I go to Penn Station and buy a train ticket to Portsmouth. Then I buy a box of Krispy Kremes, three chocolate glazed, three chocolate glazed with sprinkles, three strawberry glazed, and three plain glazed. They’re warm. I get on the train and eat three of them, don’t ask me to remember which because I barely taste them. By the time I get to New Hampshire I have eaten another three. I meet my mother outside the train station, at her car. I say, “I brought you something,” and I open the box of donuts and she takes one without even looking at it.
My mother and I drive deeper into New Hampshire. I saw her at my fortieth birthday party last year and this summer when she came into the city for her best friend’s funeral, and that’s been it for a long time. We are quiet for most of the drive, although she has a cough, a weird hacking cough, and so our silence is punctuated with that sound occasionally. I want to ask her if she’ll come back to New York now that she won’t be needed to help with the baby anymore, but it seems crass.
An hour later we pull up in front of their house, and before I open the car door my mother puts her hands on my knee and says, “Wait, I just need to tell you something.” I say, “It’s terrible in there, right?” She says, “Yes, that’s true also, but what I want you to know is Sigrid is fading fast. The hospice nurse was here this morning and she thinks we have just the rest of the day, maybe, to spend with her. So be ready to say your goodbyes. Be there for them, yes, but be there for her, because after this, you don’t get to know her anymore.”
“I want to talk to David first,” I say. “Just for a minute.” My brother, sometimes lost to me. The thinnest of threads connects us now. A muffled voice, handing the phone to his wife. If I squint I can see the dying embers of our joint familial spirit.
I walk through the red door beneath the crumbling brick. In the house it’s dim, and there are candles lit everywhere. There’s a circular living room, and in the center of it sits Greta, holding her daughter. She never grew much, this little girl. I kiss her. I kiss Greta, push her lion’s mane out of her face. Whoever she was five years ago, before this baby was born, that slick, urbane magazine editrix, has submitted to the behemoth of witnessing sickness in someone she loves. I squint for her embers too, her motorcycle jackets and French spike-heeled boots and vivid, inspiring confidence. I see yoga pants and heartbreak instead.
I embrace my brother, bald, slouching, exhausted, with a full beard, and I take his arm and walk him through the kitchen and out to the backyard, to the small shack where he keeps his recording equipment and instruments. I don’t know what to say. Once, before his first band took off, we went to CBGB together, completely underage, bad, fun, kids, and we saw Sonic Youth, only they were billed as something else, a different name, Drunken Butterfly, and they didn’t go on until last, like three in the morning, and we were so tired when we got there but we both kept punching each other in excitement, and then Sonic Youth went onstage finally, and played feedback for an hour and I was high off all the smoke and swigs of my brother’s beer, and I felt like I was taking two steps to the right into a room I hadn’t known existed before, and I was so glad I got there. He was the one who took me to that place. This person before me. This tired, sad man.
“I’m so glad you came,” he says. He presses a button on his stereo and some beautiful and strange ribbons of guitar sounds begin to play. “I am so here for you,” I say. “I am here however much you need me, or tell me to leave when you want me to leave. Whatever you want.”
My brother says after thirty years of it, he’s quit smoking pot. “I’m doing this thing where I live in the present tense,” he says. “How does it feel?” I say. “Oh, terrible,” he sings. “You don’t have any left, though, do you?” I say. He shakes his head. “That’s not the way it works,” he says. He points to the speakers. “This is for her, what do you think?” A slow, dirge-like chorus kicks in, his voice layered in tracks. “I think she would love it,” I say. We are silent until the song ends. “I’ve got a whole album’s worth,” he says. I experience a temporary moment of both jealousy and awe at my brother’s musical talent, and his ability to tap in so freely to his creative self. But that’s him, he won the family lottery, he got the best part of our father in him.
“Listen, Andrea, most of all I’m glad you’re here so you can say goodbye to her,” he says. “We’ve been doing it, I mean, I think it’s done, we’re done. But she’s a part of you, too. I know you never saw it but the rest of us did, and it’s important that you know that she was your family.”
“I know it!” I say. “I showed up. I love her.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said those words, though. So I guess it was time to say it to her.
I go in the house, pass through the kitchen where the box of Krispy Kremes sits empty on the counter, back to the living room, and my sister-in-law stands and hands me the baby. My mother is in the kitchen and yells to me, asks me if I want anything. “Do you have any wine?” I say. “No,” says my mother. I look at Greta and she shakes her head. “Is this a sober house now?” I say. “For the moment,” says Greta. “I object,” I say weakly. But I suppose it’s all right to be present tense, as my brother said. This moment will never exist again, and this baby in my arms will disappear, too.
I sit in the chair with Sigrid. Her hair is dark, and soft, and it curls under her ears. She is thin, and her bones feel soft and tender, but angular at the joints, as if they were sharpened to a point. She is breathing quietly. I bend and put my lips to her head and I hold her up against me and I close my eyes and think: Your blood is my blood. You beautiful girl. OK, all right, good night, goodbye. Then I sit up and hold her small hand in mine.