Before I WAKE: A Becoming LUNA Novel

The thing I’d recently learned about death was that for some reason I may never understand, it attracts people. Which is strange, of course, since most people spend the better part of their lives avoiding the subject altogether or trying to outrun the clock. But flip through any magazine and there will be advertisements for anti-aging creams or other tips and tricks for how to look and feel younger. “Fifty is the new thirty!” the glossy mouths of youthful models seemed to shout back.  And I can’t imagine that there is any greater reminder that you are going to die than actually seeing the lifeless, waxy body of someone you knew who has, in fact, died. In spite of this, people seem to flock to tragedy and grief. It’s amazing, really, who will crawl out of the woodwork for a funeral, especially a thoroughly tragic one. Young children, adults who’ve died suddenly or after a heroic battle with disease, and upstanding community members seem to attract the largest crowds. Not that I had an abundance of experience, per se, it’s just what I’d gleaned from my observations, especially over the course of the last few months of my mom’s life. There were so many people I’d been introduced to during the week of her visitation and funeral that I hadn’t been able to keep track of most of them. Their faces were virtually indistinguishable as I scanned the crowd assembled at the cemetery. Was the guy with the bad toupee my mom’s old boss? Her drycleaner? I couldn’t remember. But they all watched as my grandma and I passed by to take our places at the front of the crowd. Someone stepped up to offer a prayer and as everyone bowed their heads. I glanced around and noticed that although I was mostly looking at the tops of people’s heads, there was one man who was actually staring back at me. He was tall and lanky, spindly even, and was wearing a black sports coat, black pants and a black turtleneck. In early September. It was beyond seasonably inappropriate for the near eighty-degree weather.  His thinning, wiry hair sat like a little pouf of freeze-dried marshmallow fluff on the top of his head. But what stood out the most to me were his eyes, which he locked on mine, like he was trying to bore a hole straight through me. They were pale and gray blue and looked like they belonged to a Siberian Husky. But where you might see warmth in a dog’s, his were vacant and steely and cold. His thin lips stretched flatly across as teeth as he smiled at me. He was totally creeping me out so I broke the stare by looking back to my feet. Instead, I tried to focus on the prayer. When I glanced up again he was gone. It was weird, but I tried to brush it off since funerals seem attract all kinds of weird, anyway. Goes with the territory, I suppose. My uncle tried to get me to sit in one of the handful of folding chairs that had been set up beneath the canopy, but I politely informed him I’d rather stand. I was sick of feeling like I was on display. Of the expectation. Of everyone watching to see if I was grieving “properly.” I mean, is there a proper way to mourn? If you seem too put together, people think you must be made of stone. If you totally lose it and fall apart, you’re just a few steps away from the nuthouse. Whatever. In that moment, I wanted, no needed, to just be part of the crowd. To blend in to the mass of black and gray I also made a mental note to avoid that creepy guy as best I could, especially after I saw him staring at me. Again. The pastor walked up and began to pray as the pallbearers carried the casket from the hearse to the gravesite. The whole thing was utterly surreal. It was as though I were having an out-of-body experience, observing someone else who was preparing to bury her mother. Despite my half-hearted efforts, I couldn’t convince myself that it was actually happening because if it were, then that would mean Mom was gone. Really gone. A part of me wanted to believe that it was all an elaborate charade. That any moment my mom would pop out of the casket and yell, “Gotcha!” And I would be mad at her for it, the way she’d been angry with me that time I ran away when I was little. But like she had, I would get over my anger and just be glad to have her back, safe and sound. *** When we got back to the house, I opted to spend the remainder of the afternoon unconscious. Well, I’d hoped to anyway. But as soon as I burrowed myself under the comforter, the fatigue that had been dragging me down all day vanished. Poof. I was wide-awake, as if I’d just downed a handful of Redbulls. I tried counting sheep. I tried counting my breaths. I tried clearing my head of everything. But I just couldn’t. In fact, the only thing that I could do was replay the last few days over and over in my head. How in her final days Mom kept hanging on, even though the doctors all told us she should be gone. “Let go, Mom, it’s okay,” I whispered at least a hundred times even though I hadn’t really meant it. I just hated to see her suffer. Hated to see every labored breath. Hated the way her eyes seemed to roll back into her head anytime someone spoke. Hated when the nurses would ask us to step outside the range of the privacy curtain when it came time to turn her to prevent bedsores. She didn’t look like herself anymore. Gone was the light in her eyes. Gone were her gorgeous auburn curls leaving behind a fuzzy, bald head in their wake. She was gone. And yet, not. Her breathing would stop for a moment and Mimi and I would look at each other and sigh, just sure that we’d witnessed her last breath. Then, twenty or thirty seconds later, she’d inhale again. I stayed with her though. I didn’t leave the room once in almost two days. But Mimi finally convinced me to go down to the coffee shop on the first floor. “Get us a couple of those frappé things,” she said. I hesitated, knowing that at any moment my mom really could take her last breath and I didn’t want her to die alone. “Go on,” Mimi said, shoving a twenty into my palm. “It’s time.” Time? She must have seen the confusion written across my face because she clarified. “Time for some caffeine.” I stood and stretched, my left leg frozen all the way up to my butt. I shook it a few times before I stepped out of the room. As I neared the door I heard Mimi’s breath catch in her chest. I turned back to see she had tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you want me to stay?” I asked. “You could go downstairs if you need a break or something.” “No, you need to go, Vi. You have to go. Now.” Her tone and the urgency were strange, but I shrugged it off, thinking maybe Mimi wanted to have a few minutes alone with my mom, to tell her something that she hadn’t wanted to say in front of me. “Okay. Be right back,” I'd said. 'Please hang on, Mom,' I thought to myself as I turned to leave. Of course, there was a new girl at the coffee kiosk and it took her like five minutes just to take my order down, not to mention the ten it took for her to learn how to make it. I groaned and tapped my foot impatiently but it didn’t speed things along. And in that fifteen minutes I was gone, I returned to find my mom was gone, too. There were two nurses standing at my mom’s bedside, next to Mimi. One was holding her hand and they all watched as a flat line blipped on Mom’s monitor. “I missed it?” I said. I almost dropped the drink carrier as I felt my knees go weak beneath me. Mimi turned to me, grabbed my shoulders and hugged me tight. “I’m so sorry sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” I then spent the rest of the evening afternoon waiting for Mimi to address the massive elephant in the room, the one so glaring it may as well have been pink and holding a giant martini glass. Namely: with my mom gone, where would I go? It had just been mom and me since I was five, and because even though I was in college and technically an adult, I wasn’t ready to be on my own. Not in any real sense of the word. I couldn’t handle upkeep of a massive house, a mortgage, taxes, insurance. Twenty-one, yes. But an adult? No way. I’d have to go somewhere. Staying put would be impossible, not to mention lonely. My mom and I had never discussed that before. Not even when she got sick. I wish I could say we just never got around to it, but that’s not exactly true. Mom tried to bring it up a few times, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d always change the subject, act like I hadn’t heard her or if all else failed, I’d just run out the door and pretend I was running late for something. I guess I thought that if we ever got around to talking about it, actually acknowledging the possibility, it would be like we were accepting that she was going to die. And there was no way I was going to resign myself or my mother to that fate. In the long run it didn’t really matter, though. We couldn’t circumvent death or even trick it. Mimi seemed equally as intent on avoiding the subject so together we’d danced around it all weekend. She’d casually mention getting the house “ready” and though I knew she meant ready to sell, she never confirmed my assumption. As we were cleaning out space in the freezer, she finally broached the subject. She was cautious, as if she were taking the pulse of a very frail person. I guess in a way, she was. I knew I could have helped her by breaking the ice, but I decided to wait and see where she’d go with it. “I’m not sure there is really a point to freezing all this stuff,” she said. “What do you mean?” “Well,” she sighed and looked at me. “I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to spit it out.” I set the box of freezer-burned fudgesicles on the counter next to me and turned to look at her. She was pretty, my grandma. Even though her bobbed hair which used to be the same auburn color as mine had gone completely white, her skin was virtually ageless, except for the few little laugh lines around her mouth. “The marks of a life well-lived,” she’d always said. Her eyes were almost the same as my mother’s and mine. Same shape, same gray-green color. The only difference was that unlike my mom, Mimi and I had small black notch in our right irises. It looked like someone had pricked our pupils and let them bleed out like a fried egg yolk, a coloboma of the iris that was almost shaped like a keyhole. Mimi used to say that my grandpa was the only man who’d ever had the key to hers.            “Vi, your mom wanted you to be taken care of, you know?” she asked. I nodded. That was obvious, wasn’t it? “And she thought the best thing for you would be to come live… live with me. In Weber Grove.” And just like that, she’d revealed her whole hand. For all her avoidance, when it was finally out there, I was a little relieved. Even though my mother and I had never talked about it, I always assumed I would go live with Mimi. But it wasn’t until I overheard my Aunt Jo mention her ideas for my future— which included moving to her ranch in Idaho— that I’d begun to wonder. Aunt Jo thought Mimi was too old to take on teenager. “And besides,” she’d said, “That child could use a little structure in her life.” “Yeah, structure this,” I’d wanted to say. Fortunately, since technically I was not a minor, I knew Aunt Jo had about zero say in the matter. At the end of the day legally and otherwise, it was up to me. I just didn’t want to impose or make assumptions. “So… when?” I asked. I’d just started my first year of college. Granted, I’d forgone my scholarship options and opted to take classes at the local junior college given my mom’s health needs. Still, it wasn’t exactly the most ideal time to relocate halfway across the country, but I figured, the sooner the better.  “I was thinking I could close up my house or hire someone to come in and watch over things and then we could stay here through the holidays, if you want. Give you the chance to finish out your semester,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to put you out like that, Mimi. Plus, being uprooted at the middle of my first year is not that much better than at the beginning. Especially when I’m already behind on my coursework.” Online courses are not the same but at least it's given me a chance to keep up a little bit. “Well, I’m not sure I can take off a whole year,” Mimi said. “No,” I said. “I meant I think we should go now. Soon, at least.” I walked across the room and grabbed the trashcan, dragging it back over toward the fridge. I chucked the fudgesicles in. “I can just drop my non-online classes and maybe transfer somewhere in Colorado. Let’s get this party started,” I said. “Well, we don’t have to decide anything tonight, sweetheart. It’s been a long day. A long week, really. Things might look different to you by the light of day.” I sighed. To be honest, I knew it was coming. I’d known for a while and actually surprised myself with how ready I was. “There’s nothing here for me, now. This was mom’s dream. And the longer I stay here the more I’ll be reminded of how that dream never came true.” My mom had purchased the big old house for peanuts since the previous owners had basically let it fall in on itself. It needed major renovations from top to bottom and it was her goal to restore it and, one day, open up a bed and breakfast. She’d always had a soft spot for lost causes so, before she got sick, she’d repaired the slate roof, refinished the hardwood floors on the main level and restored the marble fireplace in the formal living room. Other than that, the house was essentially the way it was when we bought it: a dump.            I turned back toward the open freezer and started pulling stuff out to throw it away. “No point in saving all this food then,” I said. “Who’s going to eat it?” The containers of food started piling up quickly. It was kind of cathartic, clearing out all that crap. Bags of frozen chicken breasts, frozen ravioli, a frost-bitten quart of ice cream, half-empty boxes of Girl Scout cookies- the peanut butter chocolate kind, which were the one thing my mom actually wanted to eat after getting sick, the one thing her taste buds could still crave, and pans upon pans of frozen casseroles all made their way to the trash can. I wanted to get rid of it, all of it.            Before I could reach for the other half-empty box of fish sticks, I felt a soft, warm hand on my back. My grandma rubbed it in slow circles and then squeezed my shoulder twice. Her touch drained me of every shred of composure I’d managed to fake. I could feel the cracks in my façade, tiny fissures forming beneath the surface. The pressure was welling up inside and before I even knew what was happening, I found myself crumpled up in Mimi’s arms, sobbing and heaving, dousing her shoulder with tears and snot streaks. Before long, the whole sleeve of her sweater was completely drenched. I didn’t know how long we stayed there like that. Mimi holding me while I blubbered uncontrollably, bawling like a tiny, colicky infant. Mimi didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Our shared grief forged a sort of telepathic-like link between us that night. We’d both exerted so much energy trying to keep ourselves together that when the dam cracked, there was nothing for it to do but explode. The overwhelming waves of grief came crashing down around us so we clung to each other like life-preservers. Mom was gone. And I would never see her again, never hear her voice, never feel her comforting hand on my shoulder, and never curl up in her arms for solace.            We must have fallen asleep like that, a pile of limbs and tears and sadness crumpled up next to the fridge. In all the commotion, I’d left the freezer door cracked open and the coolness of the air trickled down to where we were sitting on the floor so that we huddled closer together until we both woke up shivering. Mimi got up and closed the freezer door. She reached to help me to my feet. “Lets get up to bed,” she whispered, motioning for me to follow her upstairs. My eyes were so puffy and swollen I could barely open them enough to see where I was going. I held onto the banister as we made our way up the staircase and down the hallway toward my bedroom. I listened to the quiet of the house, the stillness of which was both comforting and unsettling. The day had been so full of people and voices and noise that it was nice to enjoy some peace, but the silence was also a vivid reminder of all the life that had been drained away. When we got to my bedroom at the end of the hall, Mimi lifted the fluffy down comforter and coaxed me in. She climbed in on the other side, snuggling up next to me and wrapping her arm around my waist. She kissed my forehead. “I love you,” she said. “I love you, too,” I whispered back, squeezing her arm and rolling onto my side. “Let’s spoon.” “What does that mean?” she asked. “When you stack your bodies sideways like spoons. You know, like this.” I leaned in closer. “And just where did you learn this?” Mimi asked, a touch of suspicion in her voice. I knew exactly what her tone implied. “Mimi,” I groaned. “I don’t even have a boyfriend,” I said, protesting just enough. It was true, I didn’t and hadn’t really, unless you count Tommy Daniels in second grade. We went out for nine whole minutes of recess once. Beyond that, I just never had time for boys. Or many to pick from. “I learned it from Mom, actually.” “Ah, smart lady.”