She reached out for Angela’s hand. When Angela offered it, she grasped it in frail, cold fingers. Wrinkled, paperlike flesh clung to bone.
Betty leaned to the side so she could speak to Angela confidentially. “She’s a little more lucid when it’s time for her pain medication, which is good, but it also means she’s starting to have a lot of pain. Even on the medication, she’s still in pain, but for the most part she’s not conscious enough to feel it. We give her the medication every four hours, but if she is feeling pain she can have more as often as she wants.”
“That’s good,” Angela whispered back.
“It’s powerful narcotics. Very addicting,” Betty confided. She cast a sidelong glance at Sally. “But that’s not something to worry about at this point. I thought you should know.”
“Sure, thanks.” Angela didn’t think there was any point in saying anything about addictive drugs and her mother.
Angela thought it was ironic that Sally would die as she had lived—doped up and stoned out of her mind.
“I’m going to go in the kitchen and get your next round of pain medication ready,” Betty told Sally in a rather loud voice as she patted her frail arm. “You have a nice visit with your daughter.”
Angela’s mother nodded.
SEVENTY
Watching the ever-cheerful Betty shuffle toward the kitchen, Angela thought the woman seemed downright out of place in the dreary trailer. She was a lone streetlight happily illuminating the gloom in a storm. The world needed more people like Betty, instead of people like Rafael. Or Cassiel. The thought of Cassiel lusting to kill people like the innocent, ever-agreeable Betty made Angela’s anger boil up.
She reminded herself that she had stopped those men from harming innocent people. And Cassiel was no more.
Angela finally looked up at the hallway leading to her old bedroom. The dirty, beige shag carpeting had been worn through to the jute backing in places. The hallway looked narrower than she remembered.
She had told herself that she would visit her mother, but she was not going to go back to look at her old room.
“Betty is going to get your pain medication, Ma,” Angela said, turning her attention back to her mother.
“I don’t want it yet,” her mother said, her head rolling from side to side to emphasize the point. “I want to be awake to see you, first.”
Angela had never known her mother to turn down narcotics in favor of remaining aware of anyone.
Sally grasped Angela’s hand in both of hers. “Do you think God will take me in when I come to call on him?”
“If anyone could use his compassion, it would be you, Ma.”
Her mother smiled. The smile twisted as the pain started to bear down. She grabbed the towel by her shoulder to cough into it for a moment.
“I’m sorry it hurts, Ma,” Angela said, feeling a pang for her mother. “I wish I could make the pain go away.”
Her mother put the towel down as she gasped to catch her breath. She lifted a hand partway both in frustration and to dismiss the concern.
“The pain will end soon enough.” She finally looked up at Angela as tears welled up in her eyes. “All the pain will end soon enough.”
Angela didn’t know if her mother meant the pain would end when Betty brought another dose of drugs, or if she meant when she died. Either way, Angela didn’t ask.
“Can you tell me something, Ma?”
Her mother’s brow drew down as she focused on Angela’s face. “What?”
“Why have you always called me the girl in the moon?”
“Ah,” her mother said with a nod as she sank back a little.
“Why have you always called me that?”
“Because that’s who you are,” her mother said.
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s who you are. You’re the girl in the moon. Cold. Distant. Hauntingly beautiful. Untouchable. That’s you—the girl in the moon—that’s who you are.
“You rise above us all, silently looking down on us, watching us, seeing what we can’t see.
“You’re not like any of us. We are all lost souls. You watch over us all. That’s what you do. You are our light in the darkness, our guardian angel. My little angel.
“You are apart, up there all alone.” Her mother shook her head. “None of us are worthy of loving you. We are all lost souls, that’s what we are. Lost souls who have lost our way. We can only look up to you, up there in the sky so very far away.”
Angela swallowed back a lump in her throat. She felt a tear run down her cheek.
She had never thought of it that way, but her mother was right. That was exactly what she was.
She was the girl in the moon.
Her mother was right, too, in that Angela felt no normal human connections. She felt no emotion at all most of the time.
The only time she felt a rush of emotion was when she came down to earth to kill men who needed killing.
She had been born broken because of all the drugs her mother took. Her mother’s habit left Angela something less than normal.
And something more.
Angela had always wanted to confront her mother about all the things that she had done, and not done.
But she realized now it would be pointless.
What was the use of confronting a hollow shell of a woman lying there at the end of her life. A life wasted. A life she herself never valued.
“I’ve got your pain medication,” Betty said as she returned and saw Sally grimace and roll her head.
Sally nodded. “Yes, please. God yes, give me that hit.”
Betty stuck the needle into the IV port and started pushing the plunger. “Your drugs are coming now, Sally. This will take away your pain.”
Sally smiled up at Angela. “Karma is a bitch.”
Angela couldn’t help smiling back through the tears as she watched Betty push a syringe full of narcotics into Sally’s IV. Her mother smiled peacefully when she felt the rush of it coming over her. Her eyes rolled up in her head.
Her hand slipped off Angela’s.
The only thing her mother had ever valued was being loaded. She had lived her life the way she wanted, and now she would die with drugs taking away her pain, her regrets, and any last thoughts.
“The drugs will have her incoherent for the next three or four hours,” Betty confided.
“How long?” Angela swallowed. “How much longer does she have?”
Betty hesitated. “To tell you the truth, we’re all surprised she has lasted this long. My own personal feeling is that she lasted until she could see you again. I think that’s what kept her alive this long. It meant that much to her to see you.
“Now that you’ve come to see her, I kind of doubt she will live until the next dose. I’m glad you could be here to speak with your mother. That’s a comforting thing—for both of you. I suspect that was the last coherent thing she will ever say. I’m glad you could hear it.”
And it was the last hit of narcotics she would ever feel.
This time, with this hit, she would live forever.
Angela thought it was profoundly sad to see a life never lived slipping away.
Within ten minutes after receiving the syringe full of drugs, her mother’s last breath rattled out of her.
Angela was in a daze as she left the trailer park after her mother had died. She had trouble feeling anything. She felt like she was looking down on it all from very far away.
She had talked to Betty about the arrangements.
A funeral home was coming to collect the body of a woman who had been able to see the moon looking down on her, and know that it meant something.
SEVENTY-ONE
Angela was tired when she left work after Barry’s Place had closed. She felt good, though, because Barry had stopped in for a short time. Everyone had been happy to see him and toasted drinks to his health. His doctors wanted him at home, resting. Barry thought that going in to see how the bar was doing would be the best medicine.