The Names They Gave Us(83)

Instead, I stand at the stove crying. This was my exact fear this summer: that I would stop feeling like an expert on my mom.

Because I don’t know what else to do, I wind up melting butter and whisking eggs with milk and flour, making perfect circles on the hot skillet. Either the warm batter smell will draw her out or I’ll have an excuse to go into her room.

Inside the refrigerator, I find two items I knew would be there: strawberries and whipped cream. My mom picks up baskets of strawberries every week at the farmer’s market in town and could eat them for every meal. She buys peaches, too, cuts them into broad slices, and covers them with whipped cream. Her favorite summer dessert. At least I still know her this well.

I lay the crepes out and arrange strawberries on them, spray whipped cream as artfully as I can. Then I pull my shoulders back and march the plates into her bedroom, where she’s curled in a ball on the bed, facing the door.

She sits up, and I set the plate on her bedside table. Her face is unreadable to me, but I won’t let myself back down. I pull a chair up, taking a bite of my own crepe as if making a point.

“Mmmm,” she says, through a mouthful. After she swallows, she looks up at me innocently. “There was chocolate syrup in the fridge, you know.”

It almost makes me laugh, remembering the year she gave up chocolate for Lent. I know Jesus died for our sins, she said on Day 6. But this is horrible, Lucy. I retrieve the chocolate syrup, which she adds to her crepe, and I do too.

“Thank you, Bird.” My mom closes her eyes, leaning against the headboard. “This tastes as good as anything has in quite a while.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I know that I’m acting bananas,” she whispers. “But I can’t surrender motherhood to cancer—not with grace, anyway.”

“Mom. Motherhood isn’t . . . making me breakfast.”

She scowls at me. “I know that. But I hate feeling compromised. I hate it, Luce. I’d rather feel healthy and capable and die in a hundred days than feel this sick and die in two hundred.”

Die. A hundred days. My stomach almost turns the bites of crepe upside down onto the quilt. That’s an arbitrary number, right? “So . . . are you . . . going to stop chemo?”

“No! Oh no, sweetie. Because it’s not the difference between a hundred days and two hundred days. It might be the difference between a hundred days and thousands.” She sets her fork down. “I’m sorry I said it like that. I’m just rambling.”

“But you won’t keep anything from me, right? Any news?” My tone is the opposite of what I’m going for. I sound like a little kid, begging. “It’s just . . . I can take it, okay? I know I’m not a grown-up, but I’m tough. I am.”

I’m not sure if this is true. I just want it to be so badly. And my mom, for her part, looks touched—by my boldness or naiveté, I’m not sure. She brushes my cheek with her thumb. “Oh, I know you are. So much like your namesake in that way.”

“I’m like a martyred saint?”

She snort-laughs. “Heavens, no. Oh, dear. Who told you that? Your Memaw?”

Come to think of it, maybe she did. In my memory, I taste lemon bars dusted with powdered sugar. The musty smell of old rugs that need to be aired out. It was my grandmother who told me. My father’s mother. “Yeah.”

My mom leans forward. “Oh, Bird. I’d never name you after a dead saint. But your Memaw was insistent that her grandchild have a religious name. So we told her ‘Lucy’ was after Saint Lucy.”

It snaps together, a silent connecting of two obvious parts. “Lucy Pevensie.”

“Of course!” my mom says, as if any other option is silly. Of course. “The first time you kicked inside my belly, I was rereading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And I wanted you to be curious and loving, sensitive and full of belief.”

Well, three out of four ain’t bad. “You never told me.”

“Well, I worried you might mention it to your Memaw. Then I suppose I forgot you didn’t know!”

Named after Lucy Pevensie. It’s inconsequential, really. My name is Lucy regardless of where it came from, and I don’t know that my name has affected much of my life at all.

Still. I feel more like myself than I ever have. And it’s this added tie between my mom and me, all of our hours spent reading and watching The Chronicles of Narnia.

“You used to call me Queen Lucy the Valiant,” I muse, thinking back. “But I never knew that’s why you named me Lucy.”

My name means “light” or “light bringer”—that much I know. I looked it up once. In Greek and Roman times, Lucius and Lucia were popular names for babies born around dawn.

Around daybreak.

And there’s no going back. It’s like God Himself unfurled a red carpet to segue me from this conversation to the one I need to have.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, though I doubt she’d follow me. She looks too unwell to be on her feet for long.

When I return with my backpack, I place the “Posy and the Dreaming Tree” binder on her lap.

Her eyes widen, and I know. I know I have not made this up in my head.

She reaches out a tentative hand, touching the pages like they are museum documents under glass. And this is a historical document—hers. “I’d forgotten all about this. It was a camp project, like creative therapy. Rachel drew the pictures. The summer we met.”