“The nurses did their best to prepare me for the end. It was kind of them, but there’s no way to prepare a child to watch their parent die.” His voice grew quieter. “Even before the diagnosis, mom was so frail that everyone said it would be over quickly.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t. Or maybe it was, but it didn’t feel that way to me, because she was dying and there was nothing I could do to save her. All I could do was sit there and say goodbye to her in stages. The day she lost the ability to speak, I remember staring down at her hand while I cried. Her skin was so transparent that I could count every single vein.”
A tear slipped down my cheek. Yes, I hated this man, but it didn’t mean my heart wasn’t breaking for him.
“It was in her lungs, at the end,” he said, staring out at the highway with unseeing eyes. “I still hear the sound of her gasping in my nightmares. I think she was trying to stay as long as she could for me. I can’t explain how else she hung on for as long as she did. The day she slipped into a coma, I finally found the courage to tell her to let go. I told her it was okay to stop fighting. I lied and said I’d be all right, that I couldn’t watch her suffer anymore because it was killing me, too.”
I reached out and threaded my fingers through Tyler’s free hand, dragging it into my lap, squeezing it so he knew that at least he wasn’t reliving this alone.
“She must have believed me, because she passed that night. Afterward, I sat with her body for over an hour before the nurses were able to lead me from the room, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice hoarse.
He shook his head. “Because we didn’t have any money. I tried to go to my grandparents, but they refused to claim Mom’s body or help with her funeral costs even though they’d sold the farm and actually had money by then. She wanted to be buried,” Tyler said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But in the end, she was handed over to the state and cremated because no one would help me.”
He cleared his throat, sniffed, and the sound of him trying to hold it together was enough to make me lose the fight against my own tears. I turned my head away so he wouldn’t see, because what right did Ihave to cry?
Listening to Tyler’s story was enough to makemewant to burn the entire world to the ground. No wonder he was so angry, so mean, so unwilling to let people in. Why would he when all anyone had ever done was hurt him?
“It wasn’t until senior year of college, after I hosted my first big poker party, that I had enough money to do right by her,” he said. “I found a nice plot of land in a cemetery overlooking a lake and bought it for her. It took another party for me to afford the kind of coffin she deserved. Another one before I could buy her headstone. She has everything she wanted now, and I even pay a groundskeeper to buy new flowers every week and place them by her headstone.”
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I said.
Tyler turned toward me, but instead of grief, I saw a deep, cavernous well of rage in his eyes. He yanked his hand out of mine. “I don’t want your apology, Stella. I just wanthimto hurt as badly as she did.”
32
Tyler
Ihadn’t been back tothis piece of shit town in years. Not since Josh’s mom and stepdad moved away. There was nothing for me here but bad memories and the evidence that nothing had changed. The houses were still run down. The yards were overgrown with weeds. The concrete roads were pitted and pockmarked, and the dirt ones were so bad you’d need a lifted truck to navigate them.
Mom was buried a whole county over in a much nicer area, away from her fucked-up family. I didn’t even tell them where she was—those assholes didn’t deserve access to her. So, no, there hadn’t been a reason for me to come back here. Not until now.
One of the few changes of note was that there were more trees than I remembered. This part of the country was flat, and growing up, there had been a lot of open fields, though they’d mostly laid fallow because the local farming industry had been in full collapse by then. Now the forests were creeping back in, reclaiming what had been stolen from them. I wondered if that meant the wildlife was rebounding, too, bears and wolves stalking through the trees.
Stella was quiet beside me, her face turned away as she stared out the window at the passing landscape. Seeing her openly weep for me had been oddly gratifying. Like maybe I wasn’t wrong for thinking I had an especially shitty childhood.
She must have felt my eyes on her because she glanced my way. “Where are we going?”
“To see my aunt Jenny. She was the only one Mom had any contact with and can confirm everything I told you.”
Ten minutes later, a familiar, abandoned farmhouse appeared ahead on the right, looking even more decrepit than I remembered, the roof caving in, the front porch half rotted away. I hit my blinker and turned onto a dirt road just past it, slowing the car to avoid all the ruts and potholes. My shoulders stiffened up, and I put both hands on the wheel, white-knuckling it even though we were only going ten miles an hour.
Stella noticed. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. Aunt Jenny will confirm everything I told you, and then you’ll know I’m not lying.”
“I don’t think you’re lying,” she said. “Not about this. I believe you really think Richard treated your mom that way.”
“But you still don’t believe he did.”
“Does it matter if I do?”
“It does,” I said before I could stop myself.
Did I have any right to ask her to believe me? No. But I was asking anyway because Ineededsomeone else to hear the whole story. To understand that I had my reasons for doing what I’d done, behaving the way I had.
My mother died a horrible death that might have been prevented if she’d had access to early cancer screenings or better healthcare. Coverage shewouldhave had if Richard had done the right thing. For him to claim he’d been looking for us, all so he could save face if the scandal eventually broke, was un-fucking-forgivable. I couldn’t let him get away with it.
All too soon, we were pulling into the dusty driveway of a run-down, brown-shingled ranch. Pink flamingos dotted the lawn. A flower basket hung beside the front door. We parked next to Jenny’s ancient, rusted-out minivan, and I turned off the car. Two tired-looking old hound dogs roused themselves from the front porch. One gave a lowwoofas they headed our way, but neither seemed aggressive.
