I’ve already learned today that caretaking is not a quid pro quo; that if someone neglects you in your past, that doesn’t mean you should abandon them in their future. But does it hold the other way? Finn’s as good as any other reason for why I survived such a bad case of Covid—he tethered me. So what do I owe him, in return?
Obligation isn’t love.
It stands to reason that Finn and I might have disagreements while we’re locked together during a quarantine. He’s exhausted and I’m recovering and nothing in a pandemic is easy. But our relationship used to be. I don’t know if I’m just noticing the hairline fractures for the first time, or if they’ve only just appeared. Where we used to be marching toward the future in lockstep, I’m now stumbling or trying to catch up. Something has changed between us.
Something has changed in me.
At about nine o’clock, the door of the bedroom opens and Finn emerges. He goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge, taking out the orange juice and drinking from the carton. When he turns around, he sees me in the blue glow of the refrigerator light. “You’re sitting in the dark,” he says.
He puts the carton down on the counter and comes to sit on the other end of the couch. He flicks on a lamp, and I wince at the sudden brightness.
“I thought maybe you left.”
At that, a laugh barks out of me. “Where would I go?”
Finn nods. “Yeah. Well.”
I look down at my hands, curled in my lap like they do not belong to me. “Did you … ?do you want me to leave?”
“What makes you think I’d want that?” Finn seems honestly shocked.
“Well,” I say. “You were pretty pissed off. You have every right to be.” And I’m not paying any rent right now, I think.
“Diana? Are you happy?”
My gaze flies to his. “What?”
“I don’t know. You just seem … ?restless.”
“It’s a pandemic,” I say. “Everyone’s restless.”
He hesitates. “Maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe it’s more trapped.” He looks away from me, worrying the seam of the couch. “Do you still want this? Us?”
“Why would you ask that?” I choose those words carefully, so that I don’t have to lie, so that he can interpret them however he wants.
Reassured, Finn sighs. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he says. “I’m really sorry about your mother.”
“I’m sorry I contaminated you.”
The corner of his mouth tips up. “I needed a vacation anyway,” he says.
Two days later, my mother is actively dying. You would think that FaceTiming her while she was unconscious would be old hat, after all the energy I expended on her while I was a child and receiving nothing in return. Instead, I only feel silly. A staff member holds up the iPad near her bed and pretends she isn’t listening. I stare at my mother’s sedated body, curled like a fiddlehead under the covers, and try to find things to talk about. Finn tells me it’s important to talk to her, and that even if I think she can’t hear me, on some level, she can.
He’s right. The message might be garbled, but it will get through. My voice might be a breeze in the weather of whatever world she’s in.
Finn sits with me, and when I run out of words, he jumps in and charms with the story of how we met and how he’s teaching me the rules of baseball and that he thinks the apartment is haunted.
The last thing I say during our call is that it’s okay for her to leave, if she has to.
I realize she’s been waiting to hear those words from me her whole life, because less than an hour later, The Greens calls to tell me she has passed away.
I make the necessary arrangements in a strange, detached way—deciding to cremate her body, deciding not to have a funeral. I remember learning, as a child, how the Shinnecock made dugout canoes—by burning out the middle of a log and carving the insides away. That’s how I feel. Hollow, scraped, raw.
For someone I was angry at for so long, someone I rarely saw—I miss her.
It’s amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It’s standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love.
But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real.