“Is she going to be all right?” Nathan asked as I closed her bedroom door. It had taken both of us to get her upstairs, but I had undressed her by myself—it didn’t take two of us to pull down her pants, and I figured the person she used to take baths with should be the one to do it.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ve been here before. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“This is surreal,” Nathan muttered, and for a moment we just stood there, staring at our feet.
“How did you know?” I asked, remembering what he’d said in the graveyard about this making “perfect sense.” What on earth is “sensical” about burying an empty coffin?
“I didn’t,” Nathan said. “That’s why I dragged you out there.”
“But you suspected,” I pressed. Nathan was silent for a long beat, like he was grappling with how much to tell me. “C’mon, Nathan. We just snuck into a graveyard in the middle of the night; I think we’re beyond being cagey with each other.”
“It happened too fast,” he said. “I mean, your mom tells me on Saturday night that she’s going to change her will, and then two days later she’s dead? That can’t be a coincidence.”
Wait. What? “Change her will, how?”
“Cut you and Winnie out.”
I felt a rush of anger. “Jesus, Nathan. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What did you want me to say?” he asked. “Hey, just a heads-up, if you want your inheritance, you’d better be nicer to your mom?”
“If she was talking about cutting us out of her will, we had a right to know!” I didn’t mean to shout, but I was pissed. Why was I just hearing about this now?
“Well maybe you should have asked her yourself,” Nathan clapped back. “I was the one who checked on her, dined with her, balanced her checkbook, unclogged her kitchen sink. If you wanted to make sure her money was coming your way, maybe you should have been there for her.”
And there it was: the ugly truth. My chest flooded with shame. Because of course he was right. After her crazy ask, and my inability to say yes, I’d retreated into my own little life. I couldn’t face her—couldn’t face my own guilt and selfishness.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan said, pressing his fingertips into his forehead. “I’m tired.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “You didn’t owe me anything.” And then something else occurred to me: “And neither did she.”
He looked up at me. His eyes were sunken and rimmed with red. And I felt bad, because I knew these last two days must have been hell for him, too.
“Go home and get some rest,” I said.
He nodded, but didn’t go. When he finally spoke, his voice was haggard and sad. “She was hurt,” he said, then corrected himself. “Is hurt. That’s why she’s doing this. To hurt you back.”
I could have said more, told him how Mom had hurt us, too. How asking us for something we couldn’t give her made an already difficult relationship damn near impossible. But telling him everything meant confessing to something even more shameful, and I wasn’t ready to do that. So I just nodded and told him, “It was generous of you to help out.”
“What’s our next move?” my cousin asked, even though the answer was obvious.
“We need to call the police.”
“And tell them what?”
“Everything.”
Nathan left with a promise to come back in the morning so he, Winnie, and I could go to the station all together. I got a sick feeling in my stomach when I thought about telling our sordid story—how my mother had come to hate her own children, how she’d left her money to a random stranger, how somebody had called Nathan pretending to be her nurse, how we went to the graveyard to dig up her coffin and what we saw when we did. I lay awake for the next four hours trying to understand how we had gotten here. If my mother is still alive, where is she? How would we find her? Does she even want to be found? There was no question we would have to look for her; she couldn’t stay undead forever . . . could she?
After an agonizing, sleepless night, dawn finally crept in like a silent friend. At half past seven, I picked up my phone to call my wife. I hadn’t spoken to her since telling her the Stupid Lie, and I imagined she was wondering when we were going to get our windfall.
“Charlie, there you are!” she said as she picked up on the first ring. I couldn’t tell if she was relieved to hear from me or annoyed I’d waited so long to call.