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.Part TwoAngerAnger surfaces once you are feeling safe enough to know you will probably survive whatever comes.—Elisabeth Kübler-RossChapter Four1997, I’M EIGHTEEN.I’M LYING IN BED in my old room in Atlanta.I listen to a car drive slowly down the street.A lawn mower whirs in the distance.My mother is dead.It will be months and months, possibly even years, before this isn’t the first thing I think about when I wake up.My mother is dead.She has been dead for three days.My mother has been dead for three days.I say it out loud over and over as I lie there.My body feels warm and heavy, and I lie still beneath the comforter, replaying the last three days in my head, trying to decipher if any of it’s real.After my father’s 3:00 a.m.phone call to Christopher’s uncle’s house in New Jersey, announcing that my mother was gone, I had stumbled back to bed, curling beneath the covers like a wounded animal.Christopher stood in the doorway for a moment.The house was quiet again.It was still dark out.He crossed the room then and climbed into bed, pulling me to him like a child.My shoulder blades jutted out like little wings, pressing into his chest, and I was conscious of the thin T-shirt I was wearing, of my bare legs.Tell me about her, he said.And I did.I told him about her blond hair and her laugh.I told him bits and pieces of what I knew about her life in New York.I told him about the day she met my father, about the funny blue suit he was wearing.After a while I could tell that Christopher had fallen asleep.His breathing was soft and shallow, his arms limp and heavy around me.I watched the light creep into the sky beyond the windows.My mother was dead.Minutes passed, maybe an hour.Then Christopher jerked, his whole body flinching, startling me, and waking him.I dreamed about a dead fish, he said thickly.Rotting and putrid.I pushed out of his embrace, sat up on the side of the bed.I’m sorry, I said without turning around.And I was.I apologized one more time on my way out the door, this time to Christopher’s uncle, who looked at me with such pity that I felt guilty for burdening him with it, and then I got in my car and drove the last few hours to DC.When I got there, my father handed me a sleeping pill, the first of many during the next few weeks, and I fell into a muddied sleep in the guest room upstairs.My mother was dead.Hers was not the kind of death that threw people into frenzied action.This was not an emergency.It was not unexpected.Those of us involved moved with measured intention.No one looked at their watch or busied themselves with forms or urgent phone calls.The thing was done.MY FATHER AND I left the next day for Atlanta.Yesterday.Could that really have been yesterday?At a gas station in North Carolina my father quietly asked me to go inside and get two cups of ice.Back at the car he opened the trunk and filled each cup from a bottle of scotch he had hidden there, amidst the suitcases and the plastic bags filled with my mother’s things from the hospital.In the car he handed me one of the cups, and then we eased back onto the highway.We drove like that, each of us sipping carefully.I’d never had scotch, and the taste was strong and bitter.Each swallow left me breathless.By the time we got to Atlanta it was late.As we pulled up the steep, cracked driveway I stared at the old, white house on the hill.We’d only lived here for a few years.It was a rental, the best we could do after we moved back from Florida, my parents’ medical bills taking priority over long-term housing.My dad parked in the carport, and after he switched off the ignition both of us remained in our seats for a moment longer, listening to the ticks of the cooling engine.Finally one of us moved, maybe him, and we eased our way out of the car and up the steps to the back door.Neither of us had been in the house in months.My mother’s purse sat on her desk, from the last time she had set it down.I let my fingers brush its leather as I passed by, floating into the house like a ghost.I moved slowly through room after room.Each one more still than the last.In the kitchen I stood staring at my reflection in the window above the sink.Ghost.A plant on the windowsill was dry, and I ran the little pot under the tap.I opened the refrigerator and stared into its mostly empty contents.Half-drunk bottles of juice and condiments with crusted caps were scattered across the shelves.I opened the freezer door too, peering in at the sauces and stocks my mother kept stored there
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