CHAPTER 15 Delia
Delia
The call came on a Wednesday afternoon while I was in Axel’s arms.
We were in his bed, sheets tangled around us, the afternoon sun making patterns on the wall. I’d shown up at his place after teaching because I couldn’t wait until evening. Because wanting him had become this constant thing that made normal functioning difficult.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I ignored it.
Axel’s mouth was on my neck, his hands gripping my hips, and thinking about anything else was impossible. The phone stopped. Started again.
“Should you get that?” he asked against my skin.
“No.” I pulled him closer, my fingers digging into his shoulders. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop.
The phone buzzed a third time. Then went silent.
I forgot about it completely. Forgot about everything except Axel and the way he was looking at me like I was the only thing that existed. We moved together, desperate and perfect, and I remember thinking I’d never been this happy. Never felt this wanted. This seen.
I remember thinking I could live in this moment forever.
Afterward, lying tangled together while our breathing slowed and his fingers traced lazy patterns on my hip, reality started creeping back in.
My phone lit up on the nightstand—six missed calls. All from Daniel.
“I should check that,” I said, reaching for the phone at last.
“Everything okay?” Axel asked.
“He’s probably just checking in. You know how he is.”
But Daniel didn’t call six times in a row for check-ins. Something was wrong. Anxiety settled hard in my chest.
I called back, still wrapped in Axel’s sheets, still warm from his touch.
Daniel answered immediately.
“Delia.” Just my name — but something in the way he said it made every nerve in my body go cold, making the warmth from Axel’s touch feel obscene. The happiness curdled into something ugly and wrong.
“What’s wrong?”
“Mom collapsed this morning. Maria found her. We’re at the hospital.” His voice was panicked. “You need to come now.”
The phone slipped from my hand—dropped, clattering against the hardwood floor with a sound that felt too loud.
My mother had collapsed. This morning. While I’d been teaching, texting Axel and saying I couldn’t wait to see him. While I’d been rushing to his apartment because I wanted him more than I wanted to check on her.
This morning.
Hours ago.
And I’d ignored Daniel’s calls because I’d been too busy being happy.
Axel was saying something—asking what was wrong—but his voice sounded far away. Like I was underwater and he was calling from the surface. Like there was an entire ocean between us now where five minutes ago there’d been nothing but skin and want and perfect happiness.
All I could think was: mom had called me yesterday, she had said that she had something important to tell me. Her voice had been clear. Lucid. One of those rare good days where the fog lifted and she was actually her again.
I’d said I’d visit tomorrow. That I was busy painting but I’d come tomorrow. I thought whatever she needed to tell me could wait one more day.
“Delia.” Axel’s hands were on my face. Warm. Gentle. “Talk to me. What happened?”
I was already moving—grabbing clothes, pulling them on with hands that wouldn’t cooperate. My shirt was inside out. I didn’t care. My mother was in the hospital and I’d been here having the best sex of my life while she—
“What’s happening?” Axel was up now, getting dressed faster than I was. “Is it your mom?”
“She collapsed. Daniel says I need to come now.” My voice cracked on the last word.
“Okay. I’m driving you.”
I didn’t argue. I could barely think beyond the fact that my mother was dying.
The drive to the hospital happened in fragments. Traffic lights that lasted forever. Cars moving too slowly. Axel’s hand reaching for mine and me pulling away because if he touched me I’d break and I couldn’t break yet. Not yet.
At the hospital, Daniel met us outside her room, looking like he’d aged ten years since the last dinner. His scrubs were wrinkled. His eyes were red. His hands were shaking slightly even though he’d shoved them in his pockets to hide it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She fell. Hit her head on the kitchen counter. There’s internal bleeding they can’t control. Too much damage. Her body’s shutting down.”
“But she’s—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. “She’s going to wake up, right? She’ll wake up and—”
“They don’t know that.” Daniel’s voice cracked. “The doctors said she is unconscious and unlikely to regain consciousness. The best we can do is make her comfortable.”
Make her comfortable.
Medical speak for there’s nothing left to do but wait for her to die.
“I need to see her.”
Daniel nodded and pushed open the door.
Mom looked small in the hospital bed—so small, like death was already taking pieces of her.
Machines beeped around her, tracking things I didn’t understand. An oxygen mask covered her face. IV lines snaked into her arms. There was a bandage on her head where she’d hit it. White gauze turning pink at the edges.
I sat in the chair beside her bed and took her hand.
It was warm. Soft. The same hand that had held mine when I learned to walk. That had wiped my tears when I fell off my bike.
That hand felt alive. How could she be dying when her hand still felt alive?
“I’m here, Mom,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I didn’t come yesterday. I’m sorry I said tomorrow. I’m here now.”
She didn’t respond. Didn’t squeeze my hand. Didn’t open her eyes.
The machines just kept beeping their steady rhythm.
I stared at her face. At the lines around her eyes that came from years of smiling. At the gray in her hair that she’d stopped dyeing when the Alzheimer’s made her forget she cared. At the slight part in her lips around the oxygen mask.
She looked peaceful. Like she was sleeping.
But she wasn’t sleeping. She was dying. There was a difference and I couldn’t stop seeing it.
Axel stood in the doorway. I could feel him there even though I wasn’t looking.
I sat there holding my mother’s hand and thought about all the tomorrows I’d promised. All the visits I’d delayed. All the times I’d said I was busy when she’d called.
All the times I’d chosen anything else over her.
Hours passed. Daniel came and went, checking monitors. Maria arrived crying, stayed for a while, left when it became too much. Axel brought me coffee I didn’t drink. Water I didn’t touch. Food I couldn’t look at.
I just sat there.
Holding her hand.
Watching the machines.
Friday morning, she slipped away so quietly I almost missed it.
I’d fallen asleep in the chair. Daniel had gone home to shower. Axel had gone to get breakfast.
It was just me and Mom and the machines when the rhythm changed.
The beeping slowed. Then stuttered. Then stopped.
I jerked awake, my hand still in hers, and watched her chest rise one more time.
Then stop.
Just stop.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
The silence was so loud it hurt. After days of constant beeping, the quiet felt violent. Wrong.
“Mom, no. Please. Not yet. I’m not ready. Please.”
The machines started screaming—alarms, nurses rushing in. Daniel appearing from somewhere, moving fast, doctors checking things and speaking in professional terms that felt obscene because this was our mother, not some patient, not some case study.
One of the doctors looked at the monitors, checked for a pulse I already knew wasn’t there.
“She’s gone.”
Two words that shattered everything.
I took her hands again and tried to understand how someone could be here one second and just gone the next.
How the person who’d given birth to me, who’d promised she’d love me even when she couldn’t remember my name—how that person could just stop existing.
Her hand was still warm.
She was still here.
Except she wasn’t. She was gone. That was what gone meant. That her hand could still be warm but the person who owned it had vanished.
Daniel was talking to the nurses, making arrangements in that flat doctor voice that meant he was holding himself together by force of will.
Axel appeared beside me. Put his hand on my shoulder.
“Delia.”
I looked up at him. At his gray eyes full of concern. At this man who loved me. Who’d been with me while my mother was dying.
Who I’d been with instead of being here.
“I need to go,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll drive you.”
“No. I mean I need to go alone. I need—” I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t explain that looking at him hurt. That his presence reminded me of where I’d been when she’d been struggling for her life. What I’d been doing while she’d been bleeding. “Just let me go.”
He stepped back, hurt flickering across his face.
I left without looking back.
The funeral happened a week later.
I moved through it in a fog. People kept touching me. Offering condolences. Saying things like “she’s in a better place” and “at least she’s not suffering anymore.”
I wanted to scream at them—wanted to say she’s not anywhere, she’s just gone, stop trying to make death sound peaceful when it’s just absence, just empty space where a person used to be.
But I just smiled and nodded and accepted their casseroles.
Sarah held my arm during the service. Kept me upright when my legs forgot how to function. Daniel gave the eulogy, talking about Mom’s life. Her love of art. Her dedication to teaching. Her battle with Alzheimer’s that she’d fought with grace.
I didn’t hear most of it.
All I heard was my own voice from three days ago: I’ll come tomorrow.
At the burial, they lowered her casket into the ground.
I watched them cover it with dirt.
I watched the woman who’d been my first love, my first everything, disappear under soil and grass and finality.
I remembered her voice reading me bedtime stories, doing all the character voices even when she was exhausted. Making me laugh even on bad days.
I remembered her face when I’d shown her my first real painting. The pride in her eyes. “You made this? Oh, Delia. You’re going to be extraordinary.”
I remembered her teaching me to ride a bike. Running beside me holding the seat steady. “I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”
I remembered her at my high school graduation. Crying happy tears. Telling me she couldn’t wait to see what I’d become.
I remembered her diagnosis. The way her hands had shaken when the doctor said Alzheimer’s. The way she’d looked at me and said, “I might forget your name someday. But I’ll never stop loving you.”
The dirt kept falling. Kept covering her. Kept taking her further away until there was nothing left but a mound of earth where my mother used to be.
Where her laugh used to be. Where her voice used to be. Where the hands that taught me everything used to be.
All of it gone. All of it buried.
After the burial, everyone came back to our house.
Mom’s house. Except it wasn’t anymore. It was just a house now. Just walls and furniture and empty rooms that used to hold her.
People filled those rooms with casseroles and sympathy. Ate food in Mom’s kitchen. Sat in her chairs and touched her things like they had any right.
I stood in the doorway watching strangers occupy her space and felt something inside me crack completely.
This was wrong. All of it was wrong. These people being here. Eating. Living. When she was in the ground.
“I need to leave,” I told Sarah.
“Okay. I’ll drive you.”
“No. I’ll get Axel to—” I stopped, looking around for him. I found him talking to Daniel in the corner.
As if feeling my stare, he turned to me, looking concerned. “Actually, can you just take me home?”
Sarah studied my face. “Are you sure?”
“Please.”
She drove me to Brooklyn in heavy silence. At my building, she asked if I wanted company.
“I need to be alone,” I said.
“Delia, I can stay—”
“Please, Sarah. I just need to be alone.”
She let me go because she was a good friend. Because she understood that sometimes being alone was the only thing that made sense.
I stood in the doorway staring at my space.
Axel’s mug was on the kitchen table. There were several of his books on my shelves.
He’d been staying here sometimes and slept over because I wasn’t ready to fully move in with him yet.
I started gathering his things. Clothes from my closet. Books from my shelves. Toiletries from my bathroom.
I packed everything carefully, like if I did it right, I could pack away the guilt too. Could pack away Wednesday afternoon and the phone calls I’d ignored and the way I’d been smiling while she’d been dying.
When I was done, I texted him.
Delia
Come get your things. I need my space back.
Axel arrived thirty minutes later looking confused. Worried. Like he’d been expecting this but hoping he was wrong.
“What’s this about?” he asked, staring at the duffel bag by the door.
“I need to be alone. I need my apartment back.”
“Okay. I can give you space. I don’t need to be here every night.”
“No. I need my space back. All of it.” I couldn’t look at him. Looking at him hurt. “I need you to take your things and go.”
He was quiet for a long moment. “Are you pushing me away or do you actually need space?”
“I don’t know the difference, and I don’t have the energy to figure it out.”
“Delia.” He moved closer. “Don’t do this. Don’t shut me out.”
“I’m not shutting you out. I’m asking for what I need.”
“Those feel like the same thing.”
“Then I guess they are.” I picked up the duffel bag and held it out. My hands were shaking. “Take your things and go.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I don’t care what you want right now. I need you to leave.”
Something in his face changed. Like he was trying to understand why I was pushing him away. “This is about guilt.”
“What?”
“You feel guilty—about being with me while your mom was dying, about being happy.” His voice was gentle. Too gentle. Like I was something breakable. “Delia—“
“Don’t.” I cut him off. The gentleness made it worse. Made the guilt sharper. “Don’t analyze me. Don’t tell me what I’m feeling. Just take your things and go.”
“I’ll give you space. But I’m not going anywhere. When you’re ready—”
“Just go!”
He took the duffel bag, standing there in my doorway looking at me like I was breaking his heart.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
The words landed like knives. Because I loved him too. But loving him meant being happy. And being happy while my mother died felt like the worst kind of betrayal.
“Please go.”
He did.
The door closed with a soft click that sounded like an ending.
I didn’t cry.
I was too empty for tears. Too numb. Too broken.