I sit by Mam’s bed and watch her finish dying, and this is my training now.
I pace, I shadowbox, I get through double and triple helpings of push-ups on the floor in her room. I read while I wait for her to wake up and devour me.
I think about the symptoms, the ones Maeve knows for sure and the ones she doesn’t. I remember everything: the whole story from sorry beginning to messy, bloody end. I know as much as anyone probably knows, so I do, and it’s still not enough.
You might think that the bodily functions of a person who has been bitten would have the decency to quit, but they do not. Early on, Maeve tells me to go looking for all the sheets I can find in the village. I wash the worst of the dust and filth off them, dry them, and after they’ve been used we throw them out one by one. We’ve never wasted anything, but there’s no good in trying to wash these. Maeve and I change my mother, her body, the best we can, but once the mattress gets it, there’s only so much we can do.
The smell is awful, more pungent than death, more active. The window is open and the breeze is good, but in the day sweat rolls off me and at night I freeze. Maeve takes over for six hours every night to let me sleep, and then I’m back with her at sunrise.
The house is quiet with dread. I am frightened and also bored, and ashamed for being bored. Maeve isn’t often in the room with me, only when she’s the chores of three people all done, but she doesn’t go farther than shouting distance from the house now. The chickens are brought in, the far garden is mostly untended. She sits with me in silence, and though I breathe easier when she’s there, I hate us being in the same room. The anger courses through me like my own blood, and I hold it as close. She was always hard with me, Maeve, but I’m hard back to her now. I hate her and blame her, and that makes me feel a little better.
On the fifth day, Mam throws up black bile, without ever waking up. The vomit pours from her lips and bubbles in her throat and comes out her nostrils. I jump up, shaking, and shout for Maeve. When she comes, she shifts my mother on to her side, and more vomit comes up. We clean up. The gurgling, bubbling noises stop eventually.
On the seventh day, the seizures start. At first they’re only small episodes of twitching, but then they get worse. I count, my own body shaking, while my mother flails uncontrollably, violently on the bed. Out of everything, these are the worst.
The strings on her wrists and feet dig into the skin so it bleeds, and once she’s quieted down again, I pick them out of the flesh, wincing while my mother lies unconscious.
I go a bit mad, I think, watching this. Lots of things die in that room: half my life.
Maeve sits with me.
“It’s about respect as well,” she says, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation and I hadn’t been paying attention.
I say nothing, and it takes her a while to go on, to get at what she’s really trying to tell me. She used silence on me all the time I was growing up, and now I want to use it back on her. I want to use any weapon I can get against her.
“It’s about making this part as easy and as dignified as you can for her.”
“It’s not her,” I say, wondering does it hurt her. My voice sounds strange in my ears, older. “It’s a shell. She’s dead.” I take a breath and then say the thing I’ve been working up to. “Where were you, Maeve? What were you at that she got bitten?”
The quiet in the room is like a kick in the stomach, but I will not break it. She’s nothing to say to that, and I feel like I’ve got something back. I steal a glance over toward her, and I have to look again, and then again. She is crying, silently.
“Good girl,” she says after a moment, making no effort to wipe at her eyes.
What a poor swap I am for my mother.
“Would you rather she was on her own?” Maeve asks. “Would you rather I had left her there?”
“I’d rather you were there for her,” I say, but I’m thinking about the things Maeve meant me to, despite myself. I think about Mam, or my mother’s living corpse, left out under the stars and the heat and the rain on the mainland, shitting herself and puking black mucus, and left to die and then to hunger forever. I think about her beautiful dark hair clotted with mud and filth, and her damp forehead with nobody to wipe the sweat off it.
My ears and throat and eyes are swollen from crying, but I seem to be giving it another go anyway. I shake my head.
Maeve doesn’t need to look right at me to know it.
“We should clean her,” I say. “We should give her a proper clean and wash her hair and put her in new sheets. And then you should.”
I can’t say it.
Beside me, Maeve sighs. “Should what?”
I won’t say it.
After a long time, she says, “And what about what she wanted? You have to respect that as well. Your mother has gone, but there’s still value to her death, and if I take my knife and push it through her eye, it’ll be a betrayal of what she stood up to that pain for. So. Pity about you.”
She ends her sentence sounding cross, and hearing a trace of her old familiar anger makes me feel a little better.
“How long does it take?”
“It’s different for everyone. Some take five days, some fifteen. Some people wake up sometimes, nearly like themselves, but others don’t at all. There’s no relying on it.”
“There must be something we can do; there must be someone to help us. How do you know anything, where did you learn—”
“There isn’t,” Maeve says, clear and simple, and I don’t believe her, and I hate her, I hate her. “There’s no one out there can help us.”
We don’t talk about it again. We don’t talk much about anything again.
The end happens on the morning of the twelfth day.
The stinking sweat she’d had seemed to abate. She hadn’t vomited in a long time. It looked for all the world like she might be getting better. I let myself believe it a little. Couldn’t some people just get well again?
I take over from Maeve as usual at the end of the night.
“Any changes?”
She doesn’t bother to respond, only leaves the room.
The house is quiet now, watchful. I scribble in my training journal, look over old notes. I draw in the margins, pictures of buildings and people, and then, restless, I get down on the floor for some stretches.
The hands of the body on the bed are twitching, but I’m used to it now.
I didn’t do my push-ups yesterday. After five years of getting through them every day, when I was ten and had what Mam called a chest infection and Maeve called lung rot, and every month when I’m crippled with period pain and I couldn’t face them, I did them anyway. I thought I’d feel different if I missed them. And I did, I felt worse. Today I’ll do double, and maybe that will prove that our little life is not ending, or that if it is, I’m ready for it.
At first I don’t hear it, or I think it’s a ghost or my imagining. I’m between push-ups, and I pause for a moment, my nose almost touching the floor, my arms poised, strong, like they could hold me forever. I hold my breath, but the room is silent. I get through a few more before I hear it again, and the second time, it’s clear.
“Orpen.” My mother’s voice.
Her voice is strong.
It sounds just like her.
It scares the shit out of me.
I use my arms to propel me toward the door, my knees coming up protectively, my hands going automatically to a guard position.
“Orpen, love.”