She pressed Mel into the doorframe and kissed her with an intensity that surprised them both. Then the phone rang, the landline.
They ignored it at first. No one they knew would call that number anymore. February had been meaning to cancel the service for months but kept forgetting, in part because it so seldom rang. But after a few rings, it was more difficult for her to ignore it than to pick it up, so she shuffled back into the kitchen and collected the handset from its cradle, intent on asking whatever telemarketer was on the line to remove them from their list.
Perhaps she’d had a premonition after all, in the urge to pick up that call. They would’ve called her cellphone eventually, but February would be glad for the extra seconds’ head start while her favorite Spring Towers nurse explained that her mother had been found unresponsive during breakfast rounds, that she’d had a large stroke and had been made comfortable with a combination of pain and antianxiety medications, that February should come right away.
Antianxiety? February said as she ran to the bedroom and pulled her jeans up over her thighs. Is she awake?
The nurse cleared her throat.
It eases discomfort without slowing breathing, she said. Then, with so much care it was almost a whisper: For patients experiencing terminal agitation.
I’ll be right there, February said.
She pulled on a hoodie and lapped the house looking for her purse. Had the nurse said “terminal”？
Go, said Mel. I’ll clean up and be right behind you.
When February arrived at the Towers, the receptionist gave her directions to the hospice ward, where her mother had been moved, directions February immediately forgot, or more likely had never absorbed, so bloated was the word “hospice” in her mind there was no space for anything else.
Her mother was asleep when she got there. Of course she was. The nurse said it was unlikely she would wake again. But February nevertheless clutched frantically at her mother’s hand, spread kisses across her forehead in hopes that she might startle her into coming to for a moment, just to know that February was beside her.
She remembered the day she’d learned about Helen Keller in elementary school, how she’d gone home full of wonder that they had discussed a deaf person in class, one who could understand sign language just by feeling it. Her mother had taken pleasure in her excitement, and they’d practiced fingerspelling words into one another’s palms: c-a-t, F-e-b, m-o-m. Now February pressed an I love you into her mother’s hand, and was met with a small moan.
February had not expected the sound of her mother’s voice to be the thing to carve out an ache in her. Her mother had rarely spoken, only when she was angry or frightened. It was her other sounds, the laughs and grunts, that February knew she would miss. She allowed the sorrow to well up in her until its pressure throbbed behind her eyes, then climbed into the hospital bed and cried with such force that her mother’s eyelids fluttered, and her lips curled subtly into a kiss that grazed February’s cheek. Then, as if on strings, her mother’s arms raised from the bed like the caricature of a sleepwalker, and February felt equal parts awe and shame at the power of the instinct to comfort one’s child. She guided her mother’s arms back down and smoothed her hair until she was calm again.
Mel arrived with coffee and two bags of hot Cheetos, their preferred snack for stress eating. She pulled up a chair beside February, who was still in the bed watching the second hand between her mother’s breaths. Neither of them said anything for a very long time.
She never fell asleep, not exactly, but somehow night came, and Mel urged her to stretch her legs. February ungracefully freed herself from the bed’s rails, went to the bathroom and washed her face, bought a Coke from the vending machine. Her arm was numb, her neck stiff from craning to look at the clock. She’d been tired in her mother’s dim room, but now beneath the violent hall lights, she was jittery and short of breath. She tried walking around the ward, but the sharp smell of antiseptic made her claustrophobia worse, so she took the stairs down to the main lobby and went outside, stood there on the sidewalk and let the cold nip at her cheeks, the automatic doors gnashing open and shut behind her. She waited until her toes went numb—the chill took just a few minutes to get through her sneakers—then turned back to the vestibule, the doors opening again to beckon her inside.
All right, I’m going, she said aloud.
She claimed Mel’s chair while her wife went for takeout, but about a half hour into Mel’s absence, February’s mother began to emit a terrible sound, a wet crackle every time she drew breath. February poked her head into the hall to summon a nurse.
I think she’s choking, she said.
The nurse shook her head but followed her into the room anyway, drew a stethoscope from her scrub pocket.
Like you need a fucking stethoscope to hear that! February shouted. Sorry, that was—I’m just— The nurse put a hand on February’s shoulder.
It’s normal, she said.
February wanted to say that it was most certainly not normal, that Mel was usually the hothead and that she herself rarely cursed, and also there was no way the alien sound bubbling up in her mother’s chest could ever be misconstrued as ordinary, but instead she swallowed all of it and nodded when the nurse assured her that her mother wasn’t in any pain. February knelt beside her mother’s bed and prayed until Mel returned with a bag of Wendy’s that smelled sweet and oily and made her feel a little ill.
You better get off your knees if you wanna walk tomorrow, sweets, said Mel, and offered a hand.
Who says I want to?
Why don’t you get back in bed?
It’s so hard for her to breathe. I don’t want to crowd her.
She’d want you to crowd her.
So February climbed as gingerly as possible beside her mother. She took her mother’s palm, and spelled M-e-l into it.
What’d you tell her? Mel said.
That you’re here. You know she liked you best.
Mel smiled.
As if. You’re the biggest mama’s girl this side of the Ohio.
Mel bent in over the railing and took her mother’s palm, pressed more letters into it.
What’d you tell her? February said.
Just that it’s okay.
It’s not okay.
Of course not. But I don’t want her to worry about you. I’ve got you.
O-k, February said. O-k.
* * *
—
February lay there for hours with the bed rail sunk deep into the flesh of her hip, watching as her mother’s breath became shallower and sparser, until she could tell she was still there only by watching her pulse jump in her neck. At around midnight, the nurse listened to her lungs once more, said goodbye for the night, told February to press the call button if they needed anything. Mel, who’d commandeered a second chair for her feet, finally fell asleep, and though her presence was still a comfort, on some level February knew that this was what her mother had been waiting for—a quiet moment alone. In the end there was only an exhale, a low hiss that contained more air than she had seen her mother take in all night, so that February wondered where it had been hidden and whether it might have been breath her mother had carried for a very long time. Then it was gone, commingled with the dry and acrid hospital air, no longer special, and her mother was gone, and February had no idea what to do. She’d had her parents for more years than most, and they’d lived good lives; this was bound to make certain aspects of her coming anguish easier. For now, though, the pain was not abated by adulthood, or prayers, or last goodbyes, or even Mel’s reassurances. It was a wound, a stone fruit ripped in two, red and bruised and sweet-tinged with rot, a yawning void where the pit should have been. And she would stay that way, emptied and splayed open in the putrefaction of grief, for weeks. It was 4:04 a.m. on Black Friday, and February nearly laughed when the nurse wrote it down for the record—as if it was something she could possibly forget.