Here it comes. I don’t know what the it is, but I wait for another collision, another impact to knock me off my feet, to break my bones, to finally break me.
He checks over his shoulder as though to make sure no one is eavesdropping. “You see, I’m not exactly an unbiased listener,” he says. “Not the way you think I am anyway. I think it’s only fair to tell you that…I used my resurrection choice.” He plays nervously with the scar on his temple.
My eyes grow wide as golf balls. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me?” Questions start to pile up like water from a spring.
“Because I was embarrassed, I guess.” He catches himself worrying over the scar and pulls his fingers away to spin an empty saucer on the table between us. “You’ve met my mother.”
“I’m not sure I would call that much of a meeting, but sure,” I say, tucking my heels underneath me.
He takes a deep breath. “My mother is resurrected. By me.”
“Oh.” I’m confused. “But…she doesn’t seem very…grateful.”
“That would be an understatement.” He picks at the frayed hole in his jeans. “It’s, well, it’s complicated.” When he talks, it’s with the reluctance of somebody wrenching words out of his throat with a pair of pliers. “Look, all I can tell you is that you think what you’re going through right now is the problem, that choosing is the issue. But resurrection isn’t necessarily the solution you think it’s going to be.” There is an edge to his voice that I don’t recognize. It’s a piece of him that doesn’t sound fragile at all, but instead forged in a part deep inside him where there is red hot anger that can turn nice, soft feelings into steel.
His words feel like fingernails tearing at a spot in my heart. I can tell he wants to stop talking about it, to leave it at that, but I can’t. “What do you mean? You got your mother back.”
He grinds his jaw back and forth. Then he puffs his cheeks out, exhaling for what seems like an eternity. “My mother was a professor. She argued against the ethics of resurrection her whole life. She built an academic career on her opposition of it. Not just that, but she really believed in what she said and wrote. When she got sick with cancer, I swear, she was proud. She could finally put her money where her mouth was. She would die and that would be it. She’d put into practice what she had advocated in her academic career. She’d go down as one of the greats. I think she thought she’d be like Socrates or something. A fantastic mind that wasn’t fully appreciated until after her untimely but noble demise.”
He shakes his head thoughtfully. “It probably could have been cured, you know. Her cancer. Seventy-five–percent chance. That’s what the doctors said. But she wouldn’t do chemotherapy. She wouldn’t do anything.” There’s a lump forming in his throat. I watch the veins pulling tighter, tighter, tighter, and when he swallows it looks like he’s fighting down a mouthful of screws. “Then in the hospital…she looked so tiny.” The memory is etched on his face. “I held her hand as the cancer ate her from the inside out, but there was this light in her eyes, like she was excited to go. To leave me. I don’t have a dad, I could have been put in foster care. I had a few friends then, but nothing holding me together, plus this big, giant, well, thing on my face that I’ve had since the day I was born and…and still she wanted to go. I—I couldn’t stand it. She had the doctors pull her off any form of life support early, before my eighteenth birthday, just to prove a point—that she could be resurrected but had chosen not to.
“I stayed in the hospital for three days with her. She screamed in pain for hours at night but wouldn’t let the doctors give her anything that might prolong her life. It was the pain that killed her in the end, actually. She had a heart attack. I was furious at her.”
I set my coffee mug down on the ground beside the sofa and scoot closer. “That must have been awful,” I say and think about how Dr. McKenna first told me that there are no magic words, just regular ones that fail us when we need better ones to say what we feel. But at least I have to try.
“Believe it or not, my mother—‘Mom’ back then—had this brilliant and crazy fun mind. She invented games for us with nothing but a few strings and a half-empty box of checkers, that kind of stuff. When I was a kid, those things were huge for me because I only knew Smelly Ellie and, well…” We both smile at that. “I loved my mother. Afterward, it turned out that she’d provided instructions to me about how I was supposed to publish this paper that she’d written. Her great manifesto, I guess. I couldn’t even read it. A month later, when I turned eighteen, I turned in a resurrection application with her name on it. She hasn’t spoken more than a word at a time to me since.”
“But, you’re her son.”
“She’s a proud woman and she hates me for ruining her legacy. I can see it every time she looks at me. Honestly, it’s all been such an ordeal. I feel like just knowing about the possibility of resurrection or the nonpossibility of it—it—it made it impossible to move forward with anything until after it was all over and everything was totally wrecked. I started going to therapy. I thought that it would help to talk about it. Most days it does. My mother ignores me most of the time. Forgets to pick me up. Or maybe she means to leave me, since that was her original intention. I don’t know.”
“So, you think if you hadn’t resurrected her, that everything would have been fine? But that would have been so unfair to you.”
“I think the very existence of resurrections at all created a mess that no one, including me and anyone else, is equipped to clean up. Resurrections were just there, looming over us, and the idea of them didn’t leave us any room to heal, if that makes sense.” Two sides of his face. Two ways his life could have gone. Just like mine. “Using my resurrection destroyed everything. I just think you should know what you’re dealing with.” The edge has returned. Sharp and forged hard as steel.
I stare at him, shaken, because the only thing I can think of is Matt. What Ringo’s mother did was cruel. Who cares about an academic career when it comes to the people you love? But what he says about the mere existence of resurrections stops me dead. Without them, how might Matt’s life have been different? The very idea of the resurrection has been looming over Matt for years, keeping him from healing.
I have never thought to wish away resurrections entirely—especially not now that Penny and Will are gone. But I can’t help feeling ill. Because for the first time, I consider that if the thing that could save my two best friends didn’t exist, my brother might have stayed my brother, even if he couldn’t walk. He could have changed. In other ways. He could have been the old Matt.
Back when I was first learning about quadriplegia, my research turned up all sorts of people with his condition. Ones that had gone on to get married, have children, become activists, travel. Why couldn’t Matt have been one of them?