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“I might. I haven’t decided.” She smiles sadly. “This seems like a beautiful place to die, though, doesn’t it? I’ve thought that ever since we arrived. If I have to go, might as well be in a place like this.”
I frown. “Maybe I’ll take that seat after all.” I sink down onto the bench next to her. The wood groans under my weight, but it holds.
She turns and looks at me with a strange distance in her eyes. “I’m dropping a lot on you, but it’s only because I know you can handle it. You’re tough. And I don’t mean strong or scary or whatever you probably think I mean.” Gram inhales, and I hear it catch. Then she coughs—a wet, wrenching sound from deep in her lungs. She’s out of breath when she finishes. “You know how to lose people.”
I see my mother. Emily. Now, Benjamin.
But it hasn’t made me tough. It’s made me hollow. I’ve never felt weaker in all my life.
“Losing people doesn’t make you tough,” I murmur.
“It doesn’t make you tough, but it reveals just how strong you actually are,” she says. “You have to know how to pick up and move on after loss. It’s something I’ve never been very good at, I’m afraid. When my husband died, I kept the house we shared for too long. Long enough that I couldn’t afford it and the bank took it. I kept boxes of his old shirts and photographs in a storage unit paid for by Piper for… God, it was years. I clung to every little piece of him even though it was hurting who was left. Even though it hurt Piper.”
I remember the stack of bills on Piper’s desk at her old apartment. The way her father smiled as I gave him fifty-thousand dollars to never see her again.
“No one in your granddaughter’s life seems to mind hurting her,” I grind out.
“People are selfish that way.” She nods. “I am. Or… I was. Actually, I still am. But I don’t want to be. I want to be like Piper. She’s a good one.”
“She’s a doormat.”Unless she’s betraying me, apparently. If she did even betray me…I’m honestly not sure anymore.
“Because Piper doesn’t know how to let go.” She snaps her fingers like we’ve just solved it. The great puzzle of life. “She doesn’t let go of the dead or the living. She holds onto all of it…and I need you to help her let go of me.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
She shrugs. “I might be. Or I might not. I’ve never claimed to be brave, so I might not do the right thing.”
“What is the right thing?” I ask.
She inhales to respond and coughs again. In my peripherals, I see Piper sit up straight and look over, worried.
“I’m not well.” She glances up at me for a second and then sags wearily. “I’ve been sick most of Piper’s life. When she came to me, I’d been smoking and drinking and living hard for too long. That kind of lifestyle catches up with you.”
“But you took her in.”
“I had to. Her mom and dad couldn’t do right by her. I couldn’t, either. But I tried. In the end, Piper is the one who did right by me. She took out loans for me. She did everything she could to make sure I got the care I needed when my lungs went to shit and I needed a new hip. But I’m tired of being a burden to her. Honestly, I’m just tired.”
Suddenly, it clicks. What Gram has been saying this entire time shifts into place. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
She stares straight ahead at the ceiling of umbrellas across the courtyard. “Life will be easier for her if I’m gone.”
Somewhere deep in the past, decades gone, I hear my mother’s voice. “You’ll be better off without me here, Timofey,” she’d said. “I can’t help you. I can’t raise you.”
The number of times I comforted my mother when she should have been the one comforting me… I remember begging her to stay alive and then splashing in puddles outside an hour later. That shouldn’t have been on me as a kid. I know that now.
But dealing with losing her was worse than the struggle to keep her alive.
No matter what it cost me, I would have rather she lived.
“Losing you won’t make anything easier for Piper.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t know that.”
“Actually, I do. You’re the only family she has. If you left, she’d be heartbroken. She’d never recover.”
Gram sighs. “I think she would. Because she isn’t alone.”
I look over, eyebrow arched.
