I didn’t agree with her, but I didn’t know what to do next. Dr. Wentworth was a brick wall. I mean, there had to be other tests they could run, but at sixteen with a morbid hatred of biology, I had no clue what. Nan was watching me. I knew the look on her face. The one she wore when she saw me struggling with a problem that she knew the right answer to, hoping I would choose correctly. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. I didn’t want to look back in a year or five or ten and know that I had made Nan’s last hours miserable. Especially when the mark might be useless. I took another breath, held, exhaled, and tried to let go of everything: worries about tomorrow, about a future without Nan, about how today would end. I focused on the only thing that mattered. I opened my eyes to see her still watching me.
I pulled my chair close, sinking into the pillows piled high on top, and took her hand. It was birdlike in its lightness, but still surprisingly strong. “I love you, Nan.”
She smiled then, the creases at the corners of her eyes folding onto one another, well practiced in the art of joy. “Thank you, Cassie. I love you too.”
We talked. Of things and nothings. School, my mother, the apartment, Nan’s ex-husband, bits of her childhood in an ethnic neighborhood—Greektown, she called it. The day drew on, grew darker, and, though the misty light around her never faded, I started to hope. Dr. Wentworth stopped back, surprising me. We sent him away. Tina came in and out, leaving Nan with a kiss on her final visit, black cloth coat and purse in hand.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Nan,” she said.
Nan smiled. “Good night, Tina. Thank you for everything.”
Tina smiled back, but her mouth twitched, a trace of sadness, as she turned to leave.
Dinner was delivered and cleaned up. Eight passed, then nine, then ten. Nan nodded off, but I stayed there, holding her hand, watching the clock, hope slowly, cautiously growing.
And then, against all odds and plans, I fell asleep. I was exhausted. I could feel it, but I had counted on anxiety and adrenaline to keep me awake. And it had, but with Nan breathing softly and a TV droning in a room nearby, I felt my lids drooping. I remember thinking I could rest my head for just a minute.
As soon as I woke up, I knew she was gone. I could feel the cold in her hand. My face was wet before I even raised it from the bed where it had fallen. She was calm, her face serene and pale and statuesque in a way that made it clear that Nan, my vibrant, strong, loving, solid Nan, was gone. And so too was the light.
Chapter 5
Agnes’s nephew John drove us to the funeral. I sat in the backseat, a thousand miles away, clutching a sleeve of tissues. My head felt wrapped in cotton. I could barely hear Agnes’s sobbing or John’s attempts at conversation.
The sun was unnaturally bright, glinting off the metal of car after car lining the neat lanes and perfect grass of the cemetery. The pain of its sharp glare hardly registered as I stared at the people, so many of them clustered around that awful hole. I recognized Nan’s charity friends, her yoga partners, neighbors, a ton of old people I knew vaguely or not at all. Tina and Dr. Wentworth were there too. I could feel Tina’s eyes on me, but I didn’t look at her. We had already spoken the day after Nan died.
I had been sitting in a hallway at the hospital, filling out endless, incomprehensible paperwork, when I saw motion at the periphery of my vision—Tina, probably making the sign of the cross. I could tell from the look on her face that she was scared.
“Cassie,” she whispered, coming hesitantly toward me. “I am so, so sorry.”
I shrugged. “I guess it was her time.”
She didn’t say anything, just looked at me, her eyes deep brown pools, bottomless. I went back to my forms, angrily wiping the tears that had started again.
“You knew.”
She said it so softly that I pretended not to hear.
“Cassie.” This time she waited for me to meet her eyes. I finished filling in our address for the sixteenth time on the fourteenth form before looking up.
“What?”
“How did you know?”
“It was just a feeling, Tina.” I ducked back into the papers again, ignoring her. She didn’t want to listen when it mattered, and I’d be damned if I’d waste my time on her now.
“But … you were so sure.” When I didn’t answer, she said, “I’m sorry we didn’t listen. Do more. Help.”
“Nothing you could have done.”
She’d thought about asking more. I could tell from the way she lingered, but in the end she said only, “Take care of yourself, Cassie.”
Dr. Wentworth had been less curious. In fact, acted as if our dialog the day before had never happened. “No way to predict or prevent, I’m afraid. A stroke like that can happen to anyone. Just a coincidence that she was even at the hospital.”
I stared past them when they offered condolences after the burial. Dr. Wentworth pressed my hand between his and murmured stock phrases. I’m not even sure Tina spoke, her dark eyes still bewildered.
People from school came too: classmates, teachers, Principal McCarthy. Tasha told me they’d let kids leave early, which explained why I suddenly had so many friends. That’s too cynical, though, because the people I had the heart to talk to honestly seemed sympathetic. More than I could bear. “Thank you for coming,” I told them and everyone else who filed past me and the brown box where Nan lay.
I had expected those first few days to be the worst—the hospital, the funeral, going back to our apartment—but it was after, when the people and the decisions and the questions receded, when everyone else’s life took on its normal rattle and hum and I was left with quiet and solitude in mine, that it became unbearable.
I can’t even say what I did those days after the funeral, when Nan was really, truly gone. There were times I’d realize only as I was getting ready for bed that I’d forgotten to eat. Other days I didn’t need to put pajamas on, having never made it out of them.
People tried to fill the void. Tasha’s parents had me over for dinner as often as I’d come. Agnes dropped by afternoons. She was withered by Nan’s passing and I usually ended up comforting her, passing her tissues or brewing tea “just like Nan’s,” she would say, sprouting fresh tears.
It seemed weird to me that I was there on my own at sixteen. But with no family, where else could I go? Nan’s lawyer had asked if I needed someone right away, while they sorted out her affairs. I didn’t. There were people I could call if I had to. Still, it was strange to be so alone and I started to hate it in the apartment, those five rooms that used to feel warm and secure.