mother stays behind for five extra minutes to discuss the local union situation with the girl. I go to the car and text every single person I know the following sentence: “My mother is trying to murder me with her emotions. Please send help.”
When we cross the Massachusetts state line she says, “There’s something we need to discuss.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not having a discussion with you now. I’m all out of discussion energy.”
“Andrea.”
“Fine.”
“If I ever get sick, like really sick, and I need someone to pull the plug on me, I want you to be the one.”
“What? No. I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I’m asking you to do this for me,” she says. “This is part of being an adult, facing issues of mortality.”
“Then why doesn’t David have to do it?” I say.
“David has his own issues of mortality,” says my mother. “His own trials and tribulations. It’s time for you to have yours.”
“I have many problems, I promise you,” I say.
“Also I don’t trust him to respect my wishes. But I know you could do it when the time comes.”
“What makes you think I could do it?”
“Haven’t you wanted to kill me your entire life?” she says.
“Ha-ha,” I say.
“Ha-ha,” she says.
“Why are we having so many sad conversations lately?” I say.
“This is what happens when you get older. You have to think about sickness and death and dying and all of that. I had to do it with Nana and Papa. I was the plug-puller too, if it makes you feel any better. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a good person. It just means you’re capable.”
We drive for two more hours, get off the fast highway onto a slower one, then a slower, winding road. We drive past lakes littered with fallen leaves, crushed, choking the violet-tipped water. This could be a pleasure trip. Nearly a getaway. The roads grow smaller, four lanes, then two, sometimes just one; shorter buildings, then fewer buildings; long stretches of only grass and trees; the skies echo blue for miles. Tractors, goats, fir trees, chicken coops, a lawn mower. A small cemetery.
I tell my mother we’ll be there in ten minutes.
“Oh, we forgot to talk about your love life,” says my mother.
“Save it, lady,” I say.
We’re in the woods now, and I can hear every pop of gravel under the tires as I pull up to their house. My sister-in-law, blond, healthy, bigger than usual, hairier too, opens the front door with a finger to her lips. The baby is sleeping. The baby is always sleeping, I want to tell Greta. The baby has a terrible heart and a damaged brain and she has never uttered a word. I don’t believe she has ever been truly awake in her life. Instead I whisper back a hello, and I kiss her, and my mother throws her arms around her and we all walk through the crumbling brick house in the woods together to see the baby. I diverge, and ask where my brother is, and Greta points to the backyard. She mimes playing a guitar, rolls her eyes a little bit while doing so. I wander in the direction of wherever the baby isn’t.
Behind the house, from the small shack, I can hear a guitar being strummed. I knock on the door. Butterflies in a haze around the edges of the shack, green, green grass, blue skies, looming, enormous trees at the edge of the property, a creek beyond it, my brother showed it to me once. “It’s me,” I say. “Your sister.” He’s playing a guitar solo, I think. I should wait until he’s done. Then I realize everything’s a guitar solo when you’re playing by yourself, and I enter.
Inside is recording equipment, a laptop, a patterned sheet tacked to the wall, and a mattress on the floor, on which my brother sprawls, his ears covered in headphones, a guitar in his arms. His beard is enormous and fully gray. He has shaved his balding head clean. The shack smells faintly of weed. I wave a hand in front of his face. “You’re here,” he says. He seems both delighted and desperate. He takes off his headphones, stands, and then mauls me with a hug.
My brother calls himself a lifer when he talks about his music. He was never going to become famous—that we knew. Famous is hard, and anyway, you’re not supposed to want it; raw, apparent desire for it is disgusting, my brother has told me. “Making good music is the thing you’re supposed to want,” he says. “Watching people dance to it or sing along or just love it, their faces at the shows. That’s part of fame, sure, but not all of fame, and you can have that anyway, without being famous.” He makes music and sells it over the internet and a few times a year he plays free shows in New York and his gray-haired, balding fans come out and join him and buy his merch and get drunk with him and post his picture with them on the internet, as if someone had seen a ghost and captured a fleeting image and wanted to prove it was true. “I can’t do this forever,” says my brother. “I mean the music will live on, but eventually I’ll have no one left to come to my shows. They’ll all die.” “So will you,” I say. “And so will you,” he says.
We vape. He plays me some of his music. I ask him how his little girl is doing and he tells me it’s the same, the same, always the same. “How are you and Greta doing?” I say. He scratches his beard, rubs his eyes, pats his bald scalp, like fully interacts with his head in all ways possible, then says, “Sometimes she thinks Sigrid is getting better. So that’s weird.” “Sigrid is never getting better,” I say. “I know,” he says. “Sigrid is only ever getting worse,” I say. “You don’t need to tell me that,” he says.
Eventually we leave the shack and wend our way back to the house. The butterflies have disappeared, and now it’s just gnats and a preamble to the sunset. A bunny hops in the distance. “It’s pretty here,” I tell my brother. “It must be a nice life.” He puts his arm around me. “I’m miserable,” he says. My mother and Greta stand at the screen door. My mother is holding the baby, slack in her arms. A four-year-old who never grew much. Greta’s eyes are sad and enormous. “But Mom’s here now,” he says. “And I think that’s going to help.”
After dinner, when the stars have come out and I have drunk all the wine available in the house, my mother and I share the guest room. Which, technically, is her room now, I guess. Before we go to bed I tell her I know what she’s doing, that she gave her time to me and now she’s giving her time to David. “But what I really want to know is, what about you?” I say.
“I’ve had enough me to last a lifetime,” my mother says. She’s facing the wall and her voice is dreamy. Then she tells me she loves me, she tells me to go to sleep. “In the morning we’ll have a new day,” she says. “That’s the best part of going to sleep. Knowing there’s a new day tomorrow.”