“Me? Li’l old me?” she asked in my Southern accent.
“He can’t stand not being the center of my world.”
Ana’s hand paused in my hair. “The way the Beloved can fit in my heart, two thousand lives could fit in this body of mine. One kernel could contain a thousand bushels, and a hundred worlds pass through the eye of the needle.” She began stroking my hair again. “That’s Rumi,” she said.
I repeated the only part I’d really heard. “Two thousand lives could fit in this body of mine.” That made complete sense to me right now. Well, or it didn’t. Okay, it either made complete sense or it didn’t make sense at all.
“Who’s at the center of your world, Nan?”
Again, only a question Ana would ask. And it was the question lurking in my head. How had she heard it before I had?
“Who’s at the center of my world?” I repeated, buying myself time. The obvious answer was the boys.
“I’ll tell you the answer,” Ana said. “Who’s at the center of your world is you. You are the center of your world.”
“But isn’t that kind of self-centered?”
Ana shook her head. “No, my darling, that is reality.”
I watched the swelling waves without really watching them. They rose and fell and rose and fell. The ocean looked like it was breathing. And then there were our small chests expanding with air and emptying out. When I sighed, I wondered if a wave could sigh. Like that one. The way it flopped too early. The way it didn’t fully crest.
?
We ate peanut butter sandwiches as the sun got bigger and more orange in the sky, and Ana said, “Will you stay here tonight?”
I didn’t even think about it. “Of course.”
As the horizon line swallowed the last piece of orange, I held my eyes open for the green flash. “Did you see it?” I asked her.
“What?”
“The green flash.”
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t believe in the green flash. I think somebody just made that up and everyone else believed them.”
?
She gave me her red silk pajamas to wear and we got in bed early. She said, “Normally, this is when I would thank Celia for her guidance today.”
I took her toothbrush out of my mouth and through the foam, I asked, “What do you see when you look at the sky now?”
“A void.”
I was glad my mouth was full of toothpaste because I didn’t know what to say to that. I went into the bathroom to spit.
Then my phone rang.
I wiped my mouth and walked into the living room, hurrying but not hurrying toward the phone, and then there was Portico on the ground, and I howled like a maniac—“Aaah!”—as I watched my foot step just barely past her slithering body.
“I almost killed Portico!” My heart was beating in my temples.
Ana chuckled. “You can’t kill her. She’s too smart.”
I grabbed my phone off the couch. I’d missed the call. Cam. Why would he be calling? But it was probably nothing. I walked back over Portico and into the bedroom, where Ana was lying halfway off the bed with her head touching the floor.
“Why isn’t Portico in her cage?” I asked, still flustered.
“I want to see what she does with freedom,” Ana said. “Who called?”
“Cam.”
“Are you going to call him back?” Something was happening to Ana’s windpipe in that position. She sounded like a robot. She laughed, but only a little. It was too much strain to really laugh with her windpipe like that. She was in her funny, giddy mood and I loved her like this. But then—it happened so fast—her hand on her stomach and her face cringed in pain and she rolled over.
I rushed to her, put my hand on her back. “Are you okay?”
She made a little squeaking sound.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t call a doctor?”
She shook her head just barely. And then like the other times, the pain seemed to pass but maybe only sort of, and she curled her legs into her body and asked me softly, “Can you make me peppermint tea, please?”
“Of course,” I said, and kissed her bald head, which surprised me. I knew I wouldn’t have done that if she weren’t dying. I did it because after she died, I would think back to this moment and wish I had kissed her bald head. But the reality of it was nothing like the misty picture I’d imagined. My lips touching her scalp—we were just fumbling body parts colliding in space and it was awkward. Both the intimacy of it—I had kissed the side, not the top of her head—and the position of my body, pretzeled between the bed and the floor with my foot strangled beneath me.
I went to the kitchen. Peppermint, peppermint. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I went back to the bedroom. She was still curled in a ball. “You don’t have peppermint tea. Do you want something else?”
“No,” she groaned. “It has to be peppermint.”
“I’ll run to the store then,” I decided. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
?
I drove fast. I was still wearing the red silk pajamas. Before I got out of the car, I threw Chuck’s sweatshirt on. He’d left it in the backseat. LIFE IS GOOD, it said. I remembered the day he’d bought it. It was right after Shelly. When he came home wearing it, I had rolled my eyes at how delusional he was and walked out of the room.
When I turned into the tea aisle, who was there? Mana. Mana who spent his days at the bus stop never taking the bus. Mana who had made up the name Sandwich Sistahs. I was so happy to see him. “Hey!” I said. He was holding a box of Smooth Move. He looked at me like he didn’t know me. Because he didn’t, not really. He only knew me in the context of being one half of the Sandwich Sistahs. I wasn’t recognizable without Ana. Still, he was very polite. He had understood that my effusive “Hey!” meant that he should know me, and he said, “Nice to see you again, ma fren.” And then he read Chuck’s sweatshirt. “Life is good, yeah? Yeah, life is good.” He smiled. He had maybe four teeth. “Well,” he patted my arm, “see ya, sistah,” he said, and walked toward the registers. I stood there thinking, Wait. Does Mana call everyone sistah? That makes it less special.
I grabbed three kinds of peppermint tea and paid. In the car on the way back, Cam called again. “Honey?” I answered.
“Mom! Where are you?”
I’m in the red silk pajamas of a woman you haven’t met. She’s like a sister to me and she’s dying. “With a friend. What’s wrong?”
“Dad is being insane. He made us work on the shed for five hours. And it got dark so he parked his car in front for lights. He just sat in there and blasted Journey and got wasted.”
To a stranger, this would have sounded like borderline child abuse, but I knew the boys were being dramatic. They were teenagers who didn’t want to build a shed. Or I was raised on dysfunction and had no conception of “normal.” But in this moment, I needed to believe it was no big deal.
“Did you guys sing together?” I asked. I was trying to look for evidence that it had been fun in some way.
“At first, but then Dad got wasted.” Cam sighed. “I hate this.”
“Is that Mom?” Jed said in the background.