Word of a horrific bus accident floated into town two weeks later.
Broken hearted, Vanessa always told Aly that he was the man she should have been with from the beginning, that he was the father she should have had growing up. Between the devastation of the loss Aly couldn’t recall, having Greg down her throat, and the first diagnoses, as far as Aly knew, her mother never tried again. She had already worked too hard for it, and the pain never proved worth it.
Her mother always teased that someday Aly would stumble into that stage, what she called the ‘ridiculous head over heels fantasy every little one dreams of, every old person dreads remember, and a piece of happiness that every girl deserves’.
Her mother expressed some of the most grief over never attending Aly’s wedding or seeing her children. She made Aly promised that she wouldn’t make her mistake, pregnant and alone as a teen. The week before Vanessa stopped talking; she whispered that she was going to miss the story of a first love, and they both mourned.
Just for a moment, Alyson w as thankful for no one’s eyes or arms. Flat on her back as she lay in bed, her lip trembled. Tears flooded down her face, hot and silent. Stomach relaxed to a concave between her hipbones, Aly balled her fists around the frame propped below her rips.
She would lift her head or pull it close, eyes scathing the wounded moment. A memory edging into her head, she flipped it on its back, sliding the metal clasps away from the cardboard backing. A second picture had been turned around, her packing revealing she was a frame too short to display it.
When moving to Lauren’s, Aly had found it in a paperback of The Tempest. It was wrapped for her seventeenth birthday, due at the end of the early spring Vanessa intended to see. It wasn’t wine- stained, in a mass collection, or an easy-reading version like the beat up renditions peppering the rest of her mother’s shelves. In her mother’s closet, it was hidden in a box covered in black lace. Inside, along with an unsigned card, it was brand new, the cover filled with artistic edgy illustrations, perfect-bound.
As if an afterthought, like a stray piece of paper, the picture was tucked beneath the cover. On the back, in her perfect, old-fashioned cursive printed with her calligraphy pens, she wrote, I love you, my Aly Sun, and below, “What is past is prologue” – William Shakespeare.
The photograph was taken the second time she got sick, before radiation affected her thick head of hair. It was always a shame when it pieced out, clumps in the sink or on top of a filled trashcan. Post full premature hysterectomy, it kept coming back – in surrounding areas, in new places, finally weaseling into her blood and bones, traveling to her head.
Standing against the vibrant yellow panels of a hot dog stand, her bright blue pea-coat was a contrast as stark as her dark brown curls. Pupils reduced to specks from the camera’s bright flash, her green irises looked alien. Light freckles covered her ashen skin, only noticeable after her complexion paled with dangerous levels of anemia. Her young mother shared a genuine smile, both warm and pained, her lips pale and dimples slack.
She always was beautiful.
At her side, Lauren had her fast twisted into a mock-gape, leaning forward with both arms crossed. In a gray sweater, black skinny jeans, and a blue beanie that caused the bottom of her hair to spray out passed her shoulders, they were both dressed too chilled for that summer. Aly remembered the blistering heat, a rare feat to be prolonged over so many months, as distinctly as she remembered her mother’s frigid fingers.
Aly wished either were here to offer advice, but the longing for her mother was overwhelming. It took a while to confess how viciously the grief was, as though labeling it was an understatement. It tasted like pain and fear, a constant haunting over her shoulder, fighting its way forward through every thought. It had been half a year, those unspeakable days after Christmas, before New Year’s, since the doctors offered false hope that she’d be able to fight it until an early spring.
At the time, it never felt like her mother was the only one carrying the disease, always a dozen bricks too many on her own chest. Like glass, and ashes, it filled her lungs. Always crying, praying, pleading