The Great Alone

Beneath her mother’s shaky signature was her grandfather’s signature both as an attorney and as a witness, and a notary seal.

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.