Chapter 16 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 says Get 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 his breath (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.”
She squeezes him into her and breathes again in that raspy way and it really seems like it is taking a lot of work for her just to breathe, and also like someone else should be coming in any minute now, and she asks him, “What about the day after tomorrow?”
“Well, I guess it’s school again and, um. It’s a Tuesday so we have art class. And gym. Do you think Sadie will come over to babysit?”
His mother does not respond. Her breaths are further and further apart, and her chest has just about stopped going up and down, and maybe she is sleeping, and he puts his head in the soft spot under her armpit and he keeps talking: “And the day after that, I don’t know, maybe it will be a snow day, and we won’t have to go to school.
If you put a spoon under your pillow, it will happen, if everyone does it.
I’ll bring one for you so you can do it too.
And then we can come and hang out with you all day. ”
Afterward, for weeks on end, he will not sleep an unbroken hour, in case he forgets to wake up.
When the doctor calls to Al, it is with more gravity than urgency.
His name is the end of a sentence. Inside Susan’s room, his son is nestled in the space between her breast and her armpit, talking to himself.
At one point, it is possible that he was talking to her but now she is very obviously dead.
“Sebastian.”
He didn’t plan it this way. He hadn’t planned for it to happen like this. He just left the room. He had only stepped out for a moment.
You don’t seem like the type of person who would want to leave in the wrong way.
He looks at her body. He always thought there would be a last conversation.
That it wouldn’t be about walking with her to the bathroom.
Or the choreography of their children, or the next round of scans or chemo.
He had grown so used to it, the illness.
I know what to do, he would think when she would start vomiting, and get the bag with her change of clothes and drive her to the care center, drink shitty coffee from the café, talk to her, wait, talk to the doctors, do what they said, know that she would feel worse and then better, administer increasingly powerful painkillers.
And there was a kind of perverse happiness in this, in helping her, like they were sharing the project of their lives, united under the goal of saving her.
He felt, for the first time since they had been married, like a team.
Like he imagined a husband was supposed to feel.
She looks so small.
When they try to pull Sebastian off of her, his son starts screaming, asking where they are taking her, agitated that no one seems able to describe where she is going, and Al is holding him and he is kicking and it isn’t fair.
“We weren’t done talking,” Sebastian says.
Until this moment (looking at the thing that used to be her body, assigning it a new word: corpse) he hadn’t let go of the ending he imagined for them.
Walks on the seaside, wrinkled hand holding wrinkled hand, a dog.
A shared sense of the world. All the happy continuum of life.
When you get better, he got used to saying, because it felt important for everyone, the project of hope, the fantasy of the future.
It only occurs to him now how many conversations they never had.
Like, how she should be buried. What she should wear. Who should be told.
He could collapse. But here they are, his wide-eyed children, and he is the only thing standing between them and the end of the world.