roses on it trailing behind him in the hallway, bobbing uselessly in the air-conditioner draft.
“Perhaps we should leave them alone,” Hugo says, sounding somehow both guilty and accusing. I suppose I should be glad he was willing to defy his friendship in order to tell me the truth, but it feels a little too late—kind of like me reading the Death Plan.
“I’m staying right here,” Bea says, but she’s completely green now.
“Please go home,” I tell her fervently. “I’m only going to worry about you if you stay. And I’m pretty sure Hugo is about to have a stress aneurysm.”
She presses her hand to her mouth, eyes squeezes shut. “Honestly. Yes. Okay.”
Hugo looks immensely relieved as they give me a hug and kiss to say goodbye. Then I’m left alone in the room with the man I can’t quite look in the eye. I’m not sure whether I’m mad at him. Yes, I decide. I would be mad if I had any energy in my body to feel things.
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” I ask, but the question feels far away.
“Would you have let me stay if I had?”
I shake my head, but it’s not really an answer. It’s too hard to think in this room with people, even if it’s just one person. One person I shared my body with. Maybe even my heart, but never fully my trust. Maybe I knew Christopher was telling the truth about the library.
There’s only one man I’ve ever really trusted, even though I shouldn’t. I’m not sure if that makes me foolish or in love. Is there even a difference? I love Christopher, but like my mother’s love for my father, it doesn’t mean anything good. Love is a chain around my ankle. It’s an anchor bearing me to the bottom of the ocean.
It’s this feeling of brokenness as I watch my mother die.
She wakes up so calm and casual it’s like nothing is wrong. “Harper.”
There’s a lurch in my throat, and I can taste stale coffee and hope. “Mom! You’re awake. Let me call the nurse. Are you in pain? Are you hungry?”
“No—Harper, wait. I don’t need anything.”
My stomach sinks. “What can I do?”
“Can you just…?” She blinks, a little too fast to be normal. “I lied about the plan. About being okay with everything. I’m afraid, baby, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Tears leak down my face. There’s no pantry or closet to hide in. No pillow to scream my pain into. There’s only her thin body to hold, and she holds me back, her hands shaking.
“I was—” She pauses, seeming to struggle to find the words. “I was looking up. With your father I was looking up, and I could never walk again.”
For a terrible moment I think she might be hallucinating, not really with me even though she seems clearer now than she has in months. Except I don’t think she’s hallucinating. She was looking up, like Deborah Kerr in the movie. She was hit by a car because she was so in love. What a cautionary tale, that movie. It had a happy ending, though.
Not like my mother’s love life. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
“Don’t be—sorry.” She grasps my hand, her head falling back, eyes closed. The distance widens between us, and I hold her tighter. “Love you. That’s the plan.”
And then she goes quiet.
The beep beep beep keeps going. No one rushes into the room, but there might as well be a ghost in the room with me. That’s how quiet and still my mother’s body is. That’s how lifeless she looks. There are a thousand cracks in my foundation, but this one is the deepest. I press my face into her body, into the warmth that isn’t quite alive, and cry.
The little squiggles on the machine bump up regularly enough, but that’s just electricity. Those are electrons firing inside a circuit. That’s not what makes my mother a person. That part is already gone, so it’s not a surprise when she starts breathing in a terrible sound that fills the room. A good thing, Freida says when she hears it. It means my mother is so relaxed that she can no longer be bothered to wake up. She is too relaxed to live. Can you imagine that?
That death is just the ultimate spa vacation, after all.
The afternoon sun presses hot against my neck, squeezing through the cheap white blinds on the window, marking my skin in a completely random place. The middle of the