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“Oh, I won’t. Love you.” I laughed and hugged her again, before hurrying out the door.
* * *
Aaronand I were going to play video games before bed, I think.
Or I was wanting to text with a cute fairy girl I’d met at a club the previous weekend.
There was some reason I was in such a hurry that I noticed Mom’s hug felt a little weaker than usual but ignored it.
But even if I hadn’t, even if I’d said something to Dad about it, there was nothing I could have done to save her.
Afterwards—after the funeral and the mourning rituals and holding my dad while he cried in front of me for the first time—I worked up the nerve to ask the doctor about it. He said even if she’d been put on bedrest and agreed to terminate her pregnancy, she still might not have lived through it.
And Mom wouldn’t have agreed to that. She wanted to give Diana a little sister too much.
The baby who died along with Mom was another girl.
Another girl…conceived naturally even though Mom was forty-eight years old and should have been done having kids for fuck’s sake.
She and Dad should have taken precautions. They should have realized that she was too old for it to be safe for her to get pregnant again. They should have realized how much the kids they had already needed their mother.
Later, I would work through a fucking truckload of anger with both my parents and Fate and even that poor little stillborn baby.
Later, I would grieve and change and harden and become someone so different from the boy I was before.
* * *
But on theafternoon I push through my parents’ front door after school, bursting to tell Mom the good news about my trip, only to find Diana cowering under the coffee table in her wolf form, keening like the world is about to end, all I feel is…terror.
Dropping my backpack to the floor, I race across the room, falling to my knees by the table and reaching for my sister.
“Dee dee, baby, what’s wrong?” I hook my thumbs under her front legs and gently pull her into my arms. Sitting back on my heels, I cuddle her close and stroke her fuzzy white fur, still not as coarse as a grown wolf’s. “Hush, Squirt, it’s okay, I’m here. What’s wrong? Where’s Mom?”
She whimpers harder and squirms in my arms.
I reach out telepathically, Hey, there, sis, don’t cry. I’m here. Just calm down and talk to me, okay? Can you hear me in your head? If so, nod once for me, all right?
But she doesn’t nod, she continues to keen and moan, which isn’t really a surprise. She’s a precocious kid and has already found her pack gift years before most kids even understand what that is. But developing telepathic powers before puberty is almost unheard of.
So, she’s still a wolf pup when I pick her up, carrying her with me as I move through the apartment, calling out for Mom.
Dee can’t speak in her furry form. She has no way to tell me that I’m about to turn the corner in the master bedroom and find our mother lying by the bathtub in a sea of red.
There’s so much blood it almost completely covers the tile.
Only Mom’s face—so pale it’s whiter than the marble countertops—is blood-free. It makes it easy to see how still and stiff her features have become. Easy to see that her eyes aren’t blinking and conclude they’ll never blink again.
The realization that my mother is dead hits like a sledgehammer to the stomach, and my first instinct is to run.
I want to hold tight to Diana and race out of this room, this apartment, this tower, to run and keep running until we reach another reality where this hasn’t happened.
Or maybe we can time travel, sprint fast enough to slip into the past and save our mom, this woman who is the heart of our family, our touchstone, the voice I hear in my head when I’m trying to be the kindest, highest version of myself.
But at eighteen, I know better.
I can’t run.
There is no escape from the brutal pain and grief that’s already on top of me and my poor baby sister.
