“What was urgent?”
“Apparently she’s been refusing to eat,” he says. “Chloe, they think she’s dying.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I’m out the front door in less than five minutes; my shoes are barely on, the fabric on the back of my sneakers digging blisters into my heels as I run across the driveway.
“Chloe,” Daniel calls after me, his open hand slapping the door, pushing it back open. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go,” I yell back. “It’s my mom.”
“What about your mom?”
He’s rushing out of the house now, too, tugging a white T-shirt over his head. I’m fumbling through my purse, trying to find the keys to unlock my car.
“She isn’t eating,” I say. “She hasn’t eaten in days. I have to go, I have to—”
I stop, drop my head in my hands. All these years, I’ve been ignoring my mother. I’ve been treating her like an itch that I refused to scratch. I guess I thought that if I focused on it, on her, it would be overbearing, impossible to focus on anything else. But if I ignored it, eventually the pain would just subside on its own. It would never be gone—I knew it would still be there, it would always be there, ready to begin prickling across my skin as soon as I would let it—but it would be less noticeable, like background noise. Static. Just like my father, the reality of what she is—what she did to herself, to us—had been too much to handle. I had wanted her gone. But never, not once, did I stop to think about how I would feel if she actually were gone. If she passed away, by herself in that musty room in Riverside, unable to express her final words, her dying thoughts. The realization I have always known settles over me; it’s thick and suffocating, like trying to breathe through a damp towel.
I have abandoned her. I have left my mother to die alone.
“Chloe, hang on a second,” Daniel says. “Talk to me.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head, digging my hands back into my purse again. “Not now, Daniel. I don’t have time.”
“Chloe—”
I hear the jangling of metal behind me, and I freeze in place, turning around slowly. Daniel is behind me, holding my keys in the air. I grab for them, and he yanks them back, out of my reach.
“I’m coming with you,” he says. “You need me for this.”
“Daniel, no. Just give me my keys—”
“Yes,” he says. “Goddamn it, Chloe. It’s nonnegotiable. Now get in the car.”
I look at him, shocked at this sudden flare of anger. At his flushed-red skin and bulging eyes. Then, almost as suddenly, his expression shifts back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, exhaling and reaching out toward me. He puts his hands on mine, and I flinch. “Chloe, I’m sorry. But you have to stop pushing me away. Let me help you.”
I look at him again, at the way his face has completely changed in seconds. At the concern bunching his eyebrows now, the folds in his forehead, shiny and deep. I drop my hands in surrender; I don’t want Daniel there. I don’t want him in the same room as my mother—my dying, vulnerable mother—but I don’t have the energy to fight. I don’t have the time to fight.
“Fine,” I say. “Drive fast.”
I recognize Cooper’s car as soon as we pull into the lot; I jump out before Daniel can even put ours in Park, running through the automatic doors. I can hear Daniel behind me, his sneakers squeaking on the tile, trying to catch up, but I don’t wait. I take a right down my mother’s hallway, run past the collection of cracked doors, the quiet murmurs of televisions and radios and residents mumbling to themselves. When I turn in to her room, I see my brother first, sitting on her bedside.
“Coop.” I run toward him, collapsing onto my mother’s bed as I let Cooper pull me into a hug. “How is she?”
I look over at my mother, her eyes closed. Her already thin frame looks even thinner, as if she’s lost ten pounds in a week. Her wrists look as if they could snap, her cheeks two hollowed out caves draped in tissue paper skin.
“You must be Chloe.”
I jump at the voice coming from the corner of the room; I hadn’t noticed the doctor there, standing in a white coat with a clipboard pushed against his hip.
“My name is Doctor Glenn,” he says. “I’m one of the on-call doctors at Riverside. I spoke to Cooper this morning, over the phone, but I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“No, we haven’t,” I say, not bothering to stand. I look back down at my mother, at the gentle rise and fall of her chest. “When did this happen?”