Chapter 55
age TWENTY-THREE
55
Drew
After Evie’s graduation, I spend the next two days writing and deleting a text message to her. The basic gist is, “Why are you so unhappy?”
It’s not my role to intercept her mistake. But I keep flicking through those photos on my camera and all I see is my former best friend, trapped.
Walking past that behavior is as bad as doing it.
It’s her annoying line, but it’s apt in this instance. I can’t walk past her making a mistake of this magnitude without trying to sow even a small seed of doubt in her mind. What if she’s just waiting for one person to question everything? This whole thing reminds me far too much of the way Mum described her relationship with Anderson. Suddenly, it’s Mum who I really want to ask for advice.
Her blue Mazda is parked in its usual spot under the carport. The bins are empty and still on the road—the last ones left in the street. I drag them in, before clearing the mailbox and tossing the catalogs in the recycling. She never reads them, and the NO JUNK MAIL sign doesn’t seem to deter the ten-year-old pamphlet deliverers.
I knock on the door to warn her I’m here, then let myself in.
“Mum?” There’s no immediate response as I walk across creaking floorboards through the hall into the laundry, where a load of washing is waiting to be taken out of the machine and hung on the clothesline. On autopilot, I pull out the clothes, dumping them into a basket. She has a caretaker in twice a week to do this stuff for her, and I check in several times a week myself. It’s still not enough, but she’s too proud to consider full-time care.
“Mum?”
She’s not in the kitchen, either, but I finally see her in the garden, lazing in the bright blue easy chair I gave her last Mother’s Day. There’s a book on the wrought-iron coffee table beside her, the pages flapping in the breeze, along with a half-empty glass of water.
The clouds have come over and she’s in short sleeves. I head out the back door and down the steps past her prize roses and fragrant jasmine, onto the lawn.
“Mum!” I say again, before I realize she’s asleep.
I touch her arm, gently, so as not to startle her. She’s freezing. And I look toward the blanket box she keeps under the wrought-iron pergola.
I feel like I’ve been looking for blankets to cover Mum for most of my life. Nothing is ever warm enough. Everything I do to try to help her falls short. But even as I’m searching for something to wrap her in, part of me knows the deep truth that my subconscious mind is scrambling to protect me from.
Something wasn’t right, just then, when I touched her.
My fingertips are like ice, responding to how cold she felt, my mind taking a few seconds to catch up with the monstrous knowing that’s erupting in my body.
How still she was.
How silent.
I walk slowly back to her side, scared to approach her. “Mum?” My voice breaks, her name fragile in the crisp garden air.
No response.
I put two fingers on the paper-thin skin of her neck and wait for it to pulse.
I lean forward, near her slightly open mouth, hoping for a brush of air on my cheek that never comes.
Then I shake her, gently, expecting her arm to flop off the armrest, limp.
It doesn’t. It’s stuck.
When I rock her a little harder, in a last-ditch attempt to wake her from this nightmare, her entire body rocks with the stiffness of a store mannequin, and I reel in abject horror. Stagger to the rosebushes. Throw up.
Seconds later, I grab my phone. Dial the number.
“Ambulance!” I say, my breath coming fast as my heart pounds. “But I think it’s too late.”
I know it is.
“Is the patient breathing?”
“No, she’s not.”
“I want you to move her onto the ground and lie her on her back,” the person instructs. They don’t understand.
“It’s too late,” I explain again. “She’s gone.”
“I want you to give CPR until the paramedics arrive. You’ll want to know you’ve done all you could.”
Mum looks completely at peace, in a way I don’t recall ever having seen her—not in all the years she struggled with her broken body and fractured mind.
“Place the patient on the ground, flat on her back,” the operator instructs me again.
“It’s too late,” I reiterate helplessly. I don’t know why I can’t just say the words: rigor mortis . Maybe if I speak them, the truth will cement itself into this place and time.
The place and time of Mum’s death.
Her death .
“Put the patient on the ground,” the person insists relentlessly, and I find myself silently apologizing to Mum as I do as I’m told, dragging her body from the chair, stumbling with it as we fall onto the grass. I brush the hair out of her eyes. I know how much it always annoyed her.
“Now put the heel of your hand in the middle of her chest and do compressions in time with my count, okay? One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four …”
I become unhinged from time. Past. Present. Future. All time is now, swollen seconds in this unspeakable, desperate agony. I will pump her lifeless chest for eleven whole minutes, which is what the police officer will note on the death report as the period that elapsed between this call and the arrival of paramedics.
One, two, three, four.
One of them will tramp over her azaleas in the backyard and set down his gear as he reaches us and asks me to move over.
One, two, three, four.
I won’t move. And he’ll touch her just once as he tries to coax me aside.
One, two.
He’ll feel what I felt. The stiffness.
He’ll shake his head at the other and turn to me and tell me he’s sorry, while I make one final attempt to rally her broken heart, frantically trying to undo this and bring her back to me.
One.
That’s when I’ll hear the crack of her rib and feel it break into pieces underneath my hand. A sound and a touch that I know will haunt me for the rest of my days.
I’ll fall onto her frail body, sobbing. I’m sorry, Mum. I’m so sorry.
Then I’ll notice the silver bracelet, shining on her wrist under the ambulance officer’s headlamp, three words engraved on it that will hit my heart with a regret that seems to spread cancerously through my entire body, poisoning my spirit, cell by cell.
DO NOT RESUSCITATE .