In an Instant(37)

When no one is in the room, Chloe flexes her muscles and stretches. She hums the lyrics to songs and has conversations with herself. When she has company, she feigns moroseness that verges on comatose.

Nearly every night she revises her farewell note. The journal beside her bed is filled with them. The latest version reads:

Dad, this is not your fault. The accident was just that, an accident.

Mom, you are who you are, so you also are not to blame. You tried your best, but your best could never make me who you wanted me to be.

Vance, I loved you.

She vacillates on the tense of the second-to-last word: loved or love? Vance, I loved you or Vance, I love you. But mostly her edits involve the section about my mom. This is the kindest version, but I still hope my mom never lays eyes on it.

Last night, when my mom was asleep, I tried to tell her what Chloe was doing and about her plan, but at my first word, my mom startled awake violently, hyperventilating and screaming, and I decided not to visit her again.





43

At the door to my bedroom, my mom pauses, draws in a deep breath, then bravely steps inside. Bingo steps in with her. My mess, which before was a constant irritant to her, is exactly the same as it was eighteen days ago, when everything was different. My soccer uniform is balled beside my bed, my shin guards and cleats thrown in the direction of my disheveled closet. Schoolbooks and notebooks and cards and trophies litter my small desk, and several half-finished art projects are piled in the corner.

Chloe and my dad will be discharged from the hospital in a week, and Chloe’s room (our room) needs to be ready for when they get home. I’m slightly appalled by the callous efficiency with which my mom goes about the task. Like a hazmat service disposing of contaminated waste, everything I owned is deposited into trash bags and thrown out the bedroom window to the lawn below to save my mom the task of lugging it down the stairs.

Bingo watches. He lies in his favorite spot, in the square frame of the afternoon sun through the window, the light soaking his gold fur and painting it white, his brown eyes tracking her. When she pulls the chewed-up Frisbee from beneath my bed, his head lifts and his ears perk, and then he flops back to the ground when it is deposited unceremoniously into the trash bag with everything else.

Amazingly, my entire life fits into eight Hefty lawn bags: my clothes, my collection of pigs, my trophies, my scrapbooks, my schoolwork, my Mike Trout–signed baseball.

She leaves nothing.

When the last bag has been tossed out the window, she attacks my bed, ripping the sheets and covers and dust ruffle away with such violence she is huffing and puffing and her shirt is wet with sweat. She throws them, along with my pillow, onto the stack of bags below.

She is pulling down the sash when there is a knock at the door.

With a shuddering breath, she straightens her shoulders, smooths her hair, and marches down the stairs to answer it. She swings it open to find Bob standing there, his face lined with concern, and she falls into his arms.

“I saw you throwing bags out the window,” he says, rubbing her shoulders. “Ann, you should have called. You shouldn’t be doing this alone.”

She doesn’t answer, just allows him to lead her to the couch, where she curls against him, her tears seeping into his shirt. And I hate that I’m glad he’s there.





44

Mo returns to school today. She was released from the hospital three days ago. The doctors and nurses threw a surprise apple-cider party in her room when they announced the good news that her toes were out of danger. She didn’t even wait for the party to be over before she began packing her bag to go home.

I hang out in her bedroom as she gets ready for her first day back. Physically she is better. She has regained the weight she lost, and her skin is mostly healed on her fingers. Her greatest remaining struggle is sleep, her nights continually interrupted with shivering and flinches of terror that make her exhausted when she is awake. She spends twenty minutes blotting out the fatigue that shows in dark circles beneath her eyes, and when she’s done, she almost looks like her old self, with the exception of her footwear, an old pair of sheepskin moccasins she bought when we visited Alaska three years ago—the only shoes she owns that fit over her still-swollen toes.

She frowns at her feet in the full-length mirror and then, with a deep breath, flings her hair back over her shoulder and heads out the door.



From the moment she steps onto the quad, she’s a celebrity, every eye watching as she pretends not to notice and walks boldly toward her first-period class. Some stare directly, their eyes pinched in pity. Others hide their glances, furtive peeks that dart away as soon as she looks their way.

All morning she deflects the unwanted attention with the grace of Kate Middleton, nonchalant and elegant as if immune to it. And only when she goes to the restroom after third period and is alone in a stall does she pull her feet up on the toilet and put her head against her knees, resting from the toll it takes to pretend she’s exactly who she was and to survive without me, the one person she was always able to be exactly who she was with.

I sit with her at lunch. She buys a baked potato from the cafeteria and carries it to an empty classroom to eat it in private. Peeling back the aluminum, she slices the potato open with a plastic knife and stares at its open belly as the curls of steam swirl upward, and I know she is thinking of warmth and her mouth is watering.