This time, I do laugh, but it’s a choked strangled sob-laugh. I can feel the tears pressing against my eyes and heating my face. But if I break down in tears, I can’t talk, and I desperately want to be talking to her. “Can’t take a rain check in Lost. I never saw it rain. But the ocean is amazing. I told you about the dolphin, right?”
“You know it wouldn’t have worked, right?”
“I think it’s real, Mom. I know that sounds crazy, but—”
“I couldn’t have gone.” Mom smiles, the barest upturn of her lips, as if even that movement costs her. “I’m not lost. Even on the day your father left, and everything I’d planned and dreamed of went up in smoke, I was not lost. I had you. Knowing you, loving you...I couldn’t...I can’t...be lost.” Each word is slowly delivered, as if she’s wrapping and packaging them to give to me. “I told him that, too.”
“Who? Dr. Barrett?”
She beckons me closer. I lean in as she says, “You aren’t lost, either.”
I nod because she wants me to, not because I believe her. “I don’t know who I am without you.”
“Liar,” she whispers.
I take a deep breath and then let it out. It’s never calmed me before, but it helps now. My mom watches me breathe as if I’m doing something alien and interesting. Her breaths are shallow and ragged, as if through a crushed straw.
“You will be okay,” she tells me. “Maybe not at first. Maybe not for a while. But you will. And if you ever feel lost again...promise me one thing.” Her voice is very, very faint. Her words are carried on her breath, the slightest bending of her breath. “Kiss that tattooed boy of yours for me.”
I laugh. A real laugh. But then her eyes flutter closed. “Mom?”
“Talk to me,” she whispers. “Tell me about Lost, about your Finder, about the Missing Man.”
I tell her everything, every detail I can think of, every word that was said. I tell her about the red balloon that always floats over town, about the buttons and socks and keys and glasses that overflow the gutters, about the stacks of luggage, about the houses, about the diner and the motel, about Claire and Peter, about Victoria and Sean, about the barn with the lost masterpieces. Sometimes nurses come in. Sometimes William. Every time one does, I pause talking and Mom murmurs for me to continue. So I do. When I run out of stories about Lost, I switch to my memories of us, the times we shared in both California and Maine, childhood memories and teenage memories and recent memories, happy and sad and embarrassing and silly and good and bad. And she listens with a smile on her face and her hand in my hand.
She dies at 2:34 in the afternoon.
Her hand is limp in mine. Her breath falls and doesn’t rise. The beep becomes a shrill, steady alarm. Doctors and nurses rush in. I back away as they try to revive her. Her body arches as the paddles shock her, and I turn away and focus instead on the sketches that fill the wall until my ears blur. After a while, I hear the monitor shut off. And silence.
I feel a hand on my shoulder.
I cover William’s hand with mine.
There isn’t anything to say. I’ve said it all.
I arrange for the funeral on a Saturday, and in the obituary I list her favorite flowers so that the funeral home will be full of them, and it is. I throw away any fake flowers. I hang the sketches of her on the wall between the peonies and lilacs and irises and gerbera daisies and roses, along with some of our favorite photographs.
I stand next to the casket and greet people: far-flung cousins, my condescending uncle, her coworkers from the library, my coworkers Kristyn and Angie, our neighbors, a few of her childhood friends, a few of mine, some of the kindest doctors and nurses. I’ve put a blank book by the door for them to write a memory of her if they want, and a lot of them tell me a memory as they shake my hand or hug me. Some of them are stories that I’ve never heard, and I drink them in.
Outside, in the cemetery, I read poems that she liked. My voice doesn’t crack. Afterward, my supervisor from work is the first to hug me. “Take as much time as you need. Your position will be waiting for you.”
“I won’t be returning,” I say, “but thank you.”
She clearly doesn’t believe me, but I mean it. That life is done for me. A few of our family friends and cousins speak to William, assuming that he’s with me. He accepts their sympathy gracefully. I’m grateful that he’s there to deflect some of the people, especially the aunts and uncles whom I’ve never met and the uncle whom I never liked. Theoretically, I’m grateful that they came for Mom’s sake. In reality, I’m tired inside and out.
As the line of well-wishers dwindles, I glance around me to see how many people remain. Only a few are left. A man with white hair in a suit is walking away from the gravesite. He carries a suitcase and a cane with a black handle. My heart begins to thud faster. “Excuse me,” I say to William. “I’ll be back.”
I walk after the man.
He looks as if he’s only walking, but the distance between us lengthens. I sprint after him. “Missing Man? Missing Man, wait!” His stride lengthens and he doesn’t look back. “Please, stop!”
He rounds the corner of a mausoleum near a grove of trees. Catching up, I race around the corner, and he’s gone. I skid to a halt beside a gravestone, and I look across the cemetery. There’s a curl of dusty mist around a few of the gravestones, and then it dissipates.
Gasping from the chase, I sink down into the grass.
And I let myself cry.
Poem
Things I found:
a sketch of my mother, sitting on the rocks with a book in her hand by the ocean in Maine, half watching me decorate a sand castle with broken shells and bits of seaweed until I have a palace fit for a mermaid princess—later, she’ll put down her book and help me dig a moat to protect my masterpiece from the encroaching sea, but the tide takes it anyway
Chapter Twenty-Eight
After the burial, William drives me home. He offers to stay with me in the apartment—as a friend. He says he doesn’t want me to have to be alone. He wants to help me like my mother helped him, to help me sort through her things if I want, to find closure. Parked outside our apartment, I study him. He’s been beyond kind...and I have been using him. “I’m not who you think I am,” I say softly, gently. “That girl doesn’t exist. You invented her, your manic pixie dream girl, out of the stories my mother told you and the things you imagined while I was in a coma. You don’t really know me at all.”
He swallows, and I see that I’ve hurt him. “I want to know you.”
I smile because it’s exactly what I’d expect him to say, exactly what the kind of perfect, sweet, wonderful man he is would say. But there isn’t any reply I can make that wouldn’t hurt him further.
“Can I bring you dinner later?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I have casseroles from the neighbors, enough to feed a small army. Everyone wanted to be sure I wouldn’t starve. Odd, since the only time they ever spoke to me was to scold my parking.”
“I’d be happy to volunteer to help you eat them.” He pats his stomach and then turns serious. “But if you really want to be alone... It’s just...I didn’t. So I thought you wouldn’t.”
“I might take a trip,” I say. “To sort through some things.” I dig into my purse and pull out my mother’s copy of our apartment key. I press it into William’s hand. “If I’m not back in time to water her plants...” I can’t say any more. I blink hard.
“Of course, I’ll take care of them. But where are you going? Are you sure you’re... You know you’re not alone, that people care about you. There are grief counselors at the hospital. I can make an appointment for you with them, if you aren’t comfortable talking with me or someone you know.”