A morbid laugh fell with torn tears. “He asked me to stay. Yet you ask me to leave.”
She smiled with blood-tainted teeth. “We ask…only what you’re…capable of.”
“I’m not capable of anything.”
“Yes…you are.” She gasped, her mouth wide and anguish bright. “You’re capable…of love. You just…need to trust…”
I didn’t want to argue.
Not now.
My entire body convulsed as I swallowed despair-riddled fury and vowed upon her soul. “I’ll leave, Mom. You have my word. I’ll travel the world. I’ll chase the seas. I’ll explore it all…for you.”
She nodded, accepting my pledge. “Take…Hope. She’ll be there…for you…now that I can’t.”
No.
From this day forward, I am alone.
Single.
Solitary.
Slain.
But her blue eyes implored me, and I told a lie to comfort her. “Okay. I’ll take her.” I didn’t think of the costs of lying to a dying parent. I didn’t care I’d just sold my soul to purgatory.
“Good.” Her eyes burned into mine, waiting for the eternal goodbye.
I gritted my teeth, knowing what she wanted. My throat closed up. Tears burned. And it took every power inside me to whisper, “Fine.”
Fine, I love you.
Fine.
Fuck, none of this is fine.
She smiled, teeth no longer porcelain and lips sketched in red. “I…love you…Jacob.” Her breath turned louder, wetter, thicker.
My heart pumped louder, wetter, thicker.
Tears lodged in my throat as I nodded. “I know.”
“I…don’t…have…to wait…anymore.” Her skin lost the colour of living, slipping into blue as her lungs filled with blood. “I’ll…find…him…now.”
“Okay, Mom.” My voice was muddied with suffering. “Go find him.”
Her eyes turned hazy, looking at me but not really.
Already seeing through the veil that separated us from them.
Alive from dead.
I hoped for her sake, Dad was waiting.
I begged with all my being that the second her life ended in my arms, she’d awaken in a new one in his.
It didn’t matter if I didn’t believe in it.
I just wanted it to be true so she wouldn’t just un-exist. That she’d be out there…with Dad, watching me screw up again and again, pitying me until my own dying day.
I rocked her, hugging her in ways I’d never been able to do before.
Her body didn’t feel right.
It felt cold and lifeless and…empty.
“God—”
The sounds of an ambulance screeched through the air, the squeal of tyres on gravel hinting they tore down the driveway. Their rushing noise only compounded my depression.
I didn’t bother telling Mom to hold on.
I didn’t look up or yell for Aunt Cassie to guide them.
Help was not needed.
It was already pointless.
“Goodbye, Mom.” I ended my embrace, staring deep into the eyes of my beautiful mother, hidden beneath blood and bone.
She’d slipped away silently.
There’d been no last-minute farewells or whispered affections.
She’d said what she needed to.
I’d vowed what she wanted me to.
She was done waiting and had gone.
I nodded at the finality of it.
I no longer held my mother but a shell.
A corpse just like my compass dream had shown.
“Dad, if you truly are out there…if you’re watching…I hope to God you’ve found her.”
The thought of her alone, surrounded by black, lonely forever?
Fuck, it broke my goddamn heart.
Voices and shouts sounded.
Aunt Cassie’s scream ripped through the heavy air, and a breeze erupted from nowhere.
Hurricane power and just as rogue, ripping over the field, tangling in my mother’s hair, soaring to the wooded boundary and shaking the boughs of trees.
Was that my father?
His reply?
Or was it Mom, flying to find him like she said?
Or maybe it was both of them, finally together?
Either way, they were gone.
With trembling bloody hands, I gathered a small section of her hair and tied the blue ribbon back into the strands.
She couldn’t go to the afterlife without her namesake.
She’d never opened the gifts from Dad, and the little blue boxes were trampled into the ground as people surrounded me. Paramedics, Grandpa John, and Aunt Cassie.
Before, I’d sat in aching sadness. Now, there were seized solutions and frenzied attempts at resuscitation.
Someone pushed me out of the way, pulling Mom from my arms and laying her on her back. Rough hands ripped her shirt wider. An oxygen mask was placed over her mouth. One man blew air while another pumped her heart, jiggling her chest with each compression, making the bone in her side appear and reappear with each false breath.
I was forgotten.
Not seen.
Not needed.
I couldn’t watch anymore.
Turning around, I crawled on all fours and threw up.
The taste of grave dirt and cremated ash coated my throat as sour bile splashed on the ground.
No one tried to console me.
No one noticed.
The living was obsessed with the dead, surrounding her as if she were on a pyre about to burst into flames.
Grandpa John sobbed over his surrogate daughter.
Aunt Cassie wept over her deceased sister.
Strangers in uniforms tried to grant a miracle.
And I…I stumbled to my feet and walked away.
I swallowed back mourning, wrapped arms around wretchedness, and put one foot in front of the other with my mother’s blood baptising me, urging me to keep a promise, commanding me to run.