Chapter 15
Dina’s voice startled me out of the near daze I had been in for hours.
“No, my darling, I’m not arguing. He does look just like you did at that age.”
Who was she talking to? I looked around. She stared at the wall but not at any of us. What was happening?
Eric sighed, rubbing his eyes. “This is normal.” His voice was low. “Sometimes people, toward the end, they see their departed loved ones.”
“Really?” Phoenix widened his eyes from where he sat across from me. “Why?”
“Well, we don’t know why.” Eric sunk into a chair. “Maybe it’s something happening in her brain or maybe she is, indeed, seeing the people she loved who have moved on. I am not really in a position to say.”
Dina’s helper, who I’d discovered was a hospice nurse among other things, fussed with her blanket before leaving her and slipping out of the room.
Everyone was seated now, and Kit shook his leg, looking left and right.
Daniel put his arm around his older brother, which stopped the movement.
I had never seen Kit when he didn’t seem like he was in control of the room.
This had to be throwing him for a loop. Or at least I imagined it was. I had found my mother dead.
I really never thought about that. My father had died—and I didn’t know the circumstances surrounding it—and my mother I had found dead.
I blinked. This was absolutely not the first time I had been around death.
I just never let myself think about that aspect of it.
The before and the after, that was how I existed.
Only I had a before, and an after, and an actual moment where the two existences had collided.
Right that fucking second. Why did I never think about that?
Dr. Trevor was right. I really didn’t deal with my trauma. Ever. And I certainly wasn’t going to deal with it now.
“No, I am so glad to see you.” She laughed gently at something. “When there were four of them, I knew you guys were with me then. Four boys. That had to be your doing. Your personal wink that you had never really left me.”
I turned toward Barrett who I sat right next to and took his hand in mine.
He was silent. I wasn’t sure he was even seeing his grandmother in that moment.
It was like he was present with us but not really present.
He squeezed my fingers, bringing our joined hands to his mouth so he could kiss my palm.
It was a relief when he did that. I wasn’t sure where he had gone, but it couldn’t have been any place good.
Barrett carried the emotional burdens of his entire family, mostly silently.
He and Phoenix were bookends to the twins, each one shouldering things in the ways that they could manage.
“Oh, hello. ” She smiled. “No, I would know you two anywhere even though we never met.”
The twins looked at each other. Yes, it was a little bit strange that she would be speaking to people she didn’t know? Wasn’t it?
“Your love was all over her. I could feel it. So perfectly meant to be with the children. Why yes, it’s the red hair.”
Rosalind jolted and met my gaze. Who was she talking to? Did she think—or was she seeing?—my parents?
Barrett squeezed my hand tighter. “It’s okay. It really is,” he whispered. “Whatever is happening… it’s a good thing. I mean, I’d rather have people around me as this happened than not, even if it’s only in my head.”
That was true.
Dina had known loneliness when her parents died, for a little while. She had known it again when some of the people she was seeing now had perished in a car accident. But she was a Lent and they always turned up for one another, particularly when it mattered.
My first tear slipped out of my eyes, and I batted it away. This wasn’t about me. This was about Dina who had adopted me into her life last June and changed everything.
If I lived past my eighteenth birthday, it was quite literally because of her. If I got to love the four Lent brothers for the rest of my life, it was because of her. I had her diaries. I would do what she had asked me to do. It was the least I could do.
There was silence in the kitchen except for the sounds of water dripping. Eventually someone—maybe Daniel—got up and messed with the faucet to make it stop.
“Someone has to write an obituary.” Kit looked at Rosalind and then over toward where I sat with my guys. “Julian, could you do that?”
He rapidly blinked. “What?”
“It’s four in the morning.” Rosalind touched Kit’s arm. “Let’s do this a little later today. Okay? Noon. Ask Jules at noon or later.”
He nodded. “Sure.”
There turned out to be a lot of things that had to happen after someone died.
My father didn’t have an obituary, not really.
A statement—two lines—of death in a local Colorado newspaper where we hadn’t been mentioned.
That was because he wasn’t real, had been hiding who he was.
My mother had one. Her family had done it.
But it had been vague. If Julian wrote Dina’s obituary, it was going to be beautiful.
“Sure, I’ll do it, Kit.” He nodded. “I may need to ask you for some details. Dates. Things like that.”
“Yep.”
We walked in silence back to our house. It was raining, a cool drip, and for once I didn’t mind it. My body was numb, and I could at least feel the coolness on my head.
“Anyone hungry?” I looked around, not really expecting a yes, and the shakes of their head confirmed it.
When we climbed into bed, I was between Phoenix and Barrett. Minutes passed and no one had spoken or fallen asleep. There was just oppressive silence in the room.
“I don’t think she expected this to happen so fast,” Julian whispered. “When she arrived she thought she’d have time. A little bit of it anyway but maybe it’s better.”
Maybe it was.
The night—or was it the day—ticked on.
I must have fallen asleep. We all did because I woke up and they were all still asleep.
The clock read noon. The familiar sounds of the Lents sleeping were all around me.
Phoenix’s hand was tangled in my hair, but he looked like he slept peacefully.
Barrett had his legs over mine, essentially pinning me to the bed.
He murmured in his sleep, which was probably what woke me.
Sometimes he did that, and usually I slept through it but not this afternoon.
The twins snored on opposite sides of the other bed. They were really out. I stared at the ceiling. I could lie here, or I could get up and do what she asked me to do. I could read her journals.
Somehow I managed to get out from under Barrett and untangled myself from Phoenix without waking them.
I went to the bathroom, cleaned up, and brewed coffee before I sat down to read.
All of it felt mechanical, like I couldn’t think of anything except the actual movement I needed to do those things. I was a robot—I could perform tasks.
But I opened the journal and caught my breath.
Could I actually do this? I hadn’t considered I might not be able to read her at all.
She was gone. Okay. I was doing this. I just had to pull it together.
That was all. I didn’t do grief well, and I was going to bet the Lents didn’t either.
We were all kind of a mess on a good day.
So I had to do this because the nicest woman I had ever known asked me to.
Of course she had been big on me not stressing myself out. Telling me not to read it during the summer when she wanted me to have fun. She might not insist on the day of her death that I open the journals and do this.
I steeled my shoulders. I could be a turtle, or I could take the world by the horns the way she would have. She’d learned to make it move for her. She was going to teach me how, and even though that hadn’t happened in person maybe she still could.
Okay. I was just going to do this.
I opened it up and I thumbed to the last page I had read.
June 1st, 1968
They have demolished Radio City to build it.
The glass building my uncle was going to make the glass for.
But he is dead. I saw it in the newspaper, a small mention that he had died.
Alone. In his apartment. A neighbor eventually found him.
The article didn’t say how. I could imagine some horrible ways.
Vic had been right. I never had to see my uncle again. I might have even missed the article if I hadn’t been lazy and reading the paper when I should have gone to work. He will not live to see the glass in those buildings. Someone else will do it. That feels… right somehow.
I’m not pregnant, and I am going to stop thinking I might ever be. Birth and death and everything in between.
I don’t even know why I’m writing today. I am sad. I am happy most of the time but today I’m sad. I think that Robert just noticed.
DL
Fuck. That was apropos. I closed my eyes. I needed to keep going.
June 1st 1968
I’m writing a second time today. I picked a fight. With all four of them. I have no idea why. I picked a fight. A big one. They’ve all left the house, and I can’t blame them. Maybe forever. I don’t even know. I’m a terrible wife. Maybe a worse person. It’s debatable.
DL
She picked a fight. It was hard to imagine.
“You don’t have to do that right now.” Julian sort of fell into the room, finally sitting down next to me at the counter. “You really don’t.”
I rose and went to get him some coffee. If he was going to be awake, he was going to need some caffeine. I poured it and put some cream in it. When we went to coffee houses, he got more complicated things, but at home this was how he drank it.
I slid it over to him, and he smiled at me. “Thanks, Baby.”
“How are you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Well, that was a true answer. I didn’t know either.