“You did everything right,” Marie says, patting my hand.
“Did I? Did I really, Marie? Because my mom is dead. Dead. I didn’t do anything right that day.”
“What else do you think you could have done, Declan?” she asks, digging through her purse to hand me a tissue.
“What’s that for?” I ask.
She points to the front of my shirt. It’s wet.
“Oh.” I wipe my eyes with my palms.
“You did everything right. Andrew lived. No one could have ever guessed he was allergic, too. And your mom asked you to save him and you did.”
“But I couldn’t save them both!” I’m shouting at her. She is crying but not scared. That’s because I’m not angry at her. I’m angry at a world where I couldn’t save them both.
The same world I have to live in, day in and day out.
“Why did Mom make me inject Andrew? Why did I listen to her? If I’d injected her, maybe Andrew would have been fine. And then—”
Marie grabs my arm, hard this time, with a yank that isn’t at all compassionate. It jolts me and makes me look down at her.
“You listen to me,” she says in a hard voice. A mother’s voice, the kind moms use when they are disabusing you of an errant notion. Her finger comes out and she shoves it in my face, making a point. “Your mother did what any mother would do. That’s what being a parent is, Declan. When you are dying and your child—your baby—is dying right in front of you and only one of you can live, you beg that your child lives. Because no parent could ever bear to live in a world where there was a choice and they chose themselves.”
“But—”
“No, Declan. No buts. I don’t care what you’ve been told or who has told it to you, and that includes your father. You did nothing wrong that day. It was not your fault. No one can control everything. No one. The world just keeps proving that over and over again. You did nothing wrong.”
If I squeeze my fisted hands any harder my fingers will snap off.
“Declan. Declan,” she insists. “If you had injected your mother and Andrew had died, that would have been so much worse for her. Do you understand? She needed you to save her baby. You did exactly what she wanted most in that moment. You took a terrible situation and made the best of it. You were heroic. You were your mother’s hero. You didn’t have a true choice. She made it for you. That was part of her gift to you. She loved you and Andrew so much that she took the choice away.”
My shoulders start to shake and I fall to the ground, head between my knees, eyes fixated on that carved word.
loving
“Come here, honey. It’s okay. Come here,” she says, giving me no choice in whether I get a hug or not, dropping to the ground next to me and wrapping her arms around me as I curl into a ball. Marie smells like sandalwood and vanilla, like makeup and laundry detergent, and she is warm. Soft. Motherly.
The sobs come out in embarrassing ways and I fight it, but I miss my mom. I miss her. If I could stop the world and turn back time, I’d go back and kill those wasps before they stung Andrew and Mom. I’d pack two EpiPens. I’d not go outside at all with them.
I’d do anything to have my mother alive right now.
No business deal, no hard-core negotiation tactics, no lavish spending can bring her back.
Neither can closing off my heart and running away from the love of my life.
And her crazyass family.
“I can’t be your mother for you, Declan,” Marie says, smoothing my hair as I wipe my nose on my t-shirt hem and compose myself, feeling like a weak, oversharing jackass. “If you let me, though, I can be like a mother.”
“But you are crazy, Marie.” I’m not smiling as I say it because I am not kidding.
She smiles and says, “Not clinically.”
That makes me laugh. We stand and brush off our clothes. A breeze rustles my hair. The sky is blue and wide, without a single cloud in it. Rare for a Massachusetts day.
“I just love too much, Declan.” She tips her head to the right and gives me a look I don’t think anyone but my Mom and Grace have ever given me. “And whether you like it or not, you’re one of my kids. You didn’t come out of my vag—”
I hold up a palm. “I get it. I don’t need the anatomy lesson.”
“But you’re part of Shannon’s heart, and that means you’re part of our family. Which means you’re in a web of people who love each other so much they do crazy things because they feel so intensely,” she adds.
“And because you’re crazy.”
Marie links her arm in mine and looks pointedly at Mom’s grave. “Elena, you raised a fine young man. Thank you. Whenever he decides to pop the question and officially become my son-in-law, I’ll take over for you and continue the raising.”
I give her the side eye. “I’m twenty-nine years old, Marie. No one needs to raise me.”
“You think you’re done, don’t you?” she scoffs. “I’m fifty-three—er...in my forties—and I still need my mom sometimes.” Marie’s mother died of a heart attack a few years ago. Not a bee sting, Shannon assured me.
“We all do, don’t we?” A sniff or two, a short sigh, and we both seem to have composed ourselves. I feel raw. Exposed. Like maybe I’ve given in to my emotions too much. Dad calls displays of emotion “melodrama,” and even though I understand he has the emotional development of a borderline sociopath, I can’t shake the feeling that this is all a little too much.