I wipe at my face with the backs of both hands. “You probably don’t want to talk about this. You’ve lived through it.”
He shrugs, staring off into the dark backyard.
“You just... I look at you and you seem so put together. So okay. I feel like I should be like that.”
He laughs silently on a long exhale. “You don’t. And I’m not.” He stares up at the stars. His ears are pink from the cold and so is the tip of his nose. In this moment, he looks so vulnerable, so lost. Exactly like a man who lost his mother.
He might be a mess and yet he came here to helpme. After what I said to him, I’m not sure I deserve it.
“Why are you here, Wesley?” I take his hand in mine.
He looks down at our fingers, twined together, then up to me. “You said you felt like you couldn’t trust me, that I let you down. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t let you go through this alone.”
My chest aches for him, for his selflessness, for the way he’s still such a lost boy, for how not okay he feels. “Will you talk about her? Your mom?”
He shrugs. “What do you want to know?”
I lean into him and squint up at the sky. The fear that has been following me rises up again, like a specter just out of my line of sight that disappears every time I turn to it. “You don’t have to if you don’t want but...will you tell me about...when she died?”
He frowns over at me. “Do you really want to hear about that right now, Corrine?”
“I do. If you want to tell me.”
Chapter 45: Wesley
I pull my hand from the warmth of Corrine’s grasp. I need my hands free to talk about this.
“The day Mom died...” I take a deep breath. Saying this out loud feels like a betrayal because my mother never did a thing to deserve these feelings. I push past the guilt and let the words out one by one.
“The most overwhelming emotion I felt was relief.”
I wait for a lightning bolt to hit me. But all that really happens is a tightness I didn’t realize I had loosens in my chest. Corrine reaches out, placing her hand on my thigh, and it feels like permission to keep talking.
“People always say that caregivers need to take time for themselves and I did. But it wasn’t... It didn’t help. Because no matter what, even if I got away for a few hours or overnight or even a weekend, I knew what I was coming back to. There was no escaping it.”
There are tears in my eyes and this is too heavy of a conversation for a person whose mother is in the hospital but now that the words have started I can’t stop.
“She was dying, Corrine. She was going to die and there was no way out of that. We just had to wait for it. Andshehad to wait for it.” My voice breaks. “And then she did die.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that we were there. That we held her hands and she took her last breaths in our living room. She insisted we play this song, this Beatles song she always loved. ‘Rocky Raccoon’ was on repeat for days. She said she wanted to hear it as she went because it made her happy.”
Corrine laughs and sniffles.
“It was as painless as it could have been but she was still gone. She wasn’t ever coming back.”
I take off my glasses and clean the lenses with the hem of my T-shirt. My hands feel so cold. I don’t know how to make them warm again.
“I should have felt grief, you know? I thought that was what I was supposed to feel. And I did eventually. I feel itnow. But when the nurse said, she’s gone. It felt like...like...”
I take a shuddering, gasping breath. I’ve never said this out loud. “It felt like my own death sentence had just been commuted.”
I’d kissed Mom on the forehead and I’d hugged Amy and I’d just walked out. I walked the fuck out of that house and I didn’t come back for hours. “I left. You know where I went?”
She shakes her head, a quick, decisive no.
“I walked all over the city. I got a Big Mac and chicken nuggets and ate them until I felt sick on the curb of a parking lot I don’t even know where. And I felt selfish and so, so relieved. Because I knew that no matter what, no matter how hard it was going to be to live every new day without Mom, that the next time I came back to that house, she wouldn’t still be sick.” I lose my voice for a moment, the grief choking me. “I wouldn’t have to clean up her vomit or pretend that I couldn’t hear her crying when she should have been sleeping. Mom was free and so was I.”
I laugh, my horribly timed laugh. “It was the worst kind of freedom I’ve ever felt.”
