Page 41 of The Next Person You Meet in Heaven
As the months passed, she thought about calling her mother, especially when Walt would act like a child, pouting over food, not wanting to shower before they went out. But, like many her age, Annie’s thirst for independence overruled her need for guidance. Besides, who was her mother to talk about men? Annie couldn’t bear what she knew she would hear:“Is this really how you want to spend your life, Annie? In your boyfriend’s basement?”The thought of that made her put down the phone.
Then, the following summer, she stopped by the hospital to surprise her Uncle Dennis, who had moved his practice to Arizona a few years earlier. It was after five o’clock and no one was at the reception desk, so she walked back to his office and tapped on the door. She heard a muffled “Yes?” and turned the knob.
“Annie?” Dennis said, his eyes widening.
“Hi, I was in the—”
She stopped. Her throat tightened. Sitting in a chair,just inches away, was her mother. Her face was gaunt; her eyes were hollow. Beneath a blue sweater and tan slacks, her limbs were thinner than Annie had ever seen them, sickly thin, as if she’d been melted.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Lorraine said weakly. She glanced at her brother. “So you don’t have to tell her after all.”
***
The cancer had attacked Lorraine quickly, and by six months it had spread past all known cures. Treatment, at this point, was more about comfort than healing.
Annie, stunned by the sudden turn, didn’t know how to react. She felt guilty for being absent when it had happened, and obliged to give her mother whatever time she now could. A trip to the pharmacy. A coffee shop after work. Just like that, they were back in each other’s orbits. But their conversations were less about what was said than what was not.
“How’s your tea?” Annie would ask.
“It’s fine,” Lorraine would answer.
“How’s school?” Lorraine would ask.
“It’s fine,” Annie would answer.
Neither had the strength to confront the emotions they shielded. They were polite. They pecked each other’scheeks. Annie held the car door open and braced her mother’s arm as she walked. Perhaps if there had been more time, the wall between them would have crumbled.
But the world does not cater to our timing.
“I love you, Annie,” Lorraine rasped one night, as Annie handed her a plate of stir-fried vegetables.
“Eat,” Annie said. “You need your strength.”
“Love is strength,” Lorraine said.
Annie touched her mother’s shoulder. She felt the sharpness of the bone as if the skin barely existed.
Two days later, Annie’s cell phone woke her up before the alarm clock.
“You better come to the hospital,” Dennis whispered.
He broke down crying, and Annie broke down, too.
***
The gathering at the cemetery was small, owing to the secrecy Lorraine had draped around their lives. Only Annie, Walt, Uncle Dennis, and a few work colleagues stood by the grave as a pastor recited a prayer.
“It’s funny,” Lorraine said now, as the scene appeared in front of them. “You always wonder about your funeral. How big? Who’ll show up? In the end it’s meaningless.You realize, once you die, that a funeral is for everyone else, not you.”
They watched Annie, in a black dress, sobbing into her uncle’s shoulder.
“You were so sad,” Lorraine observed.
“Of course.”
“Then why did you shut me out for so long?”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
