I’m the only one in this family who has ever been able to keep a secret. My sisters and my mom think they can. But the thing about being the littlest sister is you learn at an early age that if you ever want to know anything, you have to sneak around to learn it.
Maybe that was why Grammy chose me to carry out her final wishes. Maybe she saw something in me the others didn’t; maybe she was the only one who didn’t see me as the baby, who didn’t underestimate me.
In retrospect, it was the right choice. Caroline is outwardly the toughest, but that toughness works against her, in that sometimes she fights too long; sometimes she doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Sloane is the sweetest. She has a quiet strength about her that allows her to persevere. She also has the strongest faith, which is terrific. But not for what Grammy needed.
Mom had been through enough, quite frankly.
Plus, they weren’t who she chose. Grammy chose me.
We had all been out in the yard that day a few months earlier—Caroline, Sloane, Mom, and me. I was on the porch, telling Grammy a story about the worst first date I ever had in LA, about how this man was offensive and borderline sexist in every sense of the word. Determined to maintain my power and stand up for the good of the sisterhood, I had chewed him out and thrown the rest of my martini in his face. To be fair, it was only like two sips, so it wasn’t that big a deal. But still, I marched out of the restaurant with a dramatic flourish. I even woke up the next morning feeling proud and vindicated—until I walked into an audition. And found out the director was my date from the night before.
“Oh, no!” Grammy said, laughing. “So you didn’t get the part?”
I laughed then, too. “Oh, no. I got the part. In fact, I didn’t even have to audition.”
“What?”
I nodded. “As it turned out, the director had already told them about his lunatic date from the night before. And since the part was a crazy ex-girlfriend, they all knew I would be perfect for it.”
That was when Grammy had lowered the boom. She had been fighting breast cancer, secretly, for more than a year. The treatments weren’t working. The cancer had spread. She was going to stay on hormonal therapies and treatments as long as they worked, but when they quit, she would be ready to live out her final days in peace, however she pleased, not chained to a bag of chemo.
When the tears had subsided, when we had all agreed to Grammy’s wishes to be happy and carefree and alive for as long as she could and, to that end, were all getting ready for lunch together, I walked into Grammy’s room to see if she needed help.
She was sitting in a chair in the corner, looking at something in her hand. When I walked in, she smiled up at me. “Just the girl I wanted to see.”
“Oh, yeah?” We all knew that Caroline was Grammy’s favorite.
She put her hand in my hand, and I felt something in my palm.
When I opened it, there were several small pills in it.
“What is this?”
She cleared her throat and said a word I had never heard but would roll around in my head forever after: “Secobarbital.” When no words escaped my suddenly dry mouth, she added, “I couldn’t tell them all yet, but I’m going to be honest with you. The doctors have done all they can do to treat the metastasis to my brain. It’s going to get ugly soon. And I’m afraid I won’t be aware enough to make the decision.”
I could feel myself going pale. “Grammy,” I started, “what’s—”
But she cut me off. “Darling,” she said, “all I’m asking is that when I ask for these, you give them to me.” She cleared her throat. “And if I can’t ask for them, that means I’m asking for them.”
I shook my head, feeling my heart race. “Grammy, I can’t.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Really? Because I think you can.”
The way she looked at me was what convinced me. Because I knew she saw something in me that no one else did, that she believed in me in a way no one else ever had. But I still resisted. “What about Caroline? Or Mom?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Under all that pretty, you, my dear, have a spine of steel. I think we both know it has to be you.”
“Where did you even get them?” I whispered, awed and suddenly paranoid.
She raised her eyebrow. “Do you really want to know?”
I looked at her warily.
“Mark,” she whispered back.
I almost asked a follow-up question, but there was nothing to ask. Mark’s father was a surgeon. A great surgeon. A revered one. He had access to anything he wanted. And it warmed my heart to think that Mark and his father would do this for my grandmother, that they would take this chance.
I looked into her face then: her kind, soft eyes, the lines around her mouth and nose from all the laughing she had done, her long eyelashes, even after all these years. She wasn’t some dying woman who had lost her mind. She was still her. I took her hand in mine, if only to feel her warmth, the blood still running through her veins. God, I didn’t want this. But it seemed as though it wasn’t really a choice.
