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She was only thirty-seven, but she looked like she’d aged twenty years in the last two months. She had a scarf over her head and her skin was ghost white. Her arms were bony and frail, almost skeletal. If I’d had any doubt before, I was certain now. Mom was dying. And the reason my father had driven to the hospital in the middle of the night was so I could say goodbye.
I sat down on the chair Dad had vacated.
Mom, looking like it was a struggle just to keep her eyes open, reached for my hand. “Hello, my baby.”
I held back my impending tears. My mother had been strong for me any and every time I needed her. Now she needed me to be the strong one. I wasn’t going to let her down.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, my voice steady as I took her hand.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Ian. The doctors thought I would get better. I was supposed to be back home by mid-August. But it didn’t work out that way.”
“It’s okay,” I said, hoping she knew I forgave her.
“Have you been having fun at Daddy’s this summer?”
Under normal circumstances, I would have told her the truth: that it was the worst summer of my life and I’d never been so unhappy. But Mom always said that nothing made her happier than seeing me happy. So I played the part. For her sake. “Yeah,” I said, faking enthusiasm. “We went to a baseball game last week at Yankee Stadium. We sat right behind home plate.”
“Wow,” she said weakly. “That sounds really exciting. Could you see their faces and everything?”
“Yeah. And Derek Jeter hit a homerun in the third inning.”
“Oh my gosh,” she said, “that’s so exciting. Wait till you tell—”
She stopped, and I could see she had realized her error. She had been on the verge of saying,Wait till you tell Bobby and Jay. But I would never have a chance to tell Bobby and Jay. Because I was never going back to my home and my friends and my school and my happy life again.
Feebly, she squeezed my hand. “You’re going to be living with Daddy from now on,” she said, getting serious. “And things are going to be different. It won’t be like back home. People will treat you differently. They’ll all want to be your best friend and constantly tell you how wonderful and smart and perfect you are. But you’re not going to believe them. You won’t like the things they like or want the things they want. You’re going to feel like no one really cares about you, and that the only reason everyone’s so nice to you is because of Daddy’s money. You’ll stop trusting people. You’ll start to believe that no one will ever really want to love you. But you’ll be wrong. Please believe me. You’re a wonderful young man and a beautiful soul. You’re worth loving, Ian. If you forget everything else I’ve ever said to you, remember that. You’re worth loving.”
By the time the boy arrived at his new boarding school in faraway Massachusetts, the summer was gone and a fewscatteredleaves were already falling. The next day, before school even started, he met his new guidance counselor.
“This is for you,” the counselor said, sliding a black and white composition notebook across his stately oak desk. “Every night starting tonight, I want you to spend a half hour writing.”
“About what?” the boy said, his tone cynical.
“About your mother,” the counselor said. “Everything you remember about her, from your very first memory to your last.”
The boy slid the journal back across the counselor’s desk. He was mad at the world and everyone in it, and had no interest in the clueless counselor’s meaningless guidance.
The counselor gently slid the notebook back. “I can’t make you write anything,” he said to the boy. “But I’m going to ask you to choose to. Memories are fragile and you’ll be surprised how quickly they slip away. Writing them down while they’re fresh will keep them safe. You’ll be glad you did it someday. I promise.”
That night, the boy sat on his bed with the composition book on his lap, reading the words he’d written thus far.
Mom died three weeks ago. My school counselor gave me this notebook and said I should write down all my memories of her before I forget them. I told him I didn’t want to, but he says I don’t ever have to show it to anyone else and I’ll be glad when I’m older.
Just writing the words made the boy angry. He hated everyone on earth for daring to exist in a world where his mother did not, and was sorely tempted to find a match and burn the notebook in a garbage can. But just as he was imagining lighting a match, a forgotten memory suddenly sprung into his mind. It was his mother, lighting eight candles on a birthday cake that was supposed to be shaped like a baseball diamond but looked more like an umbrella. She’d baked and decorated it herself, and they were both laughing so hard at the sight of it that they couldn’t extinguish the candles no matter how hard they blew.
Smiling, the boy decided to write the memory down lest he forget it again, this time forever. Then he decided to write down one more memory, this one from when he was three. His mother was sitting across from him at a picnic table, cutting a hotdog into bitesize pieces with a plastic knife and then squirting ketchup into a little cup for him to dip it in. That was it, the entire memory. His mother cutting a hotdog and putting ketchup into a cup. The entry took up two whole lines.
He looked at the clock. The night was young and he had nothing better to do, so he decided to write about the time when he was five and his mother put a gold star sticker on the end of his nose for being a good boy and putting away his own toys. Technically it was just a dumb little sticker, but it felt like an Olympic gold medal. He’d never been so proud.
There was still plenty of room left on the page, so he wrote out the lyrics to “You Are My Sunshine.” Then he remembered the time when he was twelve and got knocked over by a wave at Long Beach Island. His mother ran into the water to rescue him in front of about a hundred teenage girls. He was told that he would someday look back on the incident and laugh. He doubted it, but he decided to record the memory anyway, just in case.
By the end of the boy’s first night of writing, his counselor was officially the only adult on earth he trusted, and the black-and-white composition book had become his new best friend. He continued writing, night after night, for the entire school year, religiously chronicling every single memory of his mother. As the school year drew to a close and the notebook approached capacity, he started writing in smaller and smaller script so that everything would fit. By the time he got to the last page, he practically needed a magnifying glass to read his own handwriting. But he did it. He fit every memory he had into a single fifty-cent composition notebook. And he used every last inch of white space. In the lower right-hand corner of the back inside cover was his very last memory of his mother, the last words she had ever spoken to him.
You’re worth loving.
CHAPTER 33
Clara
