Page 17 of I Can't Even

I leaned in close and whispered in her ear, “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be all right.”

The lids of her eyes fluttered a tiny bit, just enough for me to see the pale blue irises and then they closed. She puffed out a bit of air not even strong enough to be called a whisper but I heard her. “Thank you.”

That final breath left her, and she slowly slipped away. I sat on the edge of the divan, feeling numb. Babs Blumer who had shaped my life in so many ways good and bad, mostly bad, was gone. The crushing pain in my chest was almost unbearable, my throat was tight, and my eyes burned. I pushed it all back by sheer force of will.

“Hey,” I whispered and nudged first Soph and then Em. Sophie lurched up, momentarily confused before blinking awake and registering the expression on my face, which I could only imagine was devastated.

“Mom—” Em jumped to her feet. “Is she better? Is she asking for me?”

My baby sister exuded optimism. It was then I realized that even though Em knew Babs was dying, she also clung to the hope that somehow Babs would recover, and everything would go back to normal. I felt horrible when I shook my head.

“I’m sorry, Em,” I said as gently as I could. “She’s gone.”

“No!” Em cried. She reached for Bab’s hand, clutching it in hers as she studied our mother, desperate for a response.

Soph leaned over and rested her cheek on Mom’s hair. She closed her eyes probably saying her own private good-bye.

Feeling as if I’d had my time with our mother, I stepped away and let them have their moment with Babs. I found my cell phone and entered the hospice nurse’s phone number. I let her know that Babs had passed. The words were harder to get out than I thought they would be, but Ashley was very kind and said a team would be there within an hour to take care of things for us.

The rest of the night became surreal. By dawn, we had a time of death certificate, the crematorium people had collected Babs’s body, and our house, the house Babs had lived in for the last forty-two years, was suddenly without her.

The twins, Hannah and Harry, came to sit with us. They kept Em from swirling into a pit of despair, and Soph was also bolstered by her children’s presence. Being the only one of us who had lived on her own for her adult life, I needed a few minutes by myself to process all that was happening.

I slipped out the sliding glass doors into the small backyard. It wasn’t quite morning yet and the sky was gray. Babs had always taken great pride in her huge lemon tree. The Ponderosa lemon filled the corner of the yard and once a year it gifted us with lemons the size of footballs. It was so plentiful that most of our neighbors scattered when they saw Babs coming toward them with a bag of lemons. I crossed the yard and sat under the tree on the far side where I wasn’t visible from the house.

This had been my favorite reading spot as a kid and hours had been spent weaving spells with Harry and the rest of Gryffindor. Just like then, I planted my feet on the ground and braced my back against the trunk of the tree.

The grief when it came was not pretty. It felt as if it was being wrenched out of me with a crowbar. Ugly crying big fat tears, snot pouring from my nose, guttural hiccups, and fish-out-of-water gasps echoed in the early morning air. It was chilly and wet grass soaked my butt through my jeans. I didn’t care. I wanted it out, all of it, the pain, the sadness, the anger, the regret—I wanted it purged from my system.

There was serious irony here. I was gutted at Babs’s death and couldn’t reconcile the fact that I was so horribly sad about a woman who for most of my life had made me feel less than. And even at the end, she had singled me out as the unlovable one. God, that hurt so much.

Logically, I knew I should be relieved that the toxic presence in my life was gone, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was destroyed by her passing, absolutely inconsolably wrecked.

I’d worked myself up with no end in sight when his arms came around me. I started, jerking away from him, not wanting anyone to witness me in this raw and vulnerable state. He gave me no choice. He swung me up into his arms as he took my seat under the tree and pulled me onto his lap, keeping his arms around me and gently pushing my head onto his shoulder.

My eyes were swollen and my vision blurred with tears, apparently tear ducts run deep, who knew, so I couldn’t see his face but I recognized the feel of him, the scent of him that was uniquely Liam Mahony, a potent cocktail of citrus, sunshine, and the sea. Powerless to fight both him and my need for comfort, I twined my arms around his neck and held on while grief continued to beat me up with the relentless pull of a riptide.

Liam rested his head on mine and let me sob and wail and weep. He never said a word. He simply gave me his warmth while he held me close, with one hand curled around my hip as the other ran up and down my back in a gesture of comfort.

The memories that swirled around me were almost as thick as my grief. How many times had we been here exactly, with me crying and Liam comforting me when Babs and I had yet another argument, usually about my hair, my lack of femininity, or, more irony, him?

Babs never said it plainly but her disappointment in me came off her in waves of pinched disapproval and now, after all this time, I wasn’t sure how I was going to define myself without the steady stream of criticism. I supposed it should have been liberating but instead, I was lost. Except with Liam’s arms around me, everything shifted and repositioned itself and for the first time since I’d arrived in Gull’s Harbor, I felt as if I was home.

I had no idea how long we sat there, but as I lifted my head from his shoulder the sun was rising, lighting the sky with a bright red ribbon along the horizon.

I pulled back from Liam. I let my crazy curls cover my face and I glanced at him from beneath them, hoping they hid my red nose and puffy eyes. He was having none of that. He leaned forward and planted a kiss on my hair.

When I tried to climb off of his lap, Liam simply scooped me up against him and rolled to his feet. He strode across the damp grass, with me in his arms, and up onto the patio where he gently set me down.

He brushed the hair away from my cheeks and our gazes met and held. My breath stalled in my lungs as I tried to figure out what I saw in his intense brown gaze. Tenderness, compassion, affection, but there was also an edge, a flash of anger and resentment that was being held in check. Or was I just imagining that?

He cupped my face in his hands, using his thumbs to wipe away the last of my tears. Then he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. It was the sweet press of his mouth against mine, over before it began, and yet it changed everything.

Liam turned and left, striding across the small yard and vaulting over the fence that separated our homes, without ever saying a word. But now I knew, I knew where I belonged. It was as it had always been...with him. But I had absolutely no idea how to make that happen.

“Seriously, Aunt Jules, you need to tap that,” Hannah, my sixteen-year-old niece, whispered in my ear as we acted as the greeters for the reception at our house after Babs’s service.

I turned away from watching Liam across the room to look at her in alarm. “What do you know about “tapping” anything?”

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