Why hadn’t I demanded to look at that eye? All the clues clicked into place, and I felt like an idiot for not having put it all together sooner. I had seen all the pieces, but I had refused to assemble them.
Maybe I hadn’t wanted to. Things were different sometimes when the heart was involved.
But now I knew. There was no way to unknow.
I needed the details. I needed charts and histories and information. I wanted to see all her films, get the records of the surgery. I wanted to gather it all up and spread it out on the dining table like a code that I could read just right—better, smarter, than anybody else—and crack for her. I needed to know what was going on. How could I help her if I didn’t have the full story? But maybe not even she had the full story.
I noticed, the way you might with a patient, that my breathing was accelerated.
Some part of me understood that she was beyond help. That doctor had not said, Get her into surgery, stat! He hadn’t talked about any treatments at all. If this were something that could be cured—they would be trying to cure it right now. The fact that we were crocheting baby blankets for preemies at the hospital instead of going there for radiation treatments seemed to confirm that there weren’t any treatments left.
It all made sense now.
How thin she was. How vague she’d been on all the details. The goofy collection of eye patches. This was why she’d called me here. This was why she’d asked me to give up my entire life. This was what we’d been doing all this time.
We were saying good-bye.
Why hadn’t she told me? It seemed so unfair—that I hadn’t been informed.
I might not have done anything differently. But I might have thought about things differently. I might not have wasted so much time.
It filled me with panic. We were running out of time! What was she doing sitting around in the garden and making soup and crocheting blankets with a deadline like this? There had to be something more important for her to do with her time than watch ’80s rom-coms. Weren’t there people to see? Conversations to have? Travel?
Or maybe she just wanted to sit in the garden and breathe.
Complicated—always so complicated with Diana.
I don’t know how long I sat out in that hallway with my head in my hands. An hour? Two? All I knew was, once I went into her room and saw her again, knowing what I knew now, it would be real. And I didn’t want it to be real.
I stalled as long as I could. I stalled so long that when I finally forced myself through her door, she was asleep for the night. The lights were all dimmed, and the room was shadowy. I could make out the bruise on her forehead easily—it was almost black—but I didn’t get too close. I didn’t want to wake her.
Also, she wasn’t wearing her eye patch. It was the first time since I’d arrived that I could see her face, unobstructed. Would I have been able to tell, if I’d seen? Maybe. I could see that the eye itself was a bit distended. But otherwise, there she was.
My mother. Exactly the same as always—and totally different.
I lowered myself into the visitor’s chair beside her, held very still, and watched her sleeping face. I tried to imagine a world without Diana in it, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
How had I wasted so much time? How had I let one disappointment shape the course of our relationship? More than that, why had I decided to blame her for everything that happened with Heath Thompson? Stupid. And wrong. Why hadn’t I tried harder to see things clearly? Ten years I’d simmered in my own self-righteousness, holding my grudge against her as if the only way to win was to stay mad the longest.
As if there had ever been anything to win.
As if you don’t always lose by definition when you push the people who love you away.
All she’d wanted was forgiveness. And I had flat-out refused to give it to her.
I will always remember that moment of my life—that night in the hospital, crouched in a chair in my mother’s gray room, groping my way through the news of her death sentence, feeling it all, but completely numb at the same time.
I see it frozen in time, as if it’s a painting.
In the