Just Like Home(34)

“Please,” Vera whispered. “Don’t.” Because this was familiar. Daphne had called her selfish and thoughtless and burdensome more times than she could count.

But Daphne didn’t seem to hear her. “I felt the weight of you—of who you’d be in our little family and in the world—and that’s when I became whole. I existed for a reason then. I existed for you. Do you know that? I existed for—” And then Daphne cut herself off with an extended coughing fit, her chest spasming violently, her fingers clawing at the bedsheets. She hunched forward in the bed, making an almost mechanical hacking noise.

It was a spell-breaking kind of sound. Vera rose from her chair with her hands half-raised, her heart pounding, paralyzed by the onslaught of tenderness. She couldn’t think of a thing to say or a thing to do, so she just stood there as Daphne convulsed around her own lungs. Maybe, Vera thought, this was it. Maybe it was happening. Tears sprang to her eyes and she didn’t know why, didn’t know what she was afraid of, because wasn’t this perfect? Wasn’t this the way she’d imagined Daphne when she’d agreed to come home?

But then again, the Daphne she’d imagined coming home to didn’t tell loving stories of Vera’s birth.

After far too long, Daphne lurched and heaved and made a thick, underwater noise. She gestured frantically with one hand, motioning toward the edge of the bed, the doorway, her own stomach.

“What?” Vera asked, “What do you need?”

But Daphne couldn’t answer, for reasons that shortly became clear: her mouth was simply too full. Her back was still hunched with the strain of her coughing fit as she let her jaw tip open.

An uneven stream of dark gelatinous tissue fell from between her parted lips. It was threaded with something black and dense like veins under skin. Daphne sighed with evident relief as she released it from her mouth, her shoulders sagging as the clinging wet mass rolled down her chin and dropped into her lap.

Vera made a noise that started as “oh” and ended somewhere far afield from human speech. She ran to the kitchen and dove under the sink, grabbing as many rags as her hands could accommodate.

When she came back into the dining room, her mother was motionless, still curled over her own lap. The stench of the room was close and choking. It was an amphibious smell, like turned earth and rain, dark mold and half-rotted wood. There was an undercurrent, too, of sweet lemon. It filled Vera’s mouth until she closed it tight, and even then the taste of soil and citrus stayed with her.

“Here,” Vera said uselessly, her voice trembling. “Here, now. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

She eased Daphne’s shoulders back and started wiping at her chin and chest. Daphne didn’t move to help, but she didn’t resist, either. Her thin skin rucked into wrinkles at Vera’s every touch. Her breathing was quiet and even, now. It was like the breath of a person who would live.

To clear up the mess, Vera sacrificed three kitchen rags, two wet and one dry. It took dedicated scrubbing—whatever this was that had come out of her mother stuck stubbornly. Vera decided she wasn’t going to try to rinse those rags in the sink, renew them in the wash. They were ruined in a way that would never come clean.

Vera eased Daphne’s shirt off and replaced it with another one, trying not to see how the mottled fishbelly skin of her mother’s torso stretched drumtight between her ribs. She changed the blanket that covered her mother’s legs, too. She left the sheet, both because it was pretty clean and because she didn’t want to expose her mother’s bare legs. It felt like an intrusion beyond bearing, revealing her mother’s skin to the room. Looking at the parts of her that she’d kept tucked away all this time.

Vera bundled everything into a trash bag and held it, feeling like she hadn’t done enough, which was, of course, true. There was no such thing as ‘enough.’ Not anymore.

She couldn’t stop her mother’s death. She could barely even ease it. All she could do was clean up after it.

“Do you want to wash up more than this?” Vera asked. Daphne didn’t answer, not even with a gesture. She was studying her own hands. Her eyes were something worse than vacant. She looked clean enough, but Vera couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more she ought to do. “Daphne? Do you want a shower? Or a bath? Or something?”

“No. I have a system. Please, just go. Just go.”

Vera hesitated. “Are you sure? What … what’s the system?”

“It’s not your business,” Daphne said immediately. Her voice was almost normal. “I’m fine. I feel much better now, thank you.”

Fine didn’t seem like the right word at all. “Are you sure?”

Daphne picked up a cup of lemonade and sipped at it placidly, as though nothing had happened. “Of course I’m sure. Get on with your work, I’m going to rest. And Vera?”

You don’t need to say my name, I’m already paying attention to you. Vera thought it but did not, could not, say it. “Yes?” she said instead, at a complete loss for how she was supposed to look at this woman who had never ever loved her and who was, in her dying moments, unsheathing a violent wave of tenderness.

“Thank you for the lip balm.”

Vera did not go back upstairs. She left the dining room, stumbling past the bin of her mother’s clothes that she’d left on the threshold. She slipped on the shoes she’d left by the front door and walked out onto the porch, then took the porch steps two at a time, nearly falling. The tied-off garbage bag full of her mother’s rot went into the trash bin around the side of the house, and then she was in her car and driving, her hands trembling on the steering wheel, her foot too heavy on the gas pedal. She braked too hard at a stop sign, jerking forward against her seat belt, catching herself with a slap of her palms on the steering wheel.