I couldn’t breathe. I lay on my bed, tears slipping down my cheeks, my lungs swelling against my rib cage. Breathe, I told them, and they let the tiniest bit of air inside. Mama is dead. Oh my god, she’s dead.
Daddy came into my room and lay down with me. He pressed his body behind mine, wrapping a long arm over my chest and pushing his face into my neck. “I’m so sorry, baby girl,” he whispered, his words muffled by my hair.
I shook my head, rubbing my face back and forth in my pillow. I wanted to scream at him to leave me alone, to go away and be with Grace. Leave me alone, leave me alone. The words beat a noisy rhythm in my head, but I couldn’t say them. All I could see was Mama’s face; all I could feel was the ache in my chest, the sharp stinging sensation of what seemed like a thousand tiny needles pricking my skin.
“I’m going to check on Max for a minute, okay, honey?” Dad said. His voice was frayed, like he might break down, too. I could hear my brother through the wall, the high-pitched, strangled edge of his cries. “I’ll be right back.”
I couldn’t speak. There were no words. He shut the door quietly behind him and I opened my mouth wide, my insides twisting tighter and tighter. I wanted to scream. I felt desperate to get the pain out of my body, but no sound would come. Only tears.
She was gone. Mama was gone. She’d never hug me again, never tell me that I’m smart and pretty. A slideshow flashed through my brain, one image clicking after another: Mama climbing into bed with me at night, rubbing my back, whispering a lullaby in my ear to help me fall asleep. Mama standing in front of the stove, stirring the lemon chicken soup she made only when one of us was sick. Mama laughing, her mouth open wide and her blue eyes sparkling; Mama curled up in her bed, Max on one side, me on the other. Mama crying, telling us Daddy wasn’t coming home anymore. Telling us we were on our own. Mama holding me this morning, saying she loved me so much.
“Mama,” I cried, the word creaking out of my throat with blades attached to it, tearing at my flesh. “Please, Mama, no.” How could she be gone? Here one minute and vanished the next? It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. She was just here. She was here this morning. But something was wrong with her. She was dizzy and I let her convince me she was fine. I should have known. I should have sensed something was really wrong. There had to have been something I could have done. I could have made her go to the doctor. I could have told Diane she didn’t feel well. But instead, I went to school. I didn’t even kiss her good-bye when she dropped us off. I didn’t want the other kids to see me and think I was a baby, like Max. Now she would never kiss me again. She wouldn’t help me get ready for my first date or pick out my dress for the prom. She wouldn’t take me to college or teach me how to use eyeliner like she’d promised she would once I turned sixteen. She wouldn’t even be there when I turned sixteen. I’d be alone. Motherless. I felt like I was falling off a cliff. Down, down, down, flailing for a branch to hold on to. Something, anything, to save me.
This can’t be true. The hospital made a mistake. I would have noticed if she was that sick. I would have known. I knew she wasn’t happy that week, maybe even more withdrawn than usual, but she didn’t look like she was dying. She’d been acting strange since Monday, when she picked us up from school, the black smudges beneath her eyes and red splotches across her face and neck evidence of her recent tears. Max didn’t notice, but I did. The signs had become more familiar to me than her smile.
She drove us to his basketball practice at the Boys and Girls Club, and as we sat on the bleachers watching my brother run up and down the court with his friends, I took her hand in mine. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She told me, sometimes, what was bothering her. That she was lonely or afraid that we didn’t have enough money to pay the bills. Today, she kept quiet, but I kept prodding her.
“I just have a lot on my mind,” she said. “I had a talk with your father today.”
“What about?”
“Grown-up stuff,” she said, and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a little. I’d been dealing with the fallout of her “grown-up stuff” with my dad for years now. Comforting her when she cried, making sure she got out of bed in the weeks after he moved out. It irritated me how she went back and forth between trying to be my mother and acting helpless. Strong one minute, then dissolving into tears the next. It made me jumpy, never knowing which version of her I’d get. I missed the mother she used to be, the one she’d been before Daddy left.
“He asked me not to tell you,” she said, and my stomach flipped over. Even if she wasn’t doing it on purpose, I hated it when she said things to make my dad look like the bad guy. Suddenly angry, I pulled my hand away from hers and concentrated on watching Max attempting to dribble. He bounced the ball off the tip of his tennis shoe and it shot across the court. “Don’t worry, I got it!” he yelled, waving to his teammates. He picked up the ball, tried to dribble, and bounced it off his shoe again. His coach started yelling at him to pass, but Max didn’t listen. Instead, he raced after the ball, recovered it, and took a shot at the basket. “Nothing but net!” he hollered as the ball finally went through the hoop, then he did a little victory dance on the court. Watching him, I couldn’t help but smile.
I wondered what it was Dad didn’t want Mama to tell me, but it really could have been anything. I shot Bree a text message, “My mom’s such a pain,” and she texted back, “Mine 2.”
Mama nudged me as I tried to text. “Hey,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” I said, not looking at her. “Just watching Max.”
“No, you’re not. You’re texting.” She reached for my phone. “I want you to talk with me.”
“God, Mom,” I said, yanking my phone away so she couldn’t get it. “I don’t feel like talking, okay? Is that all right with you?” Her face crumpled and her eyes filled with tears, and I immediately felt horrible. I sighed and put my arm around her. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”
She leaned her head on my shoulder and wiped her eyes. “Me too, baby girl. Me too.”
Did she know she was sick, then? I wondered now, as I lay on my bed crying. Did she want Daddy to tell us instead of her, because he was better at handling those kinds of things? Maybe she knew she had something wrong with her as I sat with her on those hard bleachers. Maybe she wanted me to make her tell me, to coax it out of her like I’d done countless times before when she was upset. I’d let her down. I got irritated and ignored her. I should have told Daddy something was wrong. I should have called him and told him how upset she was, how she wasn’t sleeping and how she still cried all the time. I didn’t do any of this and now she was dead.
The pain suddenly inflated, pushing against the underside of my skin. I rolled around, trying to escape the mounting pressure inside me. “No, no, no,” I cried, and without warning, the ache exploded, slashing through the muscles in my chest and up out of my mouth. I screamed into my pillow, hot tears scalding my cheeks. I punched the wall, barely registering the hard smack of my knuckles against it, then hit it again. My cries raked against my throat, over and over, until finally, Daddy came rushing back in.
“Oh, Ava, sweetie,” he said, wrapping himself back around me, trying to hold me still.
I struggled against him, wanting to pull away, but there was no point. He was too strong; he wouldn’t let me go. “I’m here, honey,” he said. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“No!” I screamed again, but he only held me tighter. I sobbed then, the pain seeping out of me, my body melting into my father’s embrace, my mind still knowing he was wrong.
Knowing that no matter what he said, things would never be okay again.
