by Mary Kubica
By the time I woke up Mom was dead, except that she wasn’t dead.
It was all a dream.
My eyes adapt. The light becomes less painful, less blinding.
And that’s when I see a man in the room too, and I know straightaway that it’s the man from the dream. And I wonder if I’m still dreaming. If this is like the purgatory of dreams and I’m trapped somewhere between sleep and awake, having to atone for my sins before I can fully wake up. His back is to me as it’s almost always been because he’s there on a chair before Mom. He sits, though I see it in the body posture, the carriage, and I know that it’s him. I’m not chasing him anymore because now he’s here.
Ping, I hear then. Ping. And I turn to watch the movement of lines across Mom’s EKG, the spikes and dips of her heartbeat.
“Dad,” I breathe, my voice gravelly and hoarse. My heart throbs. Because after chasing him for all those days and nights, after spending my entire life trying to find him, he’s here.
He’s been here all along, waiting for me to wake up.
Except that as the man turns to me, I see that he’s different. His face is not the face from my dreams. There’s no facial hair anywhere, and his eyes are a grayish-green like sage. They’re not brown. His hair is streaked with gray and there are lines across his face, forehead lines mostly, deeply set. His arms are blotched with pale pink scars.
It dawns on me then, slowly. Of course he’s different from the man in my dream. Because in real life I never saw his face. I only caught a glimpse of the back of him when I was a girl, before Mom snatched the photograph from my hand. Before we read a book, before we ate ice cream. Now I remember. I never saw that photograph again until it returned to me in a dream.
There’s a book on his lap.
He leans forward, gathering Mom’s hands into his. Hers are limp. He strokes her cheek, and I see in his eyes the look that he has for her. A look of adoration, a look of love. It makes me feel embarrassed, watching them. This moment of intimacy. It’s not for me to see.
In all my life, no one has ever looked at me that way. I doubt anyone ever will.
His smile is deferential, kind. “No, Jessie,” he says as he lets go of Mom’s hands and turns back to me. “I’m not your father,” he tells me, and at first I’m speechless because if not my father, then who? My eyes well with tears—wanting, needing him to be my father—as I sputter, “There was a photograph Mom had of you. I remember seeing it a long time ago. She took it away, she hid it, but it stayed with me. It was a picture of my father. It was you. You have to be him,” I say, and he leaves her side to come to me.
He sits down beside me on the bed, a gap spread between us. He pats my hand, tells me his name is Aaron. “I knew your mother a long time ago,” he explains. “We were married. She was my wife,” but then he pauses, his own eyes red, and gathers himself. He won’t cry in front of me. “I don’t have any children, Jessie,” he says, as if that should make it clear, but it only makes me more confused. More angry and more confused. Because how could he be Mom’s husband but not my father? Didn’t he want me?
My tone is more scathing, more exasperated than I mean for it to be. “Then why are you here?” I ask, and I see the anguish in his eyes, the grief. I pull my hand from his, seeing then that he doesn’t have a wedding band. He’s not married and I wonder if, after he and Mom were married, he ever was. He divorced Mom, he left her, I think, and there’s a groundless anger that swells up inside me.
This man hurt Mom.
“I loved your mother very much,” he says, as if he can read my mind. But then he rethinks and alters it a bit. “I love your mother very much,” he says, before holding up the book from his lap. “Eden,” he tells me, “your mother, she sent this to me,” and I look at it, a brown leather book with a stitched edge, and in his other hand a note, written in Mom’s handwriting on a piece of stationery. Stationery with her own name engraved along the edge. “It’s her journal,” he explains, though in all my life, I never once knew Mom kept a journal.
He hands the note to me. I skim Mom’s words. In them, she tells him she’s dying. She says that she wants him to have this journal so that he can finally have closure, so he can finally understand.
The last line reads, With love, Eden.
“Understand what?” I ask. And there it is again, that exasperation.
But his tone is compassionate and warm, his eyes soft. He rubs at his forehead, confesses, “There were some loose ends, Jessie,” he says. “Some unfinished business between your mother and me.” He asks, “What did Eden tell you about your father?” and I shake my head and admit, “Nothing. She never told me a thing about him.”
He passes the book to me, the journal. He says that he thinks I should read it, that it would help me understand.
“Everything she did,” he tells me, voice cracking, “she did for you. You should know that.”
And then he rises to his feet to leave, but not before first confessing, “I wanted to be a father, Jessie. I would have loved to be a father. I would have loved to be your father. But sometimes life doesn’t go as planned.”
I don’t know what he means by that. But I grip the journal in my hand; I press it to my heart, knowing I’ll soon understand.
He says that he’ll give Mom and me a few minutes. And then he leaves the room.
My eyes turn to Mom’s. They’re unfocused and disoriented, the top lid puffed up. She sees me but doesn’t see me all at the same time. I wave; she waves back. But not right away, as if there’s a broadcast delay. Her lips are a length of string, pilled and thin. They’re dry, chapped, some sort of gunk collecting around the edges, which no one bothers to wipe. Her skin is a washed-out shade of gray blotched with purple and blue. A lack of oxygen. Poor circulation flow.
And yet she’s there. Sitting upright. Waving.
“You’re alive,” I breathe as I go to her one last time.
* * *
The nurse leads the way as we drift into the hall. I take one look over my shoulder as we go, saying to her quietly, in a whisper, “It’s a miracle.” Because I don’t want Mom to know how close she came to dying. “She’s better. She’s all better. Just like that. Overnight, and she’s better,” I say, a smile as wide as the Grand Canyon on my face. And suddenly nothing else matters. All that matters is Mom. I clutch the nurse’s hand, wanting to celebrate the moment, to savor it. Relief consumes me, seeing that Mom has her strength back, some of it anyway. That she can sit up, that she can swallow. I’m thinking of next steps already. We’ll begin chemo again. Maybe there is some clinical trial that Mom can participate in, some new medicine we can give a try.
“Oh, Jessie,” the nurse says as we watch a family pass by in the hallway, flowers and balloons tethered to their hands. Her face drops. It gets overpowered with empathy, and for a minute or two she’s speechless. The only smile she has to offer is a comforting one. Not a happy one. Not a celebratory one like mine.
It’s a sympathy smile.
“Jessie,” she says as she ushers me to a nearby bench and we sit, just across the hall from Mom’s room so we can still see inside. “Your mother,” she says, hesitating. “She doesn’t have much time left.”
“But—” I argue, thinking of Mom, sitting there in the room in a chair. Mom, more energetic than I’ve seen for weeks. Mom, making what looks to me like a speedy recovery. There’s a spark to her eye, just a dot of light that wasn’t there the last time I looked, days ago when she last opened her eyes. She’d been comatose for days like that; she couldn’t swallow, she couldn’t eat. The doctor said it wouldn’t be long. And now here she is. Clearly he was wrong. Through the doorway I see Mom reach a hand out to nurse Carrie, rub at her throat. She can’t speak. But she’s asking for more ice chips, for a drink. “Look at her. See for yourself. She looks fine.”
“She looks better. But the cancer. The cancer is still the
re. This happens, Jessie. A death rally, we call it. She will relapse, honey, and likely soon. Maybe hours, maybe days. There’s no way to know for sure, but her body is still deteriorating. The cancer isn’t cured. It’s metastasized to the lungs, the bones. It’s getting worse.”
Which I know. Of course I know. I’ve heard this all before, many times. But looking at Mom now, it can’t be true. It’s like she’s had this surge of brain power and awareness. Like she’s come back from the dead.
And then I understand.
Terminal lucidity. As imminent a sign of death as any. The final blessing I’d been hoping for. Five more lucid moments with Mom. That’s all I asked for. And here they are.
* * *
The nurse graciously turns off the machine as it flatlines. I wonder if she always does that, if her hand shoots there automatically the moment a patient dies so their beloved family members don’t have to hear the damn thing scream. The ping from my dream has finally gone silent.
Mom’s doctor presses the end of his stethoscope to her chest and we all look to him for guidance, for him to tell us she’s dead, though we already know that she is. Her body lies peacefully on the bed, skin going white, blood draining from it. Already she’s colder and more synthetic feeling than she was before. Her hands and toes unclench; her body goes lax. The doctor speaks. “Time of death,” he says, “Two forty-two.”
And with it comes great relief.
Mom’s battle with cancer is done.
Mom’s death rally lasted a total of three hours and fourteen minutes. For some of it she sat up with me in the chair, while Aaron watched from the corner of the room. He thought he should leave, that Mom and I should have this time together, but I asked him to stay. I did most of the talking. Mom could talk once she warmed up to it, but talking didn’t come with ease.
I spent the time trying not to cry. But then, when I couldn’t hold it in any longer, I sobbed, gulping down air and choking on it. Because there were things that needed to be said and I didn’t have much time left. If I didn’t say them, I’d regret it forever, for the rest of my life. “I don’t know who I am without you,” I confessed. “I’m no one without you.” And though I didn’t say it aloud, I thought to myself that I’m vapor without Mom around. I’m nothing. A nonentity. A rock, a clock, a can of baked beans.
Mom stroked my hand as she did the day she told me she was dying. Caressed my fingers one at a time, and forced a smile that was as sad as mine.
“You’re you,” she said. “The one and only Jessie Sloane,” as she stroked my arm with an anemic hand, the white flesh darkened here and there with bruise-like marks.
I squeezed into the same chair beside her, as if I was still a little girl. I don’t know how we fit, but somehow we did. We sat like that for a while. As we did, one of my earliest memories returned to me, one of the few that hadn’t been lost to time. In it, I’m about five years old. It’s the middle of the night when Mom comes to me in my room. I’m sound asleep when she kneels on the floor beside my bed, whispering into an ear, Jessie, honey. Wake up.
And I do.
She helps me get dressed. Not fully dressed, but instead we slip a sweater over my nightgown, a pair of leggings beneath its hem. Socks and shoes. I follow her out the front door and into the blackness of night, asking at least a gazillion times where we’re going, though all she ever says is You’ll see. We walk hand and hand down the street.
There’s a rare giddiness about Mom in that moment. A frivolity. She isn’t restrained as she often is, but instead is playful and bright. We only walk as far as the home next door, but for me it seems an incredible adventure, some sort of magical, midnight escapade. We have to walk to the far side of the Hendersons’ home where the gate is, cutting through their lawn as we go. Mom stands on tiptoes—her feet, I realize only then, are bare—to unlatch the gate, pushing it slowly open so it doesn’t squeak.
Where are we going? I ask, and she says, You’ll see.
We creep through the grass to a tree at the center of the backyard. A tall tree, sky-high, as high as my five-year-old eyes can see. Though it’s too dark to see, I’m pretty sure the crown of the tree stretches clear into the clouds. There’s a swing hanging there from one of the tree’s branches, just a slab of wood with a thick rope that’s looped through holes on each side. Mom tells me to hop on and at first I resist, thinking we can’t possibly ride on the Hendersons’ tree swing without asking. But Mom’s face is radiant, her smile wide.
She sits down on the wood herself, pats the thighs of her pants. She tells me again to hop on, only this time she means on her lap. And I do.
I scramble awkwardly on, Mom hitching an arm around my stomach to help hoist me up. I sit on her lap, leaning back and into her as she gets set to launch us from the ground. Mom holds onto the rope with a single hand, the other folded around my belly. She walks backward as far as her bare feet can reach and then all at once, she lifts her feet from the earth and, just like that, we fly.
“Do you remember,” I asked, snuggled there beside her on the hospital chair, “the time we broke into the Hendersons’ backyard and snuck a ride on their tree swing?”
For as long as I live, I’ll never forget the smile that bloomed on her face right then. She closed her eyes, reveling in the moment. The memory of the two of us nestled together on that tree swing. “It was the best night of my life,” I said.
Shortly after the memory left, Mom got tired. The nurses and I helped her back to bed. Minutes later, Mom fell asleep. She drifted back into some sort of minimally conscious state and passed away two hours later with me there at her side.
* * *
It’s only after the funeral director comes to collect Mom’s body that I finally rise from the chair. The room is remarkably quiet. No music playing, no familiar sound of the EKG.
The only sounds I hear now come from down the hall where other people lie dying.
Before he leaves, Aaron asks if I’ll be all right and I tell him that I will. “I may not be your father,” he says, “but it would mean the world to me if I could be your friend,” and I tell him that I’d like that very much. He goes, and after he does, I see the nurse has already begun to strip the sheets from Mom’s bed. Soon another patient will be here, another family surrounding them, watching as they die.
“Where are you going to go?” she asks, and I shrug and say stupidly, “Coffee,” because nothing else comes to mind.
Beyond that, I have no idea where to go, what to do with my life.
But there’s a part of me that thinks I can figure this out in time.
I try to reconstruct the dream. As I move down the bright, buzzing hospital halls, I try to piece it back together. But dreams have a way of fading fast, the mind a habit of deleting nonessential things. It’s as if there’s a fifty-piece puzzle before me and I’m missing all but five pieces. I’ve lost forty-five and only some of them connect. I remember only squirrels. Hot dogs. A hippopotamus. But I don’t know what any of it means.
It’s only as I cut through the hospital lobby, passing by the cafeteria, that I’m struck with the sudden sense that something is missing. Something that makes it harder to breathe. I come to a sudden stop and as I do, a body plows into me from behind, making my bag drop to the ground, contents spilling across the hospital floor. Mom’s stuff—her lotion, her ChapStick, her journal—as well as mine. My driver’s license, my credit card, dollar bills.
“My fault, my fault,” I hear as I turn to see a man scramble to the ground to pick up my stuff. “I didn’t see you. I wasn’t looking where I was going,” he admits as he rises to his feet and holds out the bag for me, my things shoved indelicately back in.
As he does I catch a look at his face for the very first time, and only then do I remember. I gasp. It’s him. “Liam,” I breathe, taking in that shaggy brown hair and the blue gum-ball eyes, knowing with certainty that he was there i
n my dream with me. There’s the vaguest recollection of sitting on a sofa beside him, of his hand stroking my hair. It’s a thought that makes me blush as I take a step closer to him. And though I don’t know him, there’s the greatest sense that I do. That we’re already friends. “Liam,” I say again.
But his face only clouds over in confusion. He shakes his head, stares vacantly at me like I’m mistaken. He looks tired. Stubble has all but taken over his face, and his hair stands on end. His bloodshot eyes are even bloodier than they were before, rivers of red running through the white. He shakes his head. “Jackson,” he says. “Jack.” And I find that I’m thrown completely off, feeling out of sorts because he’s not Liam. Of course he’s not Liam. Because Liam was only a dream. This man is a different man completely, though our late-night confessions over coffee were real. That was real, I remind myself, finding it suddenly impossible to remember what’s real and what’s not.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer. “I thought,” and I feel silly all of a sudden. “I should go,” I say, taking the bag abruptly from his hands, excusing myself, trying to sidestep him and leave. But he doesn’t let me leave. Instead he steps in front of me, reaches out his hand and says, “You never told me your name,” and for a second there’s the sense that he doesn’t want me to leave. That he wants me to stay.
His handshake is warm and firm. He holds on a second longer than he needs to.
I reply, “Jessie,” knowing for the first time in a long while that I am. I am Jessie Sloane.
“You’re leaving, Jessie?” he asks, and I say, “No reason to stick around here any longer.”
I don’t have to tell him that Mom is dead, because he already knows. He can see it in my eyes. “Your brother?” I ask, thinking of the motorcycle accident. His brother flying headfirst into a utility pole. “Is he going to be all right?” For a moment Jack—Jackson—is silent, but then he says, “Bit the dust last night,” and my heart breaks for the both of us.
But there’s also a sense of relief because, though we lost the war, the battle is finally through.