Five(42)

One morning, after he stays up playing until sunrise on his favorite site, he goes to the kitchen, unable to remember the last time he ate. Luna is sitting at the table, her hands curled around a coffee mug. He was not expecting to see her there, it’s been weeks since she’s ventured out of her bedroom.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says, a sliver of the former strength of her voice still glinting like steel in the first light of day coming through the kitchen window.

“What? No, I haven’t,” he says, guiltily.

“I haven’t seen you for three days,” she says. “I know because I don’t have too many of those left. I’m careful with them.”

He suddenly feels like he did when he was little, in the mornings, when he needed to feel the pressure of her arms, when he needed her embrace to ground him, to keep his body from feeling like it was floating away, when he needed her to root him, when he needed to tether himself to her, to be bound by the gravitational pull of her love.

“That’s okay,” she says, “because it gave me and Gabriela time to sift through and organize all of the letters that have been arriving here for you.”

“Mum, I—” He feels his face flush, a burning feeling rush up his neck. He feels caught, trapped.

Luna goes on, “I know you’ve been gambling. I know—now—that you’ve been doing it a long time. It’s not your fault, Sonny. People with ADHD are really susceptible to it. Look, addiction is an illness, just like…”

And even though she is so frail, and hollow-eyed, and exhausted, he snaps at her.

“No, Mum. I do dumb shit. I make stupid decisions. Just accept it. They’re not special choices, or disordered choices, or illness-related choices, they’re not less bad, they’re just regular, fucked-up mistakes, that stupid fucking fucked-up people make. I am just a fuck-up,” he says, turning away from her, starting to pace, wishing he could run, and run, and run.

Luna looks at him. She puts a hand to her chest, closes her eyes, takes an effortful breath. He looks over his shoulder at her, he notices that she lifts her cup with both hands.

She takes a sip. Having gathered a little strength, she says, finally, “No, Sonny, I don’t think so. Because if you’re a fuck-up, then that means I’m a fuck-up, that I didn’t do a good job, and I—Sonny—I am not a fuck-up. Because if the stupid shit you did over all these years is just you being a fuck-up, and not because you’re a genius with a messed-up brain, or a beautiful soul who is an addict, or a victim of your genetics or the loss of your father, if none of that is true, then I, as your mother, I am the fuck-up, not you. And I. Am not. A fuck-up.”

Sonny looks at his mother. She is out of breath from speaking and he is startled by it. His mother, once so fierce and strong, now half the size she used to be, her black eyes huge in her hollow face. He thinks he can see her heartbeat through the papery skin stretched across her breastbone, the only part of her not entirely swallowed by her terry robe. He has not looked at her, really looked at her, since he moved back home. He can’t bear the sharpness of her cheekbones, how the necklace she never takes off, with his and his dad’s initials on tiny medallions, is absent from her neck because the metal irritates her chemo-fragile skin.

“I’m sorry, Mama, I’m sorry,” Sonny heaves, and he starts to sob, and he kneels beside his mother’s chair and puts his head in her lap, carefully. He presses his arms gently around her. She is so small now and he is so tall, like Graham. Luna is almost child-sized in his embrace. And even though he is touching her so lightly, she can feel her little boy as he once was, squeezing his whole torso against her, pressing his whole being to her, like his life depends on her. Because it does.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” and he says it with the same urgency and pain as when he was small, when he was so sorry, so, so, sorry for all the things he did.

“Not sorry, Sonny,” she says, “never sorry,” holding her son’s head in her lap, stroking his hair that is the same copper brown as his father’s. And they stay this way together for some time until she lifts his head, and she looks at his green eye and then his brown eye.

“You can fix this,” she says. “But it will take a while, and it won’t be fixed before I die. But you’ll have to do what I say, and if you don’t, I’ll know, and I’ll come back, and I’ll haunt you.”

Great, Babe, Graham says. I’ll come too.

“Good news, your dad says he’ll come too,” she adds when she hears him, his voice much louder now than it used to be.

“Mum!” Sonny exclaims, “Jesus, you’re so morbid. That’s not funny,” and he laughs through his tears in spite of himself.

Sonny knows he will remember this moment for the rest of his life, of laughing with his mother, his arms around her while she was still living, a glint of mischief still there, in her eyes. He will remember laughing with her, but also this feeling like a firing squad is pulling all of the triggers, of rocks in his pockets weighing him down in the river of his grief, at the thought of her going and leaving him here, without her.



* * *





“Your mother left very explicit instructions that I am now going to explain to you, so just stop me if you have any questions,” the lawyer says.

“Okay,” Sonny says, grateful that Gabriela is beside him, because he knows as soon as the lawyer starts talking that he won’t remember anything she says. He has not gambled since the day in the kitchen with Luna. He spent every day after that with her, holding her hand, talking, laughing. He slept on the floor next to her bed. She was gone two weeks later.