Fifty-Two—Ivy
N
umb, empty, disoriented. I felt like a small earthquake had shaken me apart. My mother was gone. How could that be? Was it really just two weeks ago that she’d come to Monterey and we’d all been together? Dinner on Lullaby’s patio? Carmel-by-the-Sea? Life did not change that quickly. It couldn’t. There was supposed to be more warning, more time between living and dying to plan, to steel, to get ready to let go. That I’d been sitting here waiting for this didn’t seem to count.
I needed to surface here. I needed to be strong for my grandmother, but I couldn’t seem to stand up straight. I wasn’t ready for the green line on Bree’s monitor to be flat, or the tortured one-note finale ringing out from that same place. This wasn’t happening.
She couldn’t be gone.
***
It probably wasn’t very long, but it felt like a long time before the room filled up with people and attention. Somehow my grandmother was able to rally. She did all the paper-signing when the doctors came in to do their declaration. She did all the instructing when the mortuary people came. She’s the one who called Everett and told him it had happened. She’s the one who said it was time for us to go. I seemed to be standing outside of it all—watching. Watching the details of death go on around me, a mere witness to someone else’s tragedy.
But it was mine. My mother had died, and I kept watching her, willing her to change her mind and breathe. But she didn’t. This was my tragedy, and everything should have stopped. But nothing stopped, and it seemed mocking of the Universe, even cruel for everything to go on when my mother was dead.
“Breathe, Ivy girl,” Geneva said. “Just breathe.”
So, I breathed.
For some reason, a social worker had given me some orange juice. She was lovely, kind, worried that I might not be all right. I wasn’t, but I said I was. I just didn’t know how exactly to act—I didn’t know how to be in this ‘dead-mama’ place, and I was shaking a little. I drank the juice and excused myself to find a restroom. That’s when I called Bo. That’s all I could think to do. I don’t even know why, really—I just wanted to hear his voice. I thought I might not feel so undone if he could just help me know this terrible unknowable thing that had happened. But he didn’t answer. Neither did Mia.
So, I splashed some water on my pale, smudged-up face and swished some around in my mouth. Then I fiddled with my hair and stood back from the mirror. I was on my own—truly—and I needed to get strong fast.
If not for me, then for my grandmother.