It’s this feeling of brokenness as I watch my mother die.
She wakes up so calm and casual it’s like nothing is wrong. “Harper.”
There’s a lurch in my throat, and I can taste stale coffee and hope. “Mom! You’re awake. Let me call the nurse. Are you in pain? Are you hungry?”
“No—Harper, wait. I don’t need anything.”
My stomach sinks. “What can I do?”
“Can you just…?” She blinks, a little too fast to be normal. “I lied about the plan. About being okay with everything. I’m afraid, baby, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Tears leak down my face. There’s no pantry or closet to hide in. No pillow to scream my pain into. There’s only her thin body to hold, and she holds me back, her hands shaking.
“I was—” She pauses, seeming to struggle to find the words. “I was looking up. With your father I was looking up, and I could never walk again.”
For a terrible moment I think she might be hallucinating, not really with me even though she seems clearer now than she has in months. Except I don’t think she’s hallucinating. She was looking up, like Deborah Kerr in the movie. She was hit by a car because she was so in love. What a cautionary tale, that movie. It had a happy ending, though.
Not like my mother’s love life. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“Don’t be—sorry.” She grasps my hand, her head falling back, eyes closed. The distance widens between us, and I hold her tighter. “Love you. That’s the plan.”
And then she goes quiet.
The beep beep beep keeps going. No one rushes into the room, but there might as well be a ghost in the room with me. That’s how quiet and still my mother’s body is. That’s how lifeless she looks. There are a thousand cracks in my foundation, but this one is the deepest. I press my face into her body, into the warmth that isn’t quite alive, and cry.
The little squiggles on the machine bump up regularly enough, but that’s just electricity. Those are electrons firing inside a circuit. That’s not what makes my mother a person. That part is already gone, so it’s not a surprise when she starts breathing in a terrible sound that fills the room. A good thing, Freida says when she hears it. It means my mother is so relaxed that she can no longer be bothered to wake up. She is too relaxed to live. Can you imagine that?
That death is just the ultimate spa vacation, after all.
The afternoon sun presses hot against my neck, squeezing through the cheap white blinds on the window, marking my skin in a completely random place. The middle of the day seems like a strange time to die, but that’s when the horrible sound of her breathing stops.
When she’s so relaxed she leaves me completely alone, as if it had been so much effort to stay with me as long as she did. Every piece of art I’ve ever made flashes in front of me—empty, empty. There’s nothing to explain the hollowness of this room.
The hollowness of my heart.
All that protesting did not accomplish anything—I couldn’t save the library. I couldn’t save my mother. I hold her hand where it rests on the bed, and it’s still warm. A lie, because she’s gone. Her body is still. Her chest does not rise and fall.
Eventually the nurse comes and makes the machine stop beeping. She puts her hands on my shoulder, but she doesn’t insist that I leave. That must be part of the Death Plan, which suddenly strikes me as funny.
I start laughing, and then Christopher is there. “Harper,” he says.
“You’re a dream. You aren’t real.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he means it. Like he’s really sorry that I’m alone, even though he’s the one who made me this way.
“Why didn’t you come?” I say, my words garbled by the grief in my throat, the tears in my eyes. The black in my heart. “You should have come. She asked you to. She wanted you to.”
“She didn’t,” he says with a sigh that is a thousand years old.
I hit his chest with my fists, but he may as well be made of granite. Granite like his eyes. Black and hard and cold. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
He lets me hit him until I collapse. His arms are around me, and I shatter.
The house is dark when Christopher’s car pulls into the drive. How many times have I come here after working late in the library? I shouldn’t have been in the library, though. It wasn’t safe, which feels ridiculous right now. Who cares about safety? Death is inevitable.
I’m Scarlett come home after the war, the place a husk of its former self. The walls aren’t blackened with fire, but they might as well be. The house rings hollow.
Christopher puts me to bed with gentle insistence, undressing me like I’m a child. I press my face into his chest and breathe deep, taking comfort I don’t deserve from his scent. My mouth opens to taste him, to bite him. I would swallow him whole if I could, but he sets me back an inch. “Not tonight,” he says, and I hiss at him like an animal.