Page 87 of See You Next Tuesday

“Yeah?” Gabe turned his body ever so slightly toward Anya’s.

“She loved secret stuff—out-of-the-way stuff. Whenever we took a road trip, she always had a list of all these little side quests. Twenty miles to a waterfall, fifteen miles to a Vietnamese sandwich stand with outrageous bánh mì. My dad would complain about how much time it added to the trip, and she’d say, That’s the whole point of driving, Walt! If you don’t want to see any of it, you might as well fly and miss all of it.”

Anya was getting teary again; Gabe took her hand and squeezed it.

“Is this okay?” he asked, glancing down at their fingers.

Anya squeezed his hand back and nodded.

“You can tell me,” he said. “What happened. What it was like. If you want.”

Anya swallowed. She didn’t know how to explain those terrifying weeks, the fumbling doctors, the realization that they didn’t know what to do any more than she did. The tense hallway gatherings and maudlin bedside scenes that felt like a TV movie instead of Anya’s final hours with her mother.

“It’s hard, because when it was happening, it was like, I can’t wait until I forget this, you know? Like I couldn’t wait until it felt really foggy and distant, so I wasn’t trying to remember any of the details. But then I realized—oh, this is the end. These are going to be my last memories of my mother, and I’ve been trying so hard not to remember them. Like I had made a terrible mistake, but it was too late.”

“It’s too chaotic in hospitals,” Gabe said. “It’s too much to take in.”

Anya nodded. “The first brain bleed was the bad one. That was the first surgery, when they shaved her head, and my dad called me in the middle of the night. She was supposed to be okay after that one. I thought I was going to meet her in recovery. So I was a wreck, but like, I was still wondering when I could get back to work.”

Gabe nodded. “Of course. It was October.”

“Right. So I was doing work in the hospital, taking calls. And my mom seemed out of it, but we all thought that’s normal, she just had brain surgery! Except then they told us it wasn’t normal, and there was a secondary bleed, and they wanted to do another surgery to try to repair it as soon as she was strong enough. But they couldn’t agree on when that was. So it was like, do you go in to try and get the bleed before it kills her? Or if you go in too soon, will that kill her? They didn’t know.”

“Anya,” Gabe exhaled. “That’s horrible.”

“And you know how in baseball, when your team gets hot, you think they’re going to win every game of the season? But then they drop twelve, and you’re like, well, that’s the end, they’ll never be good again?”

“Sure?” Gabe peered at her, not following.

“That’s how it was with my mom,” Anya explained. “For an hour she’d be totally herself, and we’d be joking and laughing, and it was like, yes, great, this is all going to be okay! But then she’d be so sluggish, and slurring her words, and we’d have no idea why, and it felt like that would never change either. And the doctors didn’t know what exactly was causing it, except that this secondary bleed was in her speech and cognition center, so they were certain it was related.”

“Did they do the second surgery?”

“They tried, but they had to stop. She was too weak. So the only choice was to wait, to hope she had enough time for them to try again. My dad and I basically moved into the hospital at that point. We wouldn’t leave her. And then her friends came to see her, and family, and all these students…”

Anya trailed off. She didn’t want to admit to Gabe the way she’d felt when the parade of visitors began. It was too selfish. Too ugly.

“Were they constantly asking if you were okay?” Gabe asked. “The dumbest question in the history of humanity?”

“Yes. And telling me not to worry, that she would pull through. It was like, I don’t know that! The doctors don’t know that! You certainly don’t know that, Aunt Lori.”

“Stupid Aunt Lori,” Gabe grumbled encouragingly, and Anya almost laughed—but it caught in her chest, came out a plaintive sound instead.

“My dad finally put a stop to it. At the end. It was just us.” Anya’s voice broke. “That’s what my mom would always say, after everyone left on Thanksgiving or whatever. ‘I like it when it’s just us.’ So that’s how we thought she would want it. Even though she couldn’t really talk by that point.”

“And the surgeons couldn’t go back in?” Gabe asked. “Try again?”

Anya shook her head. “They said they would try if we wanted them to, but they were pretty certain it would kill her, and we didn’t—we didn’t want her to die like that, bleeding on a table. So we decided to make her comfortable. Spend whatever time she had left together.”

“That was right.” Gabe squeezed Anya’s hand. “I’m sure that was right.”

“We brought in bagels and Chinese, sat around telling stories. Sometimes it seemed like she could follow what we were saying? But sometimes she was too tired. That’s what it was like at the end—she was just tired. And then she fell asleep.”

“And she didn’t wake up?” Gabe asked.

Anya nodded. She and her dad were both there at the end, each holding one of her mother’s hands, telling her they loved her.

“And since then it’s been like…like I don’t know how to be happy anymore?” Anya squeaked. “Which feels appropriate, because how can I be happy when she’s gone? But then it’s also like, I know that’s not what she’d want, so I feel like I’m letting her down?”