Page 73 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
“She’s okay.” I recalled the doctor assuring me that, thanks to the car seat, Hazel was okay. “Do you want to see her?”
A tear rolled down her eye. “Promise me,” she said.
“I promise.” She didn’t even have to tell me what it was I was promising to do. I would’ve agreed to anything.
“Hazel.”
“Yes. I’ll take care of her. As my own. I promise.”
“No Erik.”
I shook my head, tears flowing down my face in a torrent. “No, never. No Erik.” It struck me as strange that she would bring up Erik in that moment, but Iris had always been smarter than anyone gave her credit for. “I promise, Iris.”
She mumbled something else incoherent, her eye blinking, losing focus, and I knew she was slipping away. I held her hand and pressed my cheek to hers. “Iris, it’s okay. You can let go. I love you. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She died then, and I kissed her cheek and murmured, “It’s okay,” over and over until hands appeared at my back and gently pried me away. Then, finally, I succumbed to my grief and let myself shatter into a million pieces.
• • •
I was unaware of the next few days passing. They were a painful haze of endless forms to fill out and a hundred things to take care of, and in the midst of all of it, I had a little toddler who had lost her mom to look after. Hazel didn’t fully understand what had happened. The night that Iris died, I only had moments to fall apart and then quickly, clumsily, I had to put myself back together enough to face Hazel.
She was largely unharmed, thanks to her car seat, but she was scared and bruised and very much wanted her mommy. When she saw me, she stretched her little arms out and said, “Wia!” And it undid me. I sobbed as I gathered her in my arms, and sobbed again when she asked, “Where Mommy?” Ellery embraced us both, crying as well.
At some point, Parker arrived and we all left the hospital. I was a wreck. We all were. Going about our days with stunnedexpressions. I remember thinking:This isn’t real. This can’t be real. It’s a dream. I’ve somehow crashed through the fabric of my universe and landed in another one, and if I could just wake up, then it would all be okay.But I never did find that rip in the fabric. I never stepped back into the correct universe, the one where my sister was still alive and still bossing everyone around.
I have to hand it to Parker. He really stepped up. He was the one who got all the correct forms filled out, and there were so many of them. Deaths were a complicated thing to file, even more so when it involved a car accident. There were insurance investigations and police investigations, which I found incredibly frustrating, especially since no one else had been involved. In the end, their findings said there had been an oil slick on the road and Iris had been driving a little too fast. The conclusion they came to killed me all over again. She’d probably been driving too fast because she was excited about coming home and celebrating me and Ellery.
“You can’t think that,” Ellery said. I didn’t even have to tell her what was going through my head; she knew anyway. “It’s not your fault. It was an accident.”
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. If I hadn’t called her to tell her about me and Ellery, she might have been okay. She might’ve driven slower, or she might’ve been less distracted, and she might’ve seen the dark puddle on the ground and avoided it in time. Or she might’ve taken a different route home because she wouldn’t have had to stop by the grocery store for food.
But self-hatred was a luxury I couldn’t afford. To be able to sit there loathing myself and blaming myself for everything was an indulgence. I couldn’t dwell on it for long because I hadHazel to look after. Hazel didn’t understand the concept of death. She would say things like “When Mommy stop dying? When Mommy come back?”
And I’d be torn between trying to explain to her that there was no coming back from death and lying to her and telling her, “Later, baby.” Most of the time, I just hugged her while I blinked away my tears before distracting her with a toy.
Although Parker was good with the bureaucracy, the subject of death made him extremely uncomfortable. He was sad, of course, but he’d never been close to Iris, and he didn’t know how to handle my grief. I remember one morning, he shuffled into the bathroom and found me sobbing into the sink. He stopped, uncertain, looking extremely awkward, then lowered his head and left. I’m not telling you this to convince you that he was a bad person or anything, he just didn’t know how to handle such strong emotions. I’d gone to a handful of wakes in Jakarta and seen spouses being told off for crying over their loved ones. In the Chinese-Indonesian culture, to let your emotions out without restraint is an act of selfishness; you are supposed to remain stoic and be strong for your family. When I told him that I was going to stay at Iris’s place for the next week or so to give Hazel some semblance of normalcy, he was more than relieved to agree to it.
So I packed a bag and moved into Iris’s place. It was a terrible decision for myself, but Hazel needed it. She needed the familiarity of it, a space that still smelled of her mother. She needed to fall asleep at night in her own bed. The first night I was there, after I put Hazel down, I came out into the living room and started having a panic attack. I sagged to the floor and wheezedsilently, squeezing my eyes shut. I wasn’t sure how much time passed, but there was a soft hand on my shoulder, and I opened my eyes to see Ellery there.
“Breathe, Tulip. Breathe with me. Inhale, one, two. Exhale, one, two.” She repeated it until I felt a little bit less like I was about to pass out, then she helped me up and onto the sofa.
“What are you doing here?” I said when I was finally able to speak.
“Checking in on you.”
I leaned against her and she wrapped her arms around me and kissed the top of my head. The knots in my muscles released and I melted into her.
“I don’t think it’s good for you to stay here,” she murmured into my head.
“Yeah. But Hazel needs it. For now.”
“I know, baby.” Ellery stroked my hair softly. “You’re being strong for her, but you also need to look after yourself. I’m going to stay here with you, okay?”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. I brought sleeping bags for us. I figured you wouldn’t want to sleep in the bedroom.”
I hadn’t even thought of that, but she was right. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep in Iris’s bedroom, on her bed. If Ellery hadn’t come by, I would’ve ended up sleeping on the couch. I rested my forehead on her shoulder. “Thank you.”
