“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because you’re nine.”
“So?”
“So stop asking questions.”
I heard the sharp zip of her handbag. Then her footsteps, moving
away.
At the door, she paused.
“You should start getting used to the idea of living with me.”
The door clicked shut.
I lay there in the dark behind my own eyelids, not moving, not breathing properly, while the monitor beeped on as if nothing in the world had changed.
Then I felt a small hand touch my arm.
“She’s gone, Granny.”
Part Three: “A Lot”
My eyes snapped open. “What on earth was that?”
Walter looked down at his sneakers. “That wasn’t the first time.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know.” He picked at a thread on the blanket. “A lot.”
“Walter.”
“Maybe four? Five?”
“While I was unconscious?”
He nodded.
I swallowed hard. “What exactly did she say to you?”
He took a shaky breath. “That you might not wake up. And that even if you did, I probably couldn’t live with you anymore.”
“Why?”
“She said because you’re old.”
“I’m sixty-one!”
“That’s what I told her.”
Despite everything, despite the tubes and the pain and the ice spreading through my stomach, I almost laughed. That was my boy. Nine years old and defending my honor from a hospital chair.
But his face didn’t match my smile.
“She said your eyes were bad, too,” he went on quietly. “And that the accident proved you couldn’t take care of me. She said it every time. Like she wanted me to remember it.”
And I thought about what that must have been like for him.
Eleven days. Eleven days of watching his grandmother lie motionless in a bed, not knowing if she’d ever open her eyes. Eleven days of being the only one in the room who loved her. And every few days, the one adult who was supposed to comfort him walked in and told him,
over and over, that his home was already gone.
No wonder he wouldn’t leave.
