Now! Here she is, at the click of a button, in the passenger seat of a car racing down the highway, made up and dressed to the nines.
MARGIE
Slow down!
How did she make her eyes so wild?
Sirens wail in the background as the driver swerves through traffic. His mother twists to get a look out of the rearview.
MARGIE
It’s not worth it!
In slow motion, a man steps out in front of them. The windshield, split-scattering into one hundred thousand pieces, the sucker punch of the airbag, and the barrel roll of the car: one—two—three—four flips, each one punctuated by metal slamming pavement. The slow, bloody turn of the driver, another woman, devastated, wailing at the curled-up body of the pedestrian. Orson Grey, his mouth moving over rising strings. The cop cars pull to a stop, cut the sirens. And then unbearable silence. A slow pan over guardrails wrenched spinal out of the earth. Her body lifted on a stretcher, lifeless but hardly scathed. An elegant garnet trickle.
Sebastian replays the scene multiple times, biting his tongue to stiff himself, hunting for the moment of impact. Someone had to decide when exactly she died. Didn’t they? He flips through the comments below the video.
burger_mama: our angel has gone 2 heaven
Did it help to go through the motions of death? Maybe. But there’s a difference between practicing and letting go.
He picks up and puts down his phone, wondering whether he can text Lola with some pretense, to ask: “Are you okay?” But he doesn’t.
Later, they will remember it differently, who was the one to leave.
1997
Sebastian helped decorate his mom’s new room with crayon drawings of dragons and trucks, and just now he is finishing a drawing of a monkey. He takes the tape off one of the cards someone gave her, cursive handwriting that he can’t read that probably saysGet Well Soon, and sticks the monkey on the wall by her bed. No one will notice about the card. His mom doesn’t let anyone in except Sadie and doctors who look at her papers and change out the bag of yellow liquid behind her bed. It looks like pee but his father told him it was juice.
His mother is sleeping. She sleeps most of the time now. He doesn’t understand, if she’s just sleeping, why she wouldn’t want to sleep in her own bed. This one is thin and uncomfortable, but it doesn’t stop him from climbing up and sitting next to her hip. She is wearing her headwrap with the gold chain pattern on it, which has slipped loose a little bit, and he can see her naked scalp underneath. She let him touch it a few days ago, and it was clammy and soft. Lola hadn’t liked it, had looked at their mother like she didn’t know her, but Sebastian rubbed it like a crystal ball and it made his mother laugh.
He resists the urge to touch it now, but nestles himself against her. Her breath is wind blowing across a marsh. Even though she’s sleeping, he can feel how desperately she wants to be with him. It’s the reason he doesn’t want to leave, even though today is Zach Papadopolous’s birthday party at the roller rink, and he loves the roller rink. He hardly thinks about it now. It is very important to keep making crayon drawings for the wall. He is trying to use every color in his box of sixty-four, even though some of them are gross, and still has a few of them in his hand that he hasn’t yet used. As he is sounding out a shade of green under hisbreath (ass-pair-uhh…) his mother’s eyes drift open and she looks at him strangely, differently. As though she is also a child and lost.
“Did you see the monkey I made?”
“Where are they?” she asks.
“They’re, um. I think they’re coming,” he says.
The words feel right, but the truth is, he doesn’t know where they are. Lola keeps making excuses for why she doesn’t want to be in here, and about five minutes or a million years ago, asked if she could get some chocolate milk. So she left with their father. Sebastian wanted to stay. He is afraid of what might happen if he leaves.
“Sebi,” she says, “I’m going to sleep now. And I think you should go.”
Shouldn’t someone be here?He looks at the door. No one comes in. Not his father or Lola or Sadie or one of her friends or anyone else, not even a nurse, and he realizes that his mother is squeezing his hand because she is afraid.
None of this makes any sense. He always thought that dying would mean a great intensity, a scrabbling, and then a moment where everything slows and dims, like Mufasa falling off the cliff and the world zooming backward into a dust storm and everything terrible happening very far away.
“Do you want me to tell you a story?” he asks. Her hand is bent back, unnatural.
“Tell me about what you’re going to do tomorrow.”
“Well, there’s school,” he says, “and then after, if it’s sunny, maybe Lola and I can go sledding. And then we are gonna have dinner and come back to see you.”
“You’ll be good to Lola, won’t you? You’ll help her?”
“I guess so. She’s so annoying.”
“She loves you. I love you too.”
