Mama coughed into a ball of tissue. She drew in a phlegmy breath and looked up at Leni. For a terrible, exquisite moment, time stopped between them, the world caught its breath. “It’s time, Leni. You’ve lived my life, baby girl. Time to live your own.”
“By calling you a murderer and pretending I’m an innocent? That’s how you want me to start a life?”
“By going home. My dad says you can pin it all on me. Say you knew nothing about it. You were a kid. They’ll believe you. Tom and Marge will back you up.”
Leni shook her head, too overwhelmed by sadness to say anything more than, “I won’t leave you.”
“Ah, baby girl. How many times have you had to say that in your life?” Mama sighed tiredly, gazed up at Leni through sad, watery eyes. Her breath was wheezing, labored. “But I am going to leave you. It’s the thing we can’t run from anymore. Please,” she whispered. “Do this for me. Be stronger than I ever was.”
*
TWO DAYS LATER, Leni stood just outside of the sunroom, listening to Mama’s wheezing breaths as she talked to Grandma.
Through the open door, Leni heard the word sorry in her grandmother’s trembling voice.
A word Leni had come to despise. She knew that in the past few years Mama and Grandma had already said what they needed to say to each other. They’d talked about the past in their bits-and-pieces way. Never all at once, never one big end-up-crying-and-hugging moment, but a constant brushing up of the past, reexamining actions and decisions and beliefs, offering apologies, forgiveness. All of it had brought them closer to who they were, who they’d always been. Mother and daughter. Their essential, immutable bond—fragile enough to snap at a harsh word a long time ago, durable enough to survive death itself.
“Mommy! There you are,” MJ said. “I looked everywhere.”
MJ skidded into place, bumping her hard. He was holding his treasured copy of Where the Wild Things Are. “Grammy said she’d read to me.”
“I don’t know, baby boy—”
“She promised.” On that, he pushed past her, moving into the sunroom like John Wayne looking for a fight. “Did you miss me, Grammy?”
Leni heard her mama’s quiet laughter. Then she heard the clang and squeak of MJ hitting the oxygen tank.
Moments later, Grandma exited the sunroom, saw Leni, and came to a stop. “She is asking for you,” Grandma said quietly. “Cecil has already been in.”
They both knew what that meant. Yesterday, Mama had been unresponsive for hours.
Grandma reached out, held Leni’s hand tightly, and then let go. With a last, harrowingly sad look, Grandma walked down the hallway and up the stairs to her own bedroom, where Leni imagined she let herself cry for the daughter she was losing. They all tried so hard not to cry in front of Mama.
Through the open sunroom door, Leni heard MJ’s high-pitched, “Read to me, Grammy,” and Mama’s inaudible reply.
Leni glanced down at her watch. Mama couldn’t handle much more than a few minutes with him. MJ was a good boy, but he was a boy, which meant bouncing and chatter and nonstop motion.
Mama’s thready voice floated on the sunlit air, bringing a flood of memories with it. “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another…”
Leni was as drawn to her mother’s voice as she’d always been, maybe more so now, when every single moment mattered and every breath was a gift. Leni had learned to submerge fear, push it down to a quiet place and cover it with a smile, but it was there always, the thought, Is that breath the end? Is that the one?
Here, at the end, it was impossible to believe in a last-minute reprieve. And Mama was in such pain, even hoping for her to survive another day, another hour, felt selfish.
Leni heard her mother say, “The End,” and the words carried a sharp double meaning.
“One more story, Grammy.”
Leni entered the sunroom.
Mama’s hospital bed had been placed to take advantage of the sunlight through the window. It almost looked like a fairy-tale bed in deep woods, lit by the sunlight, surrounded by hothouse flowers.
Mama herself was Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, her lips the only place left to have any color. The rest of her was so small and colorless, she seemed to melt into the white sheets. The clear plastic tubes looped from her nostrils, around her ears, and went on to the tank.
“That’s enough, MJ,” Leni said. “Grammy needs a nap.”
“Aw, crap,” he said, his little shoulders dropping.
Mama laughed. It turned into a cough. “Nice language, MJ.” Her voice was a whispery sound.
“Grammy’s cough is bleeding again,” MJ said.
Leni pulled a tissue from the box by her mother’s bed and leaned close to dab the blood from her mother’s face. “Give Grammy’s hand a kiss and go, MJ. Grandpop has a new model airplane for you guys to put together.”
Mama’s hand fluttered up from the bed. The whole back of her hand was bruised from IVs.
MJ leaned close, banging the bed so hard it jostled her mother, clanging a knee into the oxygen tank. He kissed the bruised hand carefully.
When he was gone, Mama sighed, lay back into the pillows. “The kid is a bull moose. You should get him into ballet or gymnastics.” Her voice was almost too quiet to hear. Leni had to lean close.
“Yeah,” Leni said. “How are you?”
“I’m tired, baby girl.”
“I know.”
“I’m so tired, but … I can’t leave you. I … can’t. I don’t know how. You are it for me, you know. The great love of my life.”
“Peas in a pod,” Leni whispered.
“Two of a kind.” Mama coughed. “The thought of you being alone, without me…”
Leni leaned down, kissed her mother’s soft forehead. She knew what she had to say now, what her mother needed. One always knew when to be strong for the other. “I’m okay, Mama. I know you’ll be with me.”
“Always,” Mama whispered, her voice barely heard. She reached up, her hand shaking, and touched Leni’s cheek. Her skin was cold. The effort it took for that single motion was evident.
“You can go,” Leni whispered.
Mama sighed deeply. In the sound, Leni heard how long and how hard her mother had been fighting this moment. Mama’s hand fell from Leni’s face, thumped to the bed. It opened like a flower, revealing a bloody wad of tissue. “Ah, Leni … you’re the love of my life … I worry…”
“I’ll be okay,” Leni lied. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I love you, Mama.”
Don’t go, Mama. I can’t be in the world without you.
Mama’s eyelids fluttered shut. “Loved … you … my baby girl.”
Leni could barely hear those last, whispered words. She felt her mother’s last breath as deeply as if she’d drawn it herself.
TWENTY-NINE
“She wanted you to have this.”
Grandma stood in the open doorway to Leni’s old bedroom, dressed in all black. She managed to make mourning look elegant. It was the kind of thing that Mama would have made fun of long ago—she would have looked down on a woman concerned with appearances. But Leni knew that sometimes you grabbed hold of whatever you could to stay afloat. And maybe all that black was a shield, a way to say to people: Don’t talk to me, don’t approach me, don’t ask your ordinary, everyday questions when my world has exploded.
Leni, on the other hand, looked like something washed up by the tide. In the twenty-four hours since her mother’s death, she hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth or changed her clothes. All she did was sit in her room, behind a closed door. She would make an effort at two, when she had to go pick up MJ from school. In his absence, she swam alone in her loss.
She pushed the covers back. Moving slowly, as if her muscles had changed in the absence of her mother, she crossed the room and took the box from her grandmother, said, “Thank you.”
They looked at each other, mirrors of grief. Then, saying nothing more— what good were words?—Grandma turned and walked down the hall, stiffly upright. If Leni didn’t know her, she’d say Grandma was a rock, a woman in perfect control, but Leni did know her. At the stairs, Grandma paused, missed a step; her hand clutched at the banister. Grandpa came out of his office, appearing when she needed him, to offer an arm.