Whisper Me This(38)

I sink into Dad’s chair, still warm with his body heat. “Maybe I’ll wait here.”

“You might find it helpful to see her one more time,” Dr. Margoni says. “Otherwise you’re going to be stuck with that last visual.”

I press my hands against my eyes, making black spots dance, but I still can’t shut it out.

“I need you,” Dad says, stretching out a tremulous hand. “Be with me, Maisey.”

Which does it, of course. I’ve lost my mother and my entire framework for reality. He’s lost the woman whose secrets he’s kept for almost forty years, whoever she was. So I get up and follow the wheelchair down the hall. We go to a different room, for which I’m grateful. It’s a corner room with windows on two walls, letting in sunlight and the reminder that outside there are blue skies and timeless mountains.

Mom lies in a hospital bed, a sheet pulled up over her chest, her hands folded over it. She wears a clean hospital gown. Her hair is neatly combed, her face washed, the horrible tube removed from her mouth. Except for the color of her skin, which is all kinds of wrong, she almost looks like she’s sleeping.

Still, I hang back at the door while Dr. Margoni rolls Dad up to the bed.

“Leah,” he whispers, touching her hand. “Oh, Leah. It should have been me.”

I’m braced for an emotional storm, but it doesn’t come. He just sits there, almost as still as she is. When he pushes himself up to standing, Dr. Margoni doesn’t stop him. Dad smooths Mom’s hair, touches her cheek, leans down to kiss her lips.

“Soon,” he whispers. “It won’t be long.” He lets out a long, tremulous sigh that leaves him smaller, older, frailer, if such a thing is possible, then falls back into the chair.

Dr. Margoni looks at me, eyebrows raised in a question.

The answer is no. No, no, a thousand times no. Mom looks peaceful enough from where I’m standing, but closer-up death will get me with a bitch slap. I don’t want to smell it on her. Don’t want to touch her skin now that the soul is gone. Don’t want to risk her eyes snapping open, her finger rising to point at me, her dead lips opening to croak, “You are in so much trouble, Maisey Dawn.”

I don’t need her to put any more guilt on me.

So I stay where I am, feet planted, spine stiffened by stubbornness and fear. The tears betray me, though, running down my cheeks, warm and alive where the rest of me feels as cold and dead as my mother looks.

Dr. Margoni crosses the room, takes my right hand, and uncurls the fingers I’ve clenched into a fist. She tugs at me, gently, and my feet obey, taking me to the bed, to my mother.

Her skin is as cold as I expected when I touch her hand, and her face looks subtly different, like one of those wax museum figures. I shiver at the idea that maybe she’ll start to melt if I touch her.

“Just tell her good-bye.”

I don’t want to tell her good-bye. I’m not ready to let her go. Not yet, not like this. But I feel compelled to tell her something, and I lean down and press my cheek against her cold one. I mean to tell her I love her. That I’m sorry my last words to her were angry. But what comes whispering out of my lips is not at all what I thought I wanted to say. Not angry words this time, but lost and bereft, with the bewilderment of a child.

“What happened to my sister?”





Leah’s Journal

And here we are. The pivot point where this story turns, the balance point of my sins, the advent of the man who spread a shadow over the rest of my life.

I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to invoke his name. It feels like summoning the devil.

Here I sit. Five minutes after writing those first lines, my hands are shaking. Heart racing. I want to burn this page, tear it into tiny pieces, scribble out the ink, and I haven’t even written down his name.

My rational mind tells me you won’t see this, Walter. He won’t see this. Nobody will see it, and contrary to what my imagination is wanting to tell me, he has no magical powers that would let him see what I’m writing here.

He is not a devil or a god. He is not all-knowing or all-powerful.

Alexander Garrison. The father of my children. Nickname: Boots.

There, I’ve done it. The world is still standing. Wouldn’t it be ironic if confronting my fear and my past was the thing that ruptured my aneurism? But it hasn’t. And I shall go on.

“Boots” sounds like a diminutive, doesn’t it? Something you would name a cat or a hamster.

There was nothing diminutive about him. He was nobody’s pet anything, not even his mother’s. He was always dangerous, and there lay half of the attraction. That hair, red-gold masses of it down onto his shoulders. Green eyes. That in itself would have been enough to make all of us girls swoon, but then there was the music. Put a guitar in his hands, and he was elevated from swoon-worthy to a young god.

I was invisible to him at first. Four years younger and hiding in the shadows at school. A little too smart for my own good. A little too poor, a little too adrift.

He noticed me first at a homecoming dance. I was fifteen and in tenth grade. He was nineteen and in the graduating class. I’d borrowed a dress from a friend. Saved up money to buy department store makeup. I had my first date, with another invisible kid like me. God help me, I can’t even remember his name. Can barely remember his face.