CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
I’m in the middle of senior year.
Head down. Grades up.
Counting the days until I can leave.
That’s the plan.
The plan is all I have.
· · ·
And then I get called to the front office.
I feel it before I even turn down the hallway.
That tightening.
Low and specific, just below my ribs.
My body’s early warning system that has never once been wrong.
Sirens at eleven.
An empty corner at sixteen.
It knows before I do.
It always has.
I shouldn’t have taken that extra pill this morning.
My head is too soft at the edges.
Fuzzy.
Everything slightly muffled—slow motion.
I stand outside the office door and I don’t open it.
Just for a second.
Just one more second of not knowing.
· · ·
My dad is there.
I have never seen my dad cry like that.
Not once.
In eighteen years.
He is the man who makes bad jokes at dinner and misses every piece of popcorn he throws at his own mouth and acts like he didn’t.
He is solid and steady and constant.
He is not this broken thing I see.
It’s not him.
· · ·
The ringing starts.
His voice comes through it in pieces.
My mom. Pneumonia. Worse than they thought.
She was feeling better this morning.
She told me at breakfast.
She was standing at the counter in her pastel yellow cardigan and she said I think I’m turning a corner, bug, and I grabbed a granola bar and said good and left for school.
I said good.
That was the last thing I said to her.
Good.
And I wasn’t even there, not really.
· · ·
The floor opens up.
I come back to myself at home.
I don’t remember getting there.
I don’t remember the car or the front door or sitting down.
I’m just — here.
In the house.
Her house.
Her reading glasses on the side table.
Her cardigan on the hook by the door that still smells like her.
The garden visible through the back window, the daisies still going, completely indifferent, full of color like nothing happened, like she didn’t just —
I push through the fog.
My mom.
I push harder.
I shouldn’t have.
I didn’t want to remember.
· · ·
By the time the ambulance came it was too late.
The pneumonia had turned fast.
Her lungs.
She couldn’t breathe.
She was fine this morning.
She was fine.
She told me she was fine and I said good and walked out the door and that was it.
That was the last of it.
I just don’t understand.
I’m trying to connect the pieces, but nothing makes sense to me.
I think the pieces I have left are not enough.
· · ·
I laugh.
Just once.
Short and horrible.
I’m okay.
I’m okay.
I’m okay.
I’m okay.
I’m okay.
· · ·
I have spent the last two years barely existing.
Drifting through my own life like a ghost wearing my face.
Numb. Empty. Half-gone.
And my mom has been here this whole time.
Leaving food on my desk.
Sitting beside me on the couch.
Holding my face in both hands in the kitchen and saying it is absolutely not you like she could will it to be true.
She has been here.
Right here.
And I was somewhere else.
Somewhere so far inside my own damage that I kept missing her.
I kept missing her and I didn’t even know I was doing it.
· · ·
Is this how Cassian felt.
The thought lands like something physical.
Is this why he couldn’t love me.
Because he knew what it felt like to lose someone and wish he had been somewhere else all this time.
Just like he took something from me.
Is this the thing he carried through my window that night and couldn’t put down.
This exact feeling — the one that tells you time was moving all along and you weren’t paying enough attention and now it’s over and you can’t go back.
I understand something I didn’t before.
And it doesn’t help.
Nothing about it helps.
Tears are choking me.
Air is never enough.
Why is breathing always so difficult.
· · ·
Upstairs, my dad is trying not to make a sound.
I can hear the trying.
The specific quiet of someone holding themselves together because they’re terrified of what happens if they don’t.
Just the two of us now.
· · ·
That thought goes through me like something breaking.
She was the one who always showed up.
Every panic attack. Every kitchen floor moment. Every time I came home with a face that said everything I couldn’t.
She always knew.
She always knew and she never made it smaller than it was and she never once made me feel like I was too much.
She was the reason I was still here.
I didn’t know that until right now.
I didn’t know that she was the last piece.
The last tiny piece I was holding onto so tight.
The one thing holding all the broken parts of me in some kind of shape.
· · ·
And she’s gone.
I take a pill.
Then another.
Then I stop counting.
· · ·
The edges go soft.
Then softer.
The room goes quiet in the way it only does when the medication takes over — that specific, terrible, beautiful quiet —
Her cardigan is still on the hook by the door.
· · ·
I close my eyes.
I wish I never met Cassian.
But I don’t mean it.
I don’t mean anything anymore.
I don’t want to feel anything anymore.
· · ·
That’s the problem.
I wish I was stronger for my dad.