2. Mason #2
She presses her lips to my hair. “I don’t know. Probably not. Hopefully, I’ll be here for a lot of birthdays. Maybe I won’t. We don’t really get a real timeline here. We just get the day we’re in.”
“That’s not enough.”
“I know,” she whispers.
“Who’s gonna take me to practice?” I ask as my throat starts to hurt because I’m trying to force myself not to cry. “Who’s gonna cheer for me?”
She pulls back to look at me. Her eyes are shiny, which tells me she’s holding back tears, too.
“Me,” she says. “As long as I can, me. And when I can’t, I’ll find a way to be there anyway.
You’ll hear me. You’ll feel me. In your bones when you swing a bat really hard.
In the way your heart beats fast when you run a touchdown.
In the stupid songs we always sing in the car, that you’ll hear and think about me.
I’m not going anywhere, even when I have to leave. ”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It will later,” she promises, and that makes me mad because I don’t want later. I want now to last forever. I want to rewind time and never move forward if forward means her not being here.
“What if I don’t know what to do without you? What if I can’t be brave on my own?”
She puts a hand on my cheek, and I can feel the shake.
“You already are, baby. When you helped me months ago by calling for help. When you always go out of your way to help me when I drop things or can’t pick something up.
When you were there to comfort me today in the doctor’s office.
And you’ll keep being brave through all of this. ”
“I don’t feel brave.”
“That’s the big secret,” she says, running her hand through my hair. “Nobody does.”
We stay there, cuddled up, and she turns a movie on for us to watch together. We end up ordering pizza and eating the entire box on the couch, while Dad takes his up to his office and eats alone.
When the credits come on, and we’ve laughed so much that my cheeks hurt, she turns to me with a smile on her face, even though her eyes look sad.
“I’m going to change a lot, Mase. We all are.
And it’s not going to be pretty, or seem fair…
but I want you to remember something for me when it starts getting hard. ”
“What?”
She looks out the window beside us, where the sun has gone down, and there are a couple of butterflies flying around still on top of the butterfly bush Mom planted out there last year.
“Butterflies don’t stay on your hand forever, baby,” she says.
“They have to fly away. But that doesn’t mean they’re gone forever.
You’ll see them everywhere—in the hard times, in the quiet, in the places you don’t expect to see them.
And when you see one, I want you to feel me there.
Because I’ll always find my way back to you. No matter how far away I fly.”
I bury my face in her shirt.
I don’t want butterflies. I want her.
“I don’t want you to become a butterfly,” I say against her, trying to keep my voice strong. “I want you to stay my mom.”
“I will,” she tells me. “Even when you can’t see me.”
“That’s not real,” I mutter. “That’s pretend.”
She laughs. “Maybe. Maybe pretend is how we get to keep the love alive that doesn’t fit inside this world anymore.
But I have a lot more world to live in still.
I just want you to know…even in the future, no matter where I am…
I’ll always be right here, and so will God whenever you need him.
” She places a hand on my heart, and I want to rip it away. Because I want her here for real.
“I don’t want Dad to be in charge,” I tell her, feeling angry now. “He’s mean to you. He’s mean to me. He doesn’t even like being around here.”
None of this is fair.
Her face looks even sadder for a second, and then she tries to give me that soft smile again.
“He likes what he understands,” she says.
“He understands work, and he understands control. He doesn’t understand how to be scared or show his emotions anymore.
That’s not an excuse, but it’s just the way he operates now. ”
“I hate the way he operates.”
“Me too,” she says, and we both laugh, even though it doesn’t feel funny.
“I don’t want to go to school tomorrow…I don’t wanna see anyone or do anything—”
“Okay,” she whispers. “We don’t have to decide anything about tomorrow right now.”
“Can we still have Yes Days?” I ask, and it feels stupid the second I say it. Will we still be us when everything is changing? That’s the question I’m really asking.
She doesn’t make me feel stupid, though. She never does. “Every day we can,” she says, smiling. “We’ll stack them up like pancakes so high we can’t see over them.”
I smile a little at that.
“I’m gonna help you,” I say suddenly, feeling like I want to do something. “I’m gonna do everything. I’m gonna clean and cook and…and I’ll learn how to do whatever you need. I can carry things. I can—”
She shakes her head. “You can be eleven,” she tells me. “That’s your job.”
“I can be eleven and helpful,” I say stubbornly.
She smiles at me. “Deal.”
“Can you tell me more about the butterflies?”
I actually hate them, because now when I see them I’ll think about how she’ll be one of them soon and won’t be here anymore…but I still want her to say something that’ll make me feel better.
She pulls me back to her so my head is lying on her chest, and I can hear her heartbeat.
“Okay,” she says. “You know how butterflies look so fragile and breakable ‘cause they’re small?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they aren’t,” she says. “They travel thousands and thousands of miles with their little paper wings. People think strength is loud and obvious…but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s quiet and stubborn. That’s us, Mason. That’s how we’ll do this. Remember that.”
“I will.”