“But if it hasn’t even been a day—” I said, and then broke off as Mom looked at me, her face full of love and pleading.
“You need help with what you’re doing?” I said to him, and helped Dan box up the extra linens in the closet, sat with him while he drew up plans for what would go where and Mom sat, listening to him and smiling a little.
She was pregnant for real then, finally. But it was a hard pregnancy from the start. She was sick all the time, so much that she lost weight. Dan made her favorite meals to try to get her to eat but it didn’t help much.
And then, in the second month, she had some spotting and had to go the hospital. Dan rushed there from the house so fast he forgot to call the school and tell them to find me and tell me what was going on.
I still remember coming home and finding Mom in bed.
“What happened?” I said. “Is something wrong with the baby?”
“No, everything’s fine,” Mom said. “I just—I was bleeding some before and—” She broke off, her voice cracking, her eyes filling with tears.
“Lisa, honey, don’t cry. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine,” Dan said, and Mom nodded but she didn’t look like she believed him. She looked scared.
I waited until Dan left and sat down next to her. “Mom, are you okay about the baby? Dan talks about it all the time, but you don’t and I’m wondering if—”
She squeezed my hand and said, “Emma, honey, I know what I want. I just...it was hard to get here. But now I am. I beat all the odds—over forty, all the drugs, the warnings about the clot—ugh, I already went over it. And over it.”
She touched her stomach and I kissed her cheek and lay beside her.
“I could get used to this,” I said a while later, stretching out with one foot to try to pull the TV remote up toward me.
“Not me,” she said. “I’d like to be able to get up and move around. I feel trapped just lying here. I mean, if I could paint your ceiling after the clot came out, why can’t I walk downstairs?”
“I heard that,” Dan called from the hallway. “No rest, no chocolate cake.”
“Meanie,” Mom said, grinning, but she was tapping her toes against the bed, like she heard a song and was following the beat. Like she wanted to move to it.
She was able to get out of bed after a week, and everything after that went okay. She still got sick, but not as much, and she started to finally gain some weight.
And then, on a Wednesday morning, after I’d already left for school with Olivia, she went to grab a piece of toast in the kitchen and fell down.
That was it.
That’s how she died.
She was getting breakfast, something she did every day, something normal, and her body just...stopped.
Dan ran right over to her and performed CPR until the ambulance came. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—open her eyes. Couldn’t feel anything when she was touched. Couldn’t talk.
She’d had a massive stroke caused by an embolism in her brain, the kind that—
The kind that you don’t come back from.
Mom was gone when she hit that floor. CPR kept her lungs going for a while, and then surgery and tubes and machines to try to figure out what was going on took over. And then the doctor came out and said, “I’m sorry, but she’s gone.”
“Gone?” Dan said. “But she was breathing! I was with her. She was breathing!”
I tried to hug him, and then the doctor drew him aside. I found out later he told Dan that Mom was brain-dead, that without medical intervention she wouldn’t be breathing, that her heart wouldn’t be beating. That the baby was still alive and Dan could have everything turned off now—and let Mom go—or keep her hooked up to machines until the baby was old enough to maybe live on its own.
Mom never knew what happened to her. That’s what I have to hold on to. That at least it was fast. That whatever pain there was didn’t last long. That she reached for a piece of toast and left forever.
Except she’s still here—alive but not alive—and I wonder if part of her is trapped in her broken body. A prisoner of the baby swimming around inside her.
I think of how scared she was and wonder if this was what she saw coming. If she knew that no matter what happened to her, Dan would pick the baby—that Dan would choose his baby over her. Over the family we’d had. Did she know that he would look me in the eye and say, “Your mother would want this,” even after I’d lain next to her in bed and heard how restless and scared not being able to move made her?
How having to lie still made her feel trapped.
Sometimes I hope she’s gone, that she’s in heaven looking down at all of this, but I’ve felt the weight of her hand in mine every day since she died. I’ve watched her fade, become smaller despite all the nutrients piped into her, the baby taking all it can.
She isn’t gone. Not like she should be.
My mother’s name was Lisa Davis Harold, and she was strong and beautiful. She was a person, she had her own thoughts, and I remember that. I remember how she was. Who she was.
I remember her.
I’m the only one who does.
6
At the hospital, Dan always goes in and says hi to Mom first.
Actually, he wanted “us” to go in and “say hello together,” but the first and only time he asked me that, the night after I’d lain in bed, thinking of my mother lying in the hospital kept alive for the baby—his baby—I said, “There isn’t an us. There’s you, and then there’s me.”
“But we’re family.”
“Were,” I said. “Go see what you’re here for. And then I’m going to see Mom.”
“I’m here every bit as much for your mother as I am for the baby.”
“I know. After all, if her body can’t be kept alive long enough, your baby won’t survive, will it?”
“Emma, that’s not—”
“It’s not? Then what is it?”
“It’s what your mother would want.”
I slapped him. Right there, in the hospital.
Security was called, but Dan said nothing was wrong, that we were “just struggling with our loss” and that he’d sit with me outside for a while.
He did walk outside with me, and he actually put a hand on my arm and said, “Emma, please. I don’t think you’re seeing—”
“Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t try to sell me your story. Mom loved you, I know that. You can kick me out of the house, send me to live with Mom’s parents, maybe boarding school. Take your pick.”
“I’d never do that. You’re my family. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know I love you like you were my own—”
“Go see her,” I said, cutting him off and making sure I was out of his reach.
“You should come too.”
“I don’t want to see her with you.”
“Emma—” he said and then sighed.
So that’s how I got to see Mom on my own. Dan goes in first while I sit in the waiting room outside the ICU, and then he goes and drinks some of the hospital’s sludge coffee. I don’t think he likes it, but then I don’t care what Dan thinks