He pulls her close as he guides her smoothly through a turn. The spin is easy and graceful, and he takes her around the dance floor again. She is weightless, and when she leans into him, it’s as if his heat alone holds her aloft.
The song is on its last refrain, and Yolanda isn’t ready for it to end, but there is still time. Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down. The man bends toward her, and Yolanda is poised for the kiss she knows will come. She is waiting for it. Goose bumps rise on her arms as she anticipates the delicious mild scratch of his stubble, the press of his lips against her neck, the electric rush that will pass through her like absolution.
Yolanda is still waiting when time stutters and blinks out.
This is death, then: a brief spot of light on earth extinguished, a rippling point of energy swept clear. A kiss, a song, the warm circle of a stranger’s arms—these things and others—the whole crush of memory and hope, the constant babble of the mind, everything that composes a person—gone.
The baby is seven months old. He still needs his diapers changed, still demands milk and love and Nurturing Touch. Angel isn’t even sure he notices that Yolanda is gone. He has developed a bizarrely intense attention span, and exhibits a particular interest in junk mail, turning promotional postcards from department stores inexpertly in his hands, studying them with no less wonderment than if they’d been dispatches from Jupiter.
When he bends over his postcard, the sight of the chaotic duckling fuzz and that bare, vulnerable little channel at the base of his skull leaves Angel weak. After many minutes have passed, Connor will lower the postcard, blink, swivel his head in search of his mother, and then, when he finds her, erupt in emphatic babble.
Will Connor remember Yolanda at all? As a shadow or a sensation, as a vague feeling from those long, early days of his infancy? The thought that he won’t is unbearable. Connor pumps his arms, whacking his own face with the postcard, startling himself quiet before emitting a peal of laughter at the joke of it all.
Angel had sort of believed that death—the death of someone essential and life-defining—meant the end of everything, but here she is, mashing banana with a fork, loading the dishwasher. Here she is （having placed Connor in his pen）， doing something as mundane and necessary as choosing from among the bottles lined up along the edge of the bathtub and shampooing her hair.
This heartache is so much larger than anything she’s felt. It’s agony—she can’t sit still, it hurts so much—and also enlivening. Angel had no idea that the world could hold ache like this, just as, before Connor was born, she had no idea it could hold such love.
But she can’t cry. Right after Connor was born, Angel cried so often that sometimes she didn’t even notice. Sometimes she’d be moving through the house, breasts leaking, Connor fussy in her arms, and would only become aware of her own sobs when she realized she had to blow her nose. But since her grandmother’s death, apart from some dry convulsions the night of, all those once-plentiful free-flowing tears have dried up. If only she could cry, she might find some relief.
Yolanda’s death has meant tasks—now, instead of spooning thin oatmeal into her grandmother’s mouth, she deals with the men who come to collect the hospital bed and the wheelchair and all the other equipment on loan. There are copies of the death certificate to order, thank-yous to be written to all those faceless friends of Yolanda’s who sent flowers and notes. The bills are piling up—phone, utilities, cable—and she sorts them and sets them aside for her father.
She’s glad to be busy. But still, somehow, the days feel slack and empty, Angel rattling around in them. She who’d once felt so overwhelmed by the needs of her son, who’d longed for his naps just so she could think for one stinking second, now lingers at his crib, listening to his near-silent breath, waiting for him to wake up and keep her company.
Here’s what she doesn’t want to think about: her grandmother’s death has brought—horribly, undeniably—relief. She’d been warned that this would be the case, by the hospice aide and the doctor, but the warnings don’t make her feel any less shitty.