Chapter 19

The D-Word

I wake up before dawn with this strange feeling, something like déjà vu. I sit up with a gasp, then tear out of bed and down the stairs and burst into Mom’s room as Carolyn is coming out. She nods at me. “Today,” she says.

Now we’re all assembled in there: Jeffrey, whose anger has deserted him for the moment, sitting in a kitchen chair by her bed, leaning forward onto his knees. His eyes never leaving her face. Billy stands in the corner and doesn’t say a word, but whenever Mom looks at her, she smiles. Carolyn flits in and out to take her pulse and try in vain to get her to drink something.

Dad sits at the foot of the bed, passing the time cracking angel jokes.

“Do you know why angels can fly?” he asks us. We all kind of shake our heads. “Because we take ourselves so lightly.”

Killer, I know. But it’s comforting, him being there. He’s only been hanging around with us for a little more than a week, but already I feel used to him, his silent joy, his steadiness, his weird sense of humor that fits just perfectly with Mom’s.

And then there’s me. I’m holding her hand. Waiting. All of us waiting, like we are a wheel and Mom is the center of it, the hub. We rotate around her.

“Such serious faces,” she whispers. “Geez, is someone dying?” But then she stops talking altogether. It takes too much effort. She sleeps, and we watch the rise and fall of her chest. I have to pee in the worst way, but I’m afraid to leave the room.

What if she goes while I’m not there? What if I miss it?

I cross my legs and I wait. I examine her hand in mine. She’s wearing her wedding ring again, a simple slender silver band. She and I have the same hands, I realize. I’ve never noticed that before. Hers are frail now, light as the hollow bones of a bird’s, but the resemblance to mine is there. We have the same long nail beds. The same spacing of our knuckles, lengths of our fingers, the same vein that crosses the back of our left hand.

All I have to do to find my mother is to look at my hands.

Then she takes a deep, shuddering breath and opens her eyes, and I forget about having to pee.

She looks at Dad. He reaches for her free hand, the one I’m not squeezing on to for dear life, and he kisses her wrist.

She looks around without moving her head, just her wide blue eyes, but I can’t tell if she really sees any of us anymore. Her lips move.

“Beautiful,” I think she says.

Then I’m distracted for a minute because Dad disappears. Right in front of our eyes, he simply vanishes. One second he’s sitting on the bed, holding Mom’s hand, and the next, gone.

It takes me a moment to realize that Mom’s gone too. It’s so quiet, I should have known.

We’re all holding our breath. Mom’s lying back on the pillows with her eyes closed again. But she’s not there. Her chest isn’t moving. Her heart has stopped beating. Her body is here, but she’s gone.

“Amen,” Billy says.

Jeffrey jumps up. The noise of his chair clattering back against the wall seems unbearably loud. His face looks like a mask to me, stretched at the lips, eyebrows drawn low over his red-rimmed eyes. A single tear makes its way down his cheek, hovers on his chin. Furiously he dashes it away and flees the room.

I hear the front door bang as he goes. His truck roars to life, then peels on down the driveway, scattering gravel.

Something floats its way up from my chest, not a sound but a terrible choking ache that makes me think my heart will explode.

“Billy . . . ,” I call desperately.

She’s here. Her hand comes down on my shoulder.

“Just breathe, Clara. Breathe.”

I focus on getting the air to move in and out of my lungs. I don’t know how long we stay in this position, Billy with her fingers dug into the flesh of my shoulder, hurting me but a hurt that feels good, reminds me that I, unlike my mother, still inhabit my body.

Seconds tick by. Minutes. Possibly hours. It occurs to me that Mom’s hand is being warmed by mine. If I take it away, it will get cold. Then I’ll never hold her hand again.

Outside the sky goes gray. A light drizzle of rain falls against the house. It feels appropriate for it to rain at a time like this. It feels right.

I glance up at Billy.

“Is this you?” I tip my head toward the window.

She smiles this odd, hurt twist of her lips. “Yep. I know it’s a silly human perspective, but I can’t help it.”

“I don’t want to let her go.” It’s one of those sentences I know I will hear echoing around in my head forever, along with the sound of my own ragged, broken voice.

“I know, kid,” Billy says with her own bit of a rasp. “But you’re not really holding her now. You know that’s not her anymore.”

After the initial quiet the phone starts ringing every few minutes, and then the doorbell, and people start pouring in. At first I feel compelled to greet them, like it’s my duty as the only member of my family who actually stuck around for this, as Mom’s child, to let them in and thank them personally for their abundance of sympathy and food. They should warn you about the food. When this kind of thing happens, when someone you love dies, people bring food. So here’s the contents of the Gardner refrigerator: one giant lasagna, three separate and equally disgusting macaroni salads, two fruit salads, one cherry pie, two apple pies and an apple crisp, one bucket of cold fried chicken, one mystery casserole, one spinach-cranberry-and-walnut salad that comes with an unopened bottle of blue cheese dressing, and a meat loaf. The shelves of our poor refrigerator sag under the weight of it all.

Here’s another thing they don’t tell you beforehand: people will bring enough food to feed an orphanage in China, but you won’t be hungry.

It starts to feel like every person who shows up is chipping away a piece of me when they say, “I’m so sorry, Clara. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to call.”

“She’s suddenly very supportive, isn’t she?” mutters Billy after Julia—yep, that angel-blood who kept asking all the biting questions at the last congregational meeting—leaves one of those macaroni salads and her deepest condolences.

“Yeah, I was tempted to tell her that Samjeeza’s hiding out there in the woods.” Billy’s dark eyes widen. “Is he?”

I shake my head. “No. When Dad banishes someone, I think they stay banished. I just wanted to freak her out a bit.”

“Right. Well, you should have told her. Then we could have seen just how fast she can fly.”