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“I love you, Mommy,” Marah had said, and her mom had laughed and said, “I just hope you remember that when you’re a teenager. ”
But Marah had forgotten. How?
She traced the embossed gold lettering with her fingertips. Maybe you’ll feel alone with your sadness.
Marah felt a surge of loss so keen it brought tears to her eyes and thought: She knew me.
Twenty-four
I am back in my make-believe world, my once-upon-a-time world, with my best friend beside me. I can’t picture where exactly, but I am lying in grass, staring up at a starlit sky. I hear strains of a song. I think it’s Pat Benatar, reminding me that love is a battlefield. I don’t know how it’s possible, all this coming and going, but theology was never my strong suit. Pretty much everything I know about religion comes from Jesus Christ Superstar.
My pain is gone; the memory of it remains, though, like a remembered melody, distant, quiet, but there, in the back of your mind.
“Katie, how can it be raining?”
I feel drops, soft as the brush of a butterfly wing against my cheek, and for no reason that makes sense, I feel sad. This world around me—as strange as it is—made sense before. Now something is changing and I don’t like it. I don’t feel safe anymore. Something essential and important is wrong.
It’s not raining.
Her voice has a gentleness I haven’t heard before. Another change.
It’s your mother. She’s crying. Look.
Were my eyes closed?
I open them slowly. The blackness fades unevenly; images drizzle down, drawing light into them. Tiny grains of darkness are drawn together like metal shavings and form themselves into shapes. Light appears suddenly, and I see where I am.
The hospital room. Of course. I’m always here; it is the other places that are mirages. This is real. I can see my banged-up body in the bed; my chest rises and falls in time to the bedside machine that makes a whiz-thunk sound at every exhalation. A graph shows the mountainous green line that is my heartbeat. Up and down, up and down.
My mother is beside the bed. She is smaller than I remember, thinner, and her shoulders sag as if she has spent a lifetime carrying a heavy burden. She is still dressed for another era—that time of Flower Power and Maui Wowie and Woodstock. She is wearing white socks and Birkenstock sandals. But none of that is what matters.
She is crying. For me.
I don’t know how to believe in her, but I don’t know how to let go, either. She’s my mother. After all of it, all the times she’s held on to me and all the times she’s let me go, she’s still woven through me, a part of the fabric of my soul, and it means something, that she’s here.
I feel myself straining forward, listening for her voice. It seems loud in the quiet of this room. I can tell that it is the middle of the night. Beyond the windows, it is jet-black outside.
“I’ve never seen you in pain,” she says to my body. Her voice is almost a whisper. “I never saw you fall down the stairs or scrape your knee or fall off a bike. ” Tears are falling from her eyes.
“I’ll tell you everything. How I became Cloud, how I tried to be good enough for you and failed. How I survived all those bad years. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but I can’t do any of it if you don’t wake up. ” She leans over the bed, looks down at me.
“I’m so proud of you,” my mother says. “I never told you that, did I?”
She doesn’t wipe her tears away. They fall onto my face. Leaning closer, she is almost close enough to kiss my cheek. A thing I can’t ever remember her doing. “I love you, Tully. ” On this, her voice breaks. “Maybe you don’t care, and maybe I’m too late, but I love you. ”
I have waited my whole life to hear those words from my mother.
Tul?
I turn to Kate, see her glowing face and her beautiful green eyes. In them, I see my whole life. Everything I’ve ever been, and ever wanted to be. That’s what your best friend is: a mirror.
It’s time, she says, and I understand at last. I have been coasting with Kate, drifting lazily down the river of my life with her beside me, but there are rapids up ahead.
I have to make a choice, but first I have to remember. I know instinctively that it will hurt.
“Will you stay with me?”
Forever, if I could.
