I fall apart on top of him; my eyes squeeze shut, my pulse lighting through us like a laser beam.
“Holy shit,” he says when it’s over.
I don’t say anything. All I can feel is this rapidly contracting moment. Everything that once was, evaporating.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Adam falls asleep—I hear his restful snoring next to me. But the more we descend from the high of sex, the more I feel the reality of what has just occurred—what I just saw—landing.
My mother left. Carol left. She lied to me. Not just here, on this trip, but throughout my life, in everything she did. She told me she had all the answers, that she knew. She made my life into a reflection of her own. But she didn’t know. She didn’t have all the answers. Here she is in Italy—singing and drinking and forgetting. She made me in her image, but she forgot the most important part. She forgot that one day she’d leave, that she already had, and then I’d be left with nothing. When you’re just a reflection, what happens when the image vanishes?
I pull a robe around me and head out onto the balcony. The storm has broken: it’s not raining anymore, and the air is light and new. I think about that night, the last one, the one I swore I would lock away forever.
I knew the end was close; they had warned me. The hospice nurses who came and went knew what it looked like when there was no more time left. It could be days, hours, they said. Stay close.
We had already moved home. Moved up to her bedroom. She hadn’t left the retractable bed in days. There was nowhere to go.
My father spent his days in a chair next to her. He changed her straws after every sip and kept fresh ice in a bowl, even when all it did was melt. At night he’d sleep in the family room, falling asleep to old episodes of Full House, Friends, whatever was on.
I’d wander the house, sometimes falling asleep in my old room, sometimes on the bath mat by the tub. Eric came and went, the only prisoner allowed outdoors.
I’m embarrassed to say that in those last weeks, I didn’t want to be around her. I was, all the time, but I hated it. I was embarrassed by what the disease had done to her, how it had shrunken her down to a fragment of her former self. How she could not lift her head to drink water, and grew fitful and irritated at the suggestion of medication. The disease made her hostile, and I felt that hostility, I felt it down into my bones.
For months I had felt a quiet rage inside me. It bubbled, it had been bubbling, and that night, her last, an ember jumped and caught fire. It felt like I could burn the whole house down.
Her breathing was haggard; she was struggling for air. I looked at her and felt wild, maybe even evil. I wanted to lie down next to her and cut my veins open. I wanted to slam a pillow over her head. I wanted to do anything except exist there, in that room, with her.
“Katy,” she whispered. I bent down close to her, but that was all, that was the whole ask and answer: Katy.
Those were her last words to me. The reminder of my own singularity, the impossibility of my name without hers.
How could she do this to me? How could she tell me year over year that it was okay, that I didn’t need to know, that I didn’t need to have all the answers, because I had her? How could she make herself so indispensable, so much a part of my life, my very heart—so woven into the fabric of who I am—only to leave? Didn’t she know? Didn’t she know that one day I’d be left without her?
I kept my face close to hers, I held her hand, and all the while, as I walked her to the other side, I kept thinking: How will I get there without you? How did you not tell me while you still could?
Standing on the balcony in Positano now, the world freshly washed, I feel the emotion rise up in me again. The fire, the anger. But now it is mixed with grief. It is mixed with all the things I did not see, because I couldn’t, all the things I believed because she told me they were true.
Mom, I think. Carol. How could you? She’s just a little girl.
Chapter Twenty-Six
When I wake up after a fitful sleep, I’m hit with a certain numbness—the sun is shining and the French doors are open, revealing an already-awakened morning. And then the events of last night smack me in the sternum. I put my hands to my chest and press, like I’m trying to arrest the flow of blood out of my body. So this is what it feels like to see the world as it is. This is what it feels like to reach out and find nothing but your own hand.
Next to me, Adam sleeps. He’s naked, and I see fingernail scratches—mine—along his back.
He stirs next to me. One eye opens. “Hey.”