“So, I just want you to know,” she says, turning to me. Her eyes look like mine when I see myself in the mirror every morning: hollow, lifeless.
“This is what I meant when I called it the Big Suck: it’s all bullshit, and it’s never going to feel any better.”
* * *
• • •
When Mae-Lynn’s mom pulls into our driveway, I see that Mom’s car is gone, which means Shayna is still gone, too. I’m relieved, because I’m a little drunk, and since I’ve never been drunk, I’m not sure how this would play out with Shayna, like if she’d pull the parent-y card finally and what? Ground me or something? I never even had that with Mom. I never had the chance to. Maybe Shayna would just laugh it off.
My phone pings. Woozily, I look down. Cake.
How did it go?
It was okay. Good, I guess. Hard to explain.
Who was there? Tell me!
I open the door to the house, drop my backpack on the floor. I flop down on the beanbag. Should I have water? Coffee? Sober up? Go to bed?
I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you. Like, maybe some of them want it to be private. I heard some really sad stuff.
Oh. Yeah, I get that. I can see that. Do you think it helped?
I don’t know, CAKE. I don’t think what I have can be cured in one session, you know?
Sorry! You don’t have to bite my head off.
I don’t want to fight anymore with Cake, so I tell her the truth.
I’m sorry. I drank alcohol. In the arroyo. With them. After. I don’t know what to do now.
I almost type “affer” because that’s the way the word sounds inside my head.
Oh God, really? Are you going to throw up? Cake has never had alcohol, either. Hold on, I’m Googling.
Okay, it says drink water and take ibuprofen and go to bed. Maybe put a bucket next to the bed or something.
Okay.
I stagger up, drink a glass of water, can’t find aspirin, and am almost in bed before I realize I have the bottle of rum Mae-Lynn stashed with me. I stumble to the shed and tuck it inside some old milk crates with tarps in them and make my way back to bed, where I pretty much pass out as soon as my head hits the pillow.
HERE IS WHAT HAPPENS when your mother’s death certificates come in the mail.
This shit is scary. This shit hasn’t been covered in Grief Group yet.
You think things are okay, not great, because “great” won’t ever be a thing again. But you and your sister are kind of humming along, working the Jellymobile together on the weekend. She’s still doing it during the week. You still have one more week of school left, but four sessions of Grief Group left, which extends after school is out for the summer.
You feel like you are always behind, spinning your wheels. The universe doesn’t wait for you to catch up anymore.
You just keep your head down. Thaddeus tells you to stay quiet, make nice with your sister, with school. He’ll get you a job over the summer at the ranch, he says. You wish you could go back and see the horses, but there hasn’t been time. You dreamed of them once, the way their beautiful hooves flew in the dust, made hazy, beautiful clouds.
Your sister is always busy, it seems. Spending a lot of time at the coffee shop/bookstore/diner. Suddenly very interested in being Louise and Mary’s friend. “They have an interesting setup over there,” she said one day on her way out. “I think I need to pick their brains.”
Every day you go on, just like everyone tells you to, and every day, you feel more and more invisible.
When the death certificates come, they’re in a large manila envelope. City of Tucson Medical Examiner is stamped in the corner. There’s no letter. No Dear Miss.
They look strangely like the achievement reports you got at school during grade time at Davidson Middle. Boxes checked off. Measurements and percentages and a lot of words you don’t understand. Everything is online now. Your mom had to log in to see how you were doing. Your sister will have to do that now.
They also come with a 911 report.
Because just before your mother’s brain exploded, she had been on the phone with Kai Henderson’s mom, Sue.
Which you hadn’t known before. Because neither Kai nor his mom came to the viewing, and his mom didn’t come to the hospital that night.
Caller: I was on the phone with my son’s friend’s mother and she suddenly stopped speaking. I think there’s something wrong.
Caller: I thought my son might be over there, with her daughter. We were on the phone and I heard something. I think she might have fallen. She hasn’t hung up yet. I’m on a different phone right now. I can hear breathing on the other line. It doesn’t sound…right.
You stand in the red kitchen and spread all the papers out on the counter, one by one by one.
Caller: Can you please send someone out right away? This isn’t like June. I’m quite worried.
These were the last moments of your mother’s earthly life.
Caller: I can’t believe this is happening. Please help. Are you sending someone? What’s happening?
The information blurs in front of me.
“The deceased was found…”
The deceased.
“The deceased was found face-down on a couch in the home. The deceased showed signs of…”
Face-down on the couch.
Your body goes cold. You actually leave your body. Part of you is above, watching the other you read these papers, watching that sad girl in the weird and dirty lace dress and boots hold strange papers with trembling hands.
Face-down on the couch.
“Upon examination, the deceased displayed…”
You’d had a fight that morning. You’d kissed a boy for what seemed like hours in a park, and she’d been here, dying, and alone.
You run a finger down the medical examiner’s report until you find a name, and a number, and with shaking hands, call that name and number. Dr. Marisa Matthews.
You don’t expect her to pick up. On television, medical examiners are always so busy helping to solve interesting and complicated murders, dabbing creamy stuff under their nostrils as they examine a particularly rancid corpse. You figure you will leave your message and that will be the end of it. You will have tried. Who is going to call back a kid, anyway?
But there she is. “This is Dr. Matthews.”
“Hi.” Stupid.
“Hello? This is Dr. Matthews. Who am I speaking to, please?” Her voice is brisk. You picture short hair, wire-frame glasses, a no-nonsense color of lipstick like peach or light rose.
“This is Tiger Tolliver.”
There’s a pause. “Do I…know you, Tiger Tolliver?” She sounds amused. Everyone finds your name funny.
“You…worked on my mom. I got the certificates in the mail today. The report.”
Another pause. When she speaks again, her voice is less edgy. “My condolences. Is there something I can help you with?”
“So, it says here, and I remember in the hospital, that she had a brain aneurysm? Like her brain exploded?”
Dr. Matthews speaks very carefully, like you are a child.
Because you are. You’re a child and you feel like everyone is trying to get you to be an adult. Working. Moving on. Grief Group.
“That’s one way to put it, I suppose. Do you have a specific question about that?”
You pinch your thigh through the lace dress. Cake isn’t here. She won’t see it.
You need something to keep you grounded during this conversation.
“Well, we had a fight that day. About a dress she wanted me to wear for a dance.”
Dr. Matthews chuckles softly. “I might remember something like that happening with my own mother.”
“I didn’t want to wear it.”
“My dress showed to
o much cleavage. My mother made me wear this awful shawl. I left it in the limo when we got to the dance.”
“I’m wearing the dress now, though. I haven’t taken it off since she died.” Your voice is barely above a whisper.
Dr. Matthews says kindly, “It would probably be okay if you wanted to wear something else now, Tiger. Or when you’re ready.”
“I know,” you say. “Anyway, I was just wondering, like, when that happens to your brain, do you die right away? Or is it, like, very slow? Because that fight, it was the last time we ever talked and I was very mean to her, see—”
Your voice breaks.
“It’s just us. It’s always been just us and so she was all alone when it happened and we’d had that fight and I just—”
That’s it. You didn’t know what else to say. You stop at I just. You’re crying. Maybe you should hang up the phone.
Dr. Matthews asks, “Are you asking me if your mom suffered, Tiger?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your mom’s name, Tiger? I’ll look for her file. I know the forms are probably very confusing for you.”
“June Frances Tolliver.”
You hear typing on the other end of the phone. She says, “Okay, I found her. Let’s see. There are two types of aneurysms. One is slow and can be survivable, and one can be instantaneous.
“Your mom had the second type. The only way I can describe this is for you to imagine that you’re sitting in a room and the lights are on, and then they go off. The lightbulb doesn’t flicker, you don’t hear a pop, everything just goes…dark. Gone.”
The lights are on. The lights go off.
You look around the tiny front room, at the couch, at her desk, with her cups of pencils and pens and pads of paper. The sunlight outside is fading.
She had probably puttered around. Maybe she’d been reading on the couch, waiting for you. You didn’t fight out loud very often. Sometimes, when it’s just two people like that, you keep a lot inside. You have to, or the well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine will break down.
Had she felt lonely? Worried about why you hadn’t called her back? And then the lights went out?
A few times, during summer storms, the lights suddenly snapped off. You might be in the bedroom reading, cozy under blankets, and the monsoons would start, the trees would whip, maybe a line would go down somewhere, and poof, darkness.
Your heart would leap in your throat, and the first thing you would do is call out, “Mom?” And she would answer, because she was never far from you.
That’s the way she’d planned it, you are learning. To never be far from you. To not lose you, you think, like she’d lost her parents.
Only, the universe had other plans.
It’s all bullshit, Mae-Lynn had said. It’s never going to feel any better.
“Are you there, Tiger?”
“Could she…like, did she know what was happening? Was she in pain?”
Dr. Matthew’s voice is firm. “No. Like I said, as brutal as it sounds, everything shuts off. If I had to choose a way to go, this would be it. It just happens. A lightning strike to the brain that turns everything off at once.”
“But why?” you ask. “Why does that happen?”
“No one knows, Tiger. Not really. The body is an amazing machine made of intricate systems. You can wander around in there for days, poking this, poking that, trying to figure out reasons for why and how, and sometimes you do.”
She takes a breath.
“And sometimes the lights just go out. And we don’t know why, because as much as we study and study and study, the universe is always smarter than we are. There will always be unknowable things and we have to make peace with that.”
Always the universe, against you.
“Tiger? Is there anyone with you? Do you have someone you can call after me? I have the number for a crisis line.”
“My dad’s in prison. My sister’s not home. I’m all alone.”
Did she call out for you, when it got dark?
You weren’t there. You weren’t there to answer her.
The walls of the small house are closing in on you. You’re being crushed. On the last day of your mother’s life, you had not been there for her.
You blurt out, “Do you believe in God? I mean, or something? Like that?”
There is such a long pause you wonder if you’ve been disconnected.
“Hello?” you ask tentatively.
She says, “I’m here.”
Then, “Yes, I do. And I believe your mother is in a lovely place. I think she’s being taken care of, and I think she’s watching over you, and she wants you to know how much she loves you.”
You close your eyes.
“I’m worried about you, Tiger. Let me get that crisis line number, okay? I think you need to talk to someone.”
“There’s a group, like for teens. A grief group. At my high school. I’m in that.”
“I’m glad. It’s not good to keep things bottled up.”
Dr. Matthews hangs up. You sit on your bed, staring at your Boxes of Mom, the medical examiner’s report in hand, listing all the ways you were a bad daughter.
Such a long list.
Wanting nicer, more expensive clothes. Wishing you had a dad. Wanting to go to camps. On vacation. More food. More everything. Mostly you kept it inside, but sometimes, like with the dress, it was too much to keep in, and now she’s gone.
You pinch your thighs. Cake doesn’t answer your text. Thaddeus doesn’t answer your text. Why didn’t you ask Mae-Lynn for her number? She would know. She would know what you are feeling right now.
It is dark outside, and dark in the house, just like it must have been when she died. Dark in her head. Dark in her heart.
You feel dark in your heart, too. You feel like that darkness is going to split you apart.
It is thirty steps to the outbuilding. The girl-bug hops up and down. You’ll feel better.
Mae-Lynn had tossed it to you when the sheriff’s car showed up.
It’s still there, buried under the tarps in the milk crate. Shayna wouldn’t find it here. She never does laundry. It feels like it’s always going to be you, you, you, telling her how to raise you, what to feed you, how to make money, how to be.
Why do you have to become the parent?
The first sip is horrible, burning your mouth, carving a raw path down your throat.
The second sip is better, but still.
Under the laundry sink, you find some cans of Coke, sparkling water. Stuff your mom had left over from your last birthday party.
What a party. You, your mom, Rhonda, Cake, Bonita.
Other kids had sweet sixteens and quinceañeras with cakes and streamers and DJs and bouncy houses and credit cards and shopping trips and plastic and gloss.
You have always been lonely and you have never admitted it.
Drinking from the little bottle of rum is easier if you sip some Coke after. The sweet soothes the scratchy.
The black hole glimmers.
The girl-bug approves.
Is this better than pinching your thigh cutting your skin punching Ellen Untermeyer is this better is this better is this better is this better is this better is this better is this better.
23 days
MY SISTER’S FACE IS an angry stone mask.
She’s standing above me in the shed, holding the rum bottle and the empty can of Coke. The single bulb in the ceiling flares from behind her like a crooked halo.
“What the hell.”
Her voice comes from far away, because my head is a series of firecrackers and explosions. I try to open my mouth, but it’s so dry it sticks together.
And then I lean over and puke on the laundry basket full of clean clothes.
“Jesus, Tiger.”
Shayna puts the rum and the Coke can down, swabs at the floor with a green bath towel. I roll backward onto the floor.
“I was so worried about you. I’ve been texting your friends.”
I want to say, I only have one, but then I remember Thaddeus. He must count now, right? Yay. My mom is dead and my friend count has increased. Small miracles.
“You don’t drink. Listen, you can’t drink. I mean, honestly.”
“Where did you get this? I thought you had group today. Tiger, what’s going on?”
I grab her hand, shake my head. Black spots float in front of my eyes.
“No,” I say.
“Well, this is bad, Tiger. What’s going on here? Who are those kids? This doesn’t seem like—”
No! I stand up, weaving back and forth. I’m afraid I might throw up again.
“They’re the only people who understand,” I mumble.
“Well, I felt that way about some of my friends when I was sixteen, too. Hell, last year even, but—”
“No, not that. They understand about her. My mom. Being gone. You don’t.”
She sits back on her feet, looks up at me. “I don’t, but I’m trying my best.”
She sounds defensive.
Now I feel guilty. I’ve made her feel bad.
All the rules of death and dying: Move On. Stay Strong. Be Brave. Time Heals. Don’t Make Other People Feel Bad. I’ll never learn them all.
It’s dark outside. The big white moon is covered with clouds. I stumble to the back door of the house. Shayna gets up and follows me as I go in and make my way to my bedroom. “At least let me—”
“I have to go to bed,” I say. “I have to go to sleep.”
“Just leave me alone,” I say.
“Tiger—”
But I close the bedroom door on her and she doesn’t try to come in.
24 days, 10 hours
SHAYNA IS ON THE couch, texting with It’s Just Ray again. I can tell because her face is scrunched up and she’s swearing under her breath. She hasn’t said much since finding me drunk two days ago. We’ve been quiet in the Jellymobile. She did call someone last night and talked to them for a long time in the bedroom. I wondered if it was my dad.
How to Make Friends with the Dark Page 26