Before I Say Goodbye

by Rachel Ann Nunes

I walked her to the door, and when I returned, James had still not started in on his food. “Mom, we have to say a prayer. They always do that at Lauren’s.”

  That was new. “Okay. Do you want to do it?”

  He nodded. “You have to fold your arms like this.”

  Standing next to him, I obliged.

  “Heavenly Father, thank you for this food. Thank you that my mommy’s not sick anymore and that she came home ’cuz I really missed her. Thank you for my best friend Lauren and for my cookies and for Lauren’s mommy, who is always nice to me. Thank you for our new couch and my glasses. Amen. No, in the name of Jesus, amen.”

  He smiled up at me, apparently expecting approval. I ran my hand through his hair before squatting next to his chair. “I’m glad to be back, too, James. I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “I was scared.” His voice came out a whisper. “Really scared. Lauren’s mommy rocked me, but it wasn’t you.” His face crumpled, and I gathered him into my arms. For long moments he sobbed, clinging to me, but after a time his tears dried, and he regained interest in his lasagna.

  “Aren’t you going to eat, Mommy?” he asked, sitting on his chair again.

  “Sure.” I wasn’t hungry, but if I didn’t eat, I would only get worse.

  How long, I wondered, would he cry when I was really gone? Maybe I didn’t want to know.

  “How about we sleep in the tree house tonight,” I said. “Would you like that?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Kyle

  For a day that hadn’t started out so well, it was ending perfectly. I’d dared wear my new makeup to school for the half day I was there, and my friends hadn’t said a word. What’s more, Monty, the visitor from church, talked to me in the halls and said he’d look for me in our tech class the next day. Two of his friends had stopped to chat with me, too. I was about ready to die from happiness. School suddenly looked brighter. Even Allia said she’d looked for me at lunch, not knowing that I’d eaten at her house before arriving at school.

  The crown on the day was when Sister Rushton picked me up from school and told me that not only was my mother coming home from the hospital but the dance teacher had agreed to give me a free private lesson. I could hardly contain my excitement. I didn’t ask how it happened—probably she’d been talking to the teacher about Lauren and had mentioned me—and I didn’t care. A private lesson. I could do a lot with that.

  And I did. I think I might have even impressed the teacher, though she didn’t invite me to any more free lessons. At least I’d learned enough to keep me busy for a few weeks, and I’d learn more if I kept watching the other lessons. I couldn’t wait to get home, eat something fast, and do a little more practicing before getting to my English homework. I’d finished most of it in class, though, so I was confident I could do the rest tonight.

  I practically skipped up the steps to my house, almost forgetting to wave to Sister Rushton. She was weird that way. All her kids waved to her or kissed her cheek or something whenever she dropped them off. She waved back to me but didn’t leave, waiting to see if I got inside okay. I didn’t need her to wait. I’d left my bedroom window open a crack and taken off the screen in case I got locked out someday and Mom forgot to leave the key under the front mat. Today the door was unlocked.

  A heavenly smell hit me as I walked into the house, and for a moment I stood there, taking it all in. It reminded me of Allia’s house the times I’d picked up James. My mouth watering, I hurried across the living room into the kitchen.

  “How about we sleep in the tree house tonight,” Mom was saying to James. “Would you like that?”

  “Yay!” James cheered. He forked another mound of food into his mouth. Lasagna. My stomach rumbled, reminding me how starving I was. But not starving enough to notice that Mom’s plate was still empty.

  “Outside? No way.” I sat down where Mom had left me a plate. “Mom, you just got back from the hospital. You need to be in a real bed. James, don’t be selfish. She can’t sleep out there yet.”

  “I can too. I’m fine.” Mom had a bright smile, but I could see the strain around her eyes. Was it only because of what had happened last night? I hoped so.

  James studied her. “We should sleep in your bed instead.”

  Mom sighed. “Whatever. But I’m fine. It was an accident.”

  Silence. I’d been thinking a lot about how to avoid another of these “accidents,” but I didn’t want to talk about it in front of James. He’d been so scared last night.

  I plopped a big spoonful of lasagna on Mom’s plate. “There you go.”

  “We have root beer floats for after,” James told me. He was such a kid. What did root beer floats matter after the time I’d just had at my dance lesson?

  “Yummy.” I was dying to tell Mom about the dancing, but I wasn’t about to bring it up again, not after what happened last night.

  “Look, Kyle,” Mom said, without warning. “I know about the dancing.”

  My hand stopped with my fork halfway to my mouth. I stared at her and then at James.

  “Hey, it wasn’t me,” James said. “I didn’t tell her.”

  My gaze swung back to Mom. “How?”

  “How? I can read it in your eyes. See it in the way you walk.”

  “Sister Rushton told you, didn’t she?”

  Mom nodded. “Yes.” Was that a tightening of her lips?

  “I’m okay just watching. I can copy it at home. When I’m older, I can get a job and pay for lessons.” Never mind that I’d probably never be able to make so much while I was young enough for it to matter.

  “Sister Rushton and some of the other women want to help you with the lessons, and the teacher has an opening. She doesn’t take just anyone, so that means you’re pretty special.”

  The words felt huge, as though they took up the entire universe. I blinked, hardly daring to believe. My fork dropped from my hand. “Really? You mean I can . . . I can . . .” If I was so happy, why was I crying? Why did my chest feel ready to explode?

  “Yes.” Mom was crying too. I launched myself at her and hugged her tight.

  “I can’t believe it. Oh, I swear, I’ll never do a mean thing again. I’ll clean the whole house every single day. I’ll get straight A’s, I’ll babysit James without complaining, and I’ll pay everyone back when I’m older.”

  Mom laughed, her arms hugging me tight. “Whoa,” she said. “You should stop right there before someone asks for your firstborn child.”

  I pulled from her grasp and danced around the kitchen. “It’s a miracle! I can’t believe it! I thought Utah would be the worst ever, but this makes up for everything!” God had heard my prayers, but I didn’t say that, not knowing how Mom would take it.

  James and Mom both jumped up from the table and began dancing. Mom was really good, and what James lacked in knowledge, he made up for with intensity. I laughed, and the happiness was almost too big to contain. We used to always dance like this together, mimicking moves we’d seen from old movies. How long had it been since we stopped? Eight months, a year? Mom had always initiated it before, and now I felt sad that I’d waited for her to be the one. Maybe she needed someone to remind her how much fun it was.

  James banged into the wall. “Oops.”

  “It’s a new move!” Mom called, falling into the wall herself so realistically that for a second fear arrowed down my spine. Then she was up and laughing.

  After a while, I sat down to my cold plate of lasagna, not because I was hungry, but because Mom was looking pale and her forehead pinched, signaling one of her headaches.

  James and Mom followed me, James eagerly, Mom moving with a deliberate slowness. “I want more,” James said. I gave him another helping, which he downed in less than a minute.

  “Can I watch TV now?” he asked.

 
Mom smiled. “Yeah. Why not? I’m going to take a bath.” James ran off, and Mom stood to clear the table. I noticed that only half her lasagna was gone.

  “Mom,” I said, as she put plastic wrap over her plate.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you have a headache?”

  Her hands stilled. “A little one.”

  “Are you going to take a pill?”

  She sighed. “Not until ten, I’m not.”

  That meant hours more to wait.

  “Mom,” I said. “How are you . . . I mean, can I help . . .” How are you going to stop from killing yourself, was what I wanted to say, but I knew that wouldn’t go over well.

  “It won’t happen again.” Mom’s stare felt heavy, like she could read my thoughts. “Look, honey, is there something going on with you? Besides dance?”

  “With me? Naw.”

  “It’s just, you haven’t been sleeping well.”

  She wanted to talk about my nightmares, and I wanted to talk about the pills. That made two of us who weren’t going to get what we wanted.

  I shrugged, but inside I was screaming, “You’re different!” Dancing together in the kitchen made it that much more clear. My mom wasn’t the same, and it made me uneasy.

  Mom drew her pills from her purse and showed me the sticky note attached. “I’m marking down whenever I take my medication. If I can’t see what I’ve written, I’ll ask you to tell me what it says.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be able to see it?”

  Mom’s turn to shrug. “The headaches make it hard to see sometimes.”

  “Okay.” Relief shuddered through me. She was taking this seriously. “When will the headaches go away?”

  “Unfortunately, I’m going to have them the rest of my life. But we’ll deal with it.”

  That didn’t sound good, and a wave of pity for my mother surged in my chest. “I’ll help in any way I can.” I started for the basement stairs, thinking I might practice a bit more, but Mom stopped me.

  “Uh, aren’t you forgetting the kitchen is yours? You’re still grounded. School and dance and places with me. That’s it.”

  I sighed, but deep down I knew I deserved worse. “So when do I start dance?”

  “Tomorrow.” She grinned at my happiness.

  “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “I know.”

  And I knew she really did.

  I hugged her. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too, honey.” Her voice sounded so strange that I drew back to look at her face.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Mom nodded. “I think I’ll lie down for a bit before my bath.” She walked slowly to her room. I stood watching after her, not knowing what to think.

  James had reappeared in the kitchen, probably looking for an after-dinner snack. The kid was a bottomless pit these days. He tugged at my hand. “Is Mom going to be okay?”

  I looked at his sweet face, those huge eyes begging for reassurance. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I just don’t know.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Rikki

  I’d planned on dropping the kids off at school and then going to work as usual, but I simply couldn’t get out of bed on time, so I climbed into the truck with my hair still uncombed. No big deal. I’d bathed last night, and my hair didn’t look all that different when it was combed, so fingers could do the trick as I drove. Only by the time James got out of the truck and disappeared inside the school, I was seeing double, and it took me ten minutes of resting in the car before I could drive home.

  It was as if telling someone about the tumor had made all my energy and courage flee. As if I didn’t have to be strong anymore. Except that I did. The situation with the kids wasn’t handled to my satisfaction, and I didn’t know how to hurry that along.

  I didn’t want to die. I wanted to see my little girl dance in New York, I wanted to see James go to college, I wanted to get to know Quinn.

  Tears made it even harder to see. I told myself to quit blubbering and go inside the house, but my muscles had decided they were through for the day. I hurt everywhere, and I couldn’t remember if I’d taken my pain pill, though I’d tried to be careful about writing it down on the sticky note. All I had to do was open my purse and look. Only somehow my purse wasn’t in the truck, and I couldn’t walk inside.

  I had to, though. I reached for the door. My hand closed on thin air.

  Tears came in earnest now, and I laid my head against the steering wheel and sobbed. Charlotte had said the Lord loved me and had brought me home to Utah for a reason, so I wouldn’t be alone. Yet here I was, without friends and family, sitting in my driveway too weak and discouraged to go on. What if I died here and now, without telling Kyle and James goodbye or how much I loved them?

  I hated God! Or the idea of Him. I hated the false security believing gave people, especially when they were at their most vulnerable, when they faced the end. Was it any wonder I’d stopped praying the night my father had sent his thirteen-year-old daughter alone into a cold November night because she hadn’t cleared the table fast enough? I’d known then that God was too far away to care about me and that only Dante could help

  Dante had helped. He’d wanted me to sneak inside his house each night to stay, but I didn’t like his father any more than my own, and it was warm enough in the bushes with all the blankets and old coats Dante arranged from somewhere.

  Yet even Dante had let me down now.

  Charlotte had told me to give Dante time. What if I didn’t have time? What if right now, this very moment, was the end? What if I never saw Dante or my children again?

  Another thought came, every bit as disturbing. What if God had been watching all those years ago? What if He’d sent me to Dante’s that cold night? What if God had seen ahead and had known what would happen and had prepared him with what I needed?

  I needed him prepared now.

  For the first time since I was thirteen, I prayed. I prayed for strength, for time, but most of all for Dante to be my last and greatest hero. As I prayed, I cried with a strength I didn’t know I had. I couldn’t open the door to the truck, but I did a decent job of leaving every bit of water in my body on the steering wheel.

  At last I grew quiet, holding the steering wheel and feeling the warmth of the sun coming through the windows and pushing back the coldness in my heart. The heat gave me hope, and I reached for the door again. Please let me be able to open it.

  That’s when I heard the tapping and looked out the passenger window into Becca’s concerned face.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Becca

  I left Cory his school assignments when I took the children to school, planning to go to the temple after I dropped them off, yet as I pulled up at Lauren’s school, my mind felt unsettled. I kept thinking about the gardens in Saint George as I debated what to try first in my own yard. Maybe I should pray about it, but I felt a little silly doing that. I mean, whether I chose a trellis with roses or with ivy, it could hardly make an eternal difference. What I needed was to talk to a friend who knew my heart. Yet no one really knew about my dream, except Dante, who’d acted strangely yesterday during family home evening, bringing up people we hadn’t seen for years and asking me how many children they had.

  Not that I didn’t want to share this new part of my life with Dante, but the trip to Saint George had opened another door. I hadn’t had a close girlfriend since I began having children. Oh, there were women at church, neighbors who I knew would drop anything to lend a hand, old college or mission friends who were always enjoyable to catch up with, and even my sister, though we’d drifted apart these last years as we raised our families.

  What I wanted was to talk with Rikki. Getting to know her the past weekend had brought
it all back. The youthful friendships, the craving to talk things out with another woman, having someone to laugh with and to share moments no one else really understood.

  I craved that now. Rikki didn’t see things like I did, but she had a way of getting down to the nub of the concern, and even when I totally disagreed with her, she believed my opinion was every bit as good and valid as hers.

  She wouldn’t be home, of course. She’d be at work now, though she probably should have held off a few days after her brush with death. I went home by way of her house anyway, just to see, because I remembered how fragile she’d been at the dance studio yesterday. It wasn’t too far out of the way. One street.

  Her truck was in the driveway, and I felt an odd déja vù sensation as I left the van and walked up to the door of the house. I shivered in my sweater because the sun was still hidden behind a large patch of angry gray clouds. Fall had officially arrived.

  I was almost to the porch when I saw movement in the truck. I stopped and stared. Rikki was inside, slumped over the wheel. My heart jumped into full alarm as I sprinted to the truck.

  I knocked on the glass. Her head came up slowly, her eyes reddened but intent. “Becca,” she mouthed.

  I took that as an invitation and opened the passenger door. “What are you doing out here?” Crying for one thing, I was sure, but it wouldn’t be polite to bring it up.

  “Thinking.” She looked away again. “How come you’re here?”

  “I felt like talking to you.” Tears pricked the back of my eyes, though I had no idea why. “Are you going to work?”

  “I was.”

  “Maybe you should rest another day.” Though she was always pale, her whiteness today was frightening.

  “It’s not all that hard. I sit a lot. It doesn’t take much energy to push a few buttons on the computer.”

  She was simplifying things, as we women have a tendency to do. “Just being there is stressful,” I said. “Do you really need to go?”

  “Actually, I don’t think I’m ever going to work again.”