The Great Alone

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.

The two of them, heads bowed together, were a portrait of pain.

Leni hated that there was nothing she could do to help. How could three drowning people save each other?

Leni went back to bed. Climbing in, she pulled the rosewood box into her lap. She’d seen it before, of course. Once, it had held their playing cards.

Whoever had made this box had sanded it until the surface felt more like glass than wood. It was a souvenir, maybe from the road trip they’d taken a lifetime ago, when they’d lived in a trailer and driven all the way to Tijuana. Leni was too young to remember the trip—before Vietnam—but she’d heard her parents talk about it.