Mothered (72)

It felt right.

Right in the sense that while inside the dream she’d had no confusion. The scene had moved forward with confidence, like a windup toy that marched perpetually onward when given a wide-open space. And Grace had had the sensation of knowing what was going to happen next. She remembered wanting a lamp for her birthday. The tomato-soup vomit. Her decision to let Hope be mad at her. And then the annoying power of Hope belting out her favorite songs.

What bothered Grace now, what kept her pacing, was her appalling inability to answer a single question: If everything else in the dream rang true, did that make the murder true as well?

She had no memory of that part.

In her memory, Hope finally shut up. And while Grace happily—obliviously—went about finishing her chores and watching TV, her sister struggled to catch her breath. And when Mommy came through the front door, Grace had one moment of perfect satisfaction, seeing her mother’s serenity that everything on the home front was as it should be. The moment was shattered when Mommy went to check on Hope. First Grace heard her bellowing Hope’s name. Then Mommy made a mad dash for the kitchen phone and called nine one one.

“My daughter’s not breathing!”

Grace remembered sinking into her chair, wishing she could disappear, wishing the mommy cat could come to life and carry her away. She should have known that Hope couldn’t go on with all that singing and yelling, not with the state her lungs were in. She should have gone in to check on her instead of being smug and thrilled that her sister had finally shut the fuck up.

The paramedics came. While they were in the dining room, Mommy sent her upstairs, told her to go to bed. Mommy didn’t say “Your sister died,” but Grace knew: Hope just wasn’t one to stay quiet during a dramatic turn of events. Her feet were almost too heavy to carry her up the steps. Grace wanted to go outside and lie in the snow. And freeze to death in the scary dark. Why had she thought Hope’s silence was okay? Why had she felt victorious when she never heard another peep from her sister’s room?

The days after that were a blur. Until the funeral.

Grace was sure, so sure, of most of those memories. But . . . but a splinter of her imagination could see herself screaming at her sister—it wouldn’t have been the first time. Was it possible? Could it have happened just as she’d seen it in the dream?

She almost punched the television screen when she passed it but retracted her fist at the last second. This is bullshit! So many of the nightmares she’d had were a confounding mixture of reality and horror. None of them had been completely true, so why should this one be the exception? Her mother was fucking with her, trying to convince Grace that she was the crazy one. Jackie wanted her to torment herself, to question everything that had happened in the past, and Grace didn’t want to play along.

Her phone rang.

Just as in the dream, Grace knew what was about to happen—which only made her question, yet again, if she was trapped in a nightmare.

“Hello?”

It was the nurse’s station on Miguel’s floor. Grace wanted to hang up or, better yet, hurl the phone across the room. She pulled it away from her ear but still heard most of what the woman on the other end was saying.

“. . . sorry but Miguel took a turn during the night . . . moved to intensive care . . . breathing tube . . . doctor will call later . . . the phone number where you can reach his nurse . . .”

She should’ve been running for a piece of paper and a pen, scribbling down the precious phone number. But Grace just stood there in a stupor. She heard herself say “thank you” before tossing the phone onto the sofa.

So this was how it was going to be. Previously her life had been merely a thousand ways upside down. Now it was a million. Now Miguel might really die. And a crack had formed in her certainty that she couldn’t possibly have put a pillow over her sister’s face.

Could I have put a pillow over my sister’s face?

In the anemic morning light, she saw a mirage of herself in her sister’s room, holding the pillow down. And Grace knew, from recent experience, exactly what that felt like—the physical pressure on the nose and lips, the emotional mayhem as the heart and brain fought to survive. But as the illusion sharpened, Young Grace pulled the pillow away before it was too late.

“That’s what I’ll do if you don’t shut up!”

Such a threat could’ve been uttered. It wasn’t beyond the realm of plausibility.

A sound made her look toward the stairwell, a nasally rumble that cut off with a sharp inhale and then started again. Jackie was snoring, loudly.

Was her mother congested? Struggling to breathe in her sleep?

“Okay.” Grace had fulfilled her end of the bargain. She would dutifully check on her mother, and start packing Jackie’s things.





46


Grace didn’t linger at her mother’s bedside. Though Jackie continued to breathe loudly through her open mouth, she was obviously sound asleep and not in any distress. Grace opened the closet door and reached for the high shelf where the empty suitcases were stacked. They were light but bulky, and she tried to balance them on her head before backing out of the closet. Slowly, she turned around, readying to transfer the luggage to the ground.

Her hands stopped working. Her vision betrayed her and she lost her grasp on the material world. There were ghosts in the room—in the space between the bed and the open door to the hallway.