Chapter 24 Magnolia
MAGNOLIA
The table was set as beautifully as I could manage, and I’d found an assortment of cheeses in Iris’s fridge and arranged them nicely on a wooden board.
Ellery and I puttered about nervously, bumping into each other and hugging and kissing before breaking apart with guilty giggles.
When my phone finally rang, I pounced on it and said, “Oh my god, what’s taking so long? We’ve been here nearly an hour!”
“Is this Magnolia Chen?” a man said.
“Oh. Yes, hi. Who is this?”
“Ma’am, my name is Morgan Bartz. I’m calling from the Huntington Hospital. Your sister, Iris Chen, was involved in an accident.”
“What?” I said stupidly. None of his words made any sense.
“Could you come down to the hospital right now?”
“What?” I said again.
He repeated the words, and still my mind refused to comprehend them.
Ellery, who’d been standing next to me, gently pried the phone from my hand and pressed it to her ear.
“Hi,” she said, “could you repeat that, please?” She listened, then uttered a short gasp.
“All right. I understand. We’ll be right there. ”
I was barely aware of Ellery taking me by the arm.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll drive us.” She grabbed my jacket and draped it around my shoulders as we hurried out the door.
The entire drive to the hospital, I kept saying stupid crap like “This isn’t happening, right? It’s going to be fine, right? Right?”
And each time, Ellery would nod and say, “I’m sure it’s all going to be okay, baby.”
“Why didn’t Iris call me herself though? Do you think she’s okay? Maybe she was just busy? Do you think Hazel—”
“Shh, don’t think about that right now.” Ellery took her eyes off the road just long enough to squeeze my arm. “They’ll both be okay.”
When we got there, I ran inside, and once I gave my name, the receptionist’s face fell, and I knew then. I knew that nothing was going to be fine. In a daze, I was led down a hallway, where I met with the surgeon on call outside of the hospital room.
I don’t remember much of that conversation. There was mention of organ failure and loss of blood. None of it made any sense. Then he said, “She doesn’t have long. Would you like to say goodbye?”
Ellery caught up with me then. It had taken her a while after dropping me off at the entrance to find parking. “Magnolia,” she said. I looked at her and she must’ve seen it on my face. Her own face crumpled and she pulled me into a hug.
“I need to—I have to go inside.”
“Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Do you want me to…?”
“I think I need to do this alone.”
“Okay. I’ll be here.”
I pushed open the door. There she was. My badass older sister who’d always been larger than life.
Only two times in my life I’d seen her looking tiny and fragile.
The first time was when I found her outside my gate.
This was the second and final time. She looked so impossibly small in the hospital bed, covered up in thick layers of gauze, tubes sticking out of her.
I took another step and my legs gave out from underneath me. I stumbled but kept going.
“Iris,” I choked out. I was at her side, and this couldn’t be real.
This couldn’t be happening. I couldn’t be looking down at my sister while she lay dying.
“Iris, I’m here. It’s me, Magnolia.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek, my tears dripping onto her skin.
Wildly, stupidly, for a fleeting moment, I imagined we were in a Disney movie and that my tears would somehow heal her.
One eye fluttered open. The other one, swollen beyond recognition, remained closed. “Mag…” she wheezed.
“Iris,” I sobbed. I didn’t know what else to say. “I love you, Iris. I love you, I love you.”
She closed her eye and opened it again. I knew she was saying it back to me. Then she whispered, “Hazel.”
“She’s okay.” I recalled the doctor assuring me that, thanks to the car seat, Hazel was okay. “Do you want to see her?”
A tear rolled down her eye. “Promise me,” she said.
“I promise.” She didn’t even have to tell me what it was I was promising to do. I would’ve agreed to anything.
“Hazel.”
“Yes. I’ll take care of her. As my own. I promise.”
“No Erik.”
I shook my head, tears flowing down my face in a torrent. “No, never. No Erik.” It struck me as strange that she would bring up Erik in that moment, but Iris had always been smarter than anyone gave her credit for. “I promise, Iris.”
She mumbled something else incoherent, her eye blinking, losing focus, and I knew she was slipping away. I held her hand and pressed my cheek to hers. “Iris, it’s okay. You can let go. I love you. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She died then, and I kissed her cheek and murmured, “It’s okay,” over and over until hands appeared at my back and gently pried me away. Then, finally, I succumbed to my grief and let myself shatter into a million pieces.
· · ·
I was unaware of the next few days passing.
They were a painful haze of endless forms to fill out and a hundred things to take care of, and in the midst of all of it, I had a little toddler who had lost her mom to look after.
Hazel didn’t fully understand what had happened.
The night that Iris died, I only had moments to fall apart and then quickly, clumsily, I had to put myself back together enough to face Hazel.
She was largely unharmed, thanks to her car seat, but she was scared and bruised and very much wanted her mommy.
When she saw me, she stretched her little arms out and said, “Wia!” And it undid me.
I sobbed as I gathered her in my arms, and sobbed again when she asked, “Where Mommy?” Ellery embraced us both, crying as well.
At some point, Parker arrived and we all left the hospital.
I was a wreck. We all were. Going about our days with stunned expressions.
I remember thinking: This isn’t real. This can’t be real.
It’s a dream. I’ve somehow crashed through the fabric of my universe and landed in another one, and if I could just wake up, then it would all be okay.
But I never did find that rip in the fabric.
I never stepped back into the correct universe, the one where my sister was still alive and still bossing everyone around.
I have to hand it to Parker. He really stepped up.
He was the one who got all the correct forms filled out, and there were so many of them.
Deaths were a complicated thing to file, even more so when it involved a car accident.
There were insurance investigations and police investigations, which I found incredibly frustrating, especially since no one else had been involved.
In the end, their findings said there had been an oil slick on the road and Iris had been driving a little too fast. The conclusion they came to killed me all over again.
She’d probably been driving too fast because she was excited about coming home and celebrating me and Ellery.
“You can’t think that,” Ellery said. I didn’t even have to tell her what was going through my head; she knew anyway. “It’s not your fault. It was an accident.”
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. If I hadn’t called her to tell her about me and Ellery, she might have been okay.
She might’ve driven slower, or she might’ve been less distracted, and she might’ve seen the dark puddle on the ground and avoided it in time.
Or she might’ve taken a different route home because she wouldn’t have had to stop by the grocery store for food.
But self-hatred was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
To be able to sit there loathing myself and blaming myself for everything was an indulgence.
I couldn’t dwell on it for long because I had Hazel to look after.
Hazel didn’t understand the concept of death.
She would say things like “When Mommy stop dying? When Mommy come back?”
And I’d be torn between trying to explain to her that there was no coming back from death and lying to her and telling her, “Later, baby.” Most of the time, I just hugged her while I blinked away my tears before distracting her with a toy.
Although Parker was good with the bureaucracy, the subject of death made him extremely uncomfortable.
He was sad, of course, but he’d never been close to Iris, and he didn’t know how to handle my grief.
I remember one morning, he shuffled into the bathroom and found me sobbing into the sink.
He stopped, uncertain, looking extremely awkward, then lowered his head and left.
I’m not telling you this to convince you that he was a bad person or anything, he just didn’t know how to handle such strong emotions.
I’d gone to a handful of wakes in Jakarta and seen spouses being told off for crying over their loved ones.
In the Chinese-Indonesian culture, to let your emotions out without restraint is an act of selfishness; you are supposed to remain stoic and be strong for your family.
When I told him that I was going to stay at Iris’s place for the next week or so to give Hazel some semblance of normalcy, he was more than relieved to agree to it.
So I packed a bag and moved into Iris’s place.
It was a terrible decision for myself, but Hazel needed it.
She needed the familiarity of it, a space that still smelled of her mother.
She needed to fall asleep at night in her own bed.
The first night I was there, after I put Hazel down, I came out into the living room and started having a panic attack.
I sagged to the floor and wheezed silently, squeezing my eyes shut.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed, but there was a soft hand on my shoulder, and I opened my eyes to see Ellery there.
“Breathe, Tulip. Breathe with me. Inhale, one, two. Exhale, one, two.” She repeated it until I felt a little bit less like I was about to pass out, then she helped me up and onto the sofa.