The nurse gives me a sympathetic smile before wheeling my mom’s bed through the door. “She’ll be back soon enough. There’s coffee by the nurses station.”
In the silence of the room, I let myself shiver until the dread and horror leaves me. Until I’m still in my own body and it’s safe to use my limbs again. When they are, I find that coffee at the nurses station and let the caffeinated bitterness cleanse the rest of the panic away.
Grant’s broad shoulders are suddenly in the doorway of Connie’s room and hastily drop my coffee, the brown liquid splashing over the edges, and wrap my arms around my brother, tears springing anew.
“Grant!”
“What happened?” he demands to know, studying my face with an eerie calm that tells me he knows this is about Connie. That he’s pieced together more than I’ve told him.
“Grant, I wanted to tell you, I swear, I just, I don’t know. I thought it would be better coming from her.” I swipe at the tears collecting on the apples of my cheeks.
“What? What would’ve been better coming from her?”
My face crumbles, the words hardly piercing the veil I’vetried so hard to maintain. But this is one of those signs, isn’t it? Connie’s falling apart, and I’ve been in denial. “She’sdying, Grant. Mom’s dying.”
Grant looks frozen in time, suspended, his gaze suddenly unfocused. “No…Sloane. No, she’s not—” His words fail him, just drop off the imaginary edge as he finds the edge of the second hospital cot and sits.
“She is Grant. It’s why I came here. Why I left California.”
Without Connie’s reemergence in my life, I might’ve found myself somewhere else after the abortion. After Elliot. Somewhere with a beach, a warm one. Somewhere no one would've known me. Instead, I came here, for her, to save her. I failed, though—am failing. My breath shudders with realization just as my brother’s arms find me and pull me close, steadying me.
“I’m sorry I made you deal with this alone, I’m—I’m sorry for everything,” he tells me, and I nod, let myself lean on him, the way I imagine maybe we did in the womb. The way we would on a long car ride to somewhere strange and new. The way we did before he boarded his flight to Boston, to his new life without me. The way we do.
The door sounds with the gentle tapping of Genevieve, and when she cracks open the door, replete in her pink tutu and crystal encrusted leotard, my only grin today cracks across my battered face.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I admit, feeling the depth of her love for not just my brother but for me in the harshly lit hell of this hospital room.
“I’ll always be here,” she soothes, the balm neither my brother nor I were entirely sure we needed just a few months ago. “You know that.”
I nod with fervor, turning to my brother who’s fixated on Gen, whose attention is firmly stuck on the best thinghe ever dared mess up. “Go, talk to her. She came this far.” I nudge him by the shoulder, watching as he and Gen disappear.
It’s only then, once all the angst feels well out of site, that I notice a puzzle peeking out of my mom’s bag. It’s got kittens on it, on a beach, and I take solace that on her worst day, it was a piece of me that she tucked tightly away, close to her.
25
Andy
The snowfall is going to be historic, according to the weather station Mom’s had on all afternoon. The diner let her know she’s off for the night because they anticipated closing early for the storm, to which my mom gasped, “What storm?” and promptly called Carmen to let her know she was on her way to pick her.
She insisted on staying for the Christmas Eve clean up—surprise, surprise—since most people had already gone home for the holiday. She’d catch a ride home before the storm kicked up. And for whatever reason, my mom let it slide. Decided shedidn’tneed to drop everything and make sure her eleven year old daughter got home before the roads got blocked. From where I stand near the sliders that lead to the patio, the roads are more than halfway there.
“No—really I think—” I feel my heart rate in my wrist the moment I hear her.
“Absolutely not!” my mom squeals, cutting off the sweet smoke of Sloane’s voice. “You have to stay. You can’t even drive back in this. And to the airport?”
“You’re so kind,” she says, her voice rising, a little frantic. “But my flight’s…” her voice dips out of my reach, and I know the last thing she wants is to be stranded here. With me.
“Oh, sweetie. You’re not flying anywhere,” Mom chuckles, just as Sloane nervously laughs.
I finally let myself move toward them and find her face illuminated by her phone screen, cold air funneling inside around her, Carmen clinging to her jean leg.
“A little late to make it for Christmas Eve,” I say, clearing my throat. My mom’s head snaps to me, Carmen’s eyes sliding up to me in a glare, and neither of them move.
Sloane’s gaze jumps to mine, panic flashing in her gaze before she slots behind something more practiced—nonchalance, carelessness.
“They’re used to it.”
“You didn’t want to fly back with Grant?”
