“Was it a good cake?” Mom asks later, at the hospital.
“It was grocery store cake.” I sit on the edge of the bed and rub her feet under the covers. Even through the blankets they feel like blocks of ice. “Dad can’t make himself go to the shop.”
“I miss it.” Mom sighs. “I miss everything.”
I nod. “I used to think the shop was actual magic.”
“It was,” Mom agrees, but then she does that thing where she makes a conscious choice not to dwell on what she’s lost. “So. Happy birthday. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for your party.”
“It was no big deal,” I say, and actually I’m glad this time that she wasn’t at my party, so she didn’t get to hear my embarrassing announcement regarding boys. Which I’m pretty sure no one else is ever going to let me live down.
She reaches over to the bedside table, where there is a small package wrapped in blue paper. “Here.”
I unwrap it. It’s a ring box. Inside is a silver ring with a circle of stars around the circumference.
“It’s a copy of a sixteenth-century English ring in the British Museum,” Mom explains. “It’s called a poesy ring.”
I get an instant lump in my throat. Do not, I think, under any circumstances, cry in front of your sick mother.
Mom takes the ring and reads the inscription on the inside: “Many are the starrs I see, but in my eye no starr like thee.”
“It’s perfect.” I slide the ring onto the middle finger of my right hand, where it fits, well, perfectly.
“You’ve always been my star.” Mom opens her arms for a hug. “Happy birthday, darling girl.”
“I’ll never take it off,” I promise into her bony shoulder. “Never ever.”
She lies back against the bed again, her face pale. “I can’t believe you’re eighteen,” she murmurs. “It feels like I blinked, and you went from being a baby to being all grown up. How did that happen?”
“You fed me,” I answer. “I think that’s how it works.”
Mom laughs. “You used to cry from ten o’clock at night to a little past two in the morning, every single night until you were almost six months old. No matter what we tried.”
“It’s amazing you didn’t send me back and ask for a refund. I was clearly a faulty baby.”
Mom shakes her head. “We were thrilled to have you. We didn’t care about the crying.”
This is a familiar scene between us. Mom always says, “You were the most gorgeous baby. I couldn’t believe it, the first time I saw you.”
Then I say, “You were the most gorgeous mom.”
And then Mom says something like: “I would have been happy with a boring, regular baby. That’s all I was thinking about—that I wanted a baby. Any baby would do. But you’ve always been extraordinary. So smart. So funny. So beautiful. I could never have imagined in a million years that I’d be so lucky to end up with a daughter like you.”
And I say, “Okay, Mom, stop. You’re making me blush.”
I wait for it, but this time Mom doesn’t go into any of that. She’s quiet.
“Are you okay?” I ask. Mom’s always been a talker. Silence is usually a bad sign.
“I’m so tired of being here,” she says.
My breath catches. It’s been more than a year since that night in the movie theater when she had the heart attack. One minute she was munching popcorn and laughing at Chewbacca, and the next she said it felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. We called an ambulance immediately and rushed her straight to the hospital. She spent hours in surgery and months in a state of touch and go. For a while she got to come home, hooked up to a machine that pumps her blood for her, but a few months ago she had to go back to the hospital full-time.
She needs a transplant. I’m choosing to believe that she’s going to get a new heart. Soon. I hope.
But here’s the thing: through all the ups and the downs of this past year, my mother has never complained. It’s an unspoken rule we have. For my sake, Mom tries not to show me how painful and exhausting it is now just to make it from one day to the next. And I, in return, try not to show her how terrified I am of losing her. And so we go on pretending that life is basically normal. I act like a standard-issue teenager—I keep my grades up and keep performing in plays for the high school theater and keep talking about boys and the drama club and how gross the cafeteria food is, and my parents act like Mom’s stay at the hospital is a minor inconvenience, a temporary thing.
Normalcy. That’s our goal. We’ve gotten really good at acting like everything’s fine.
But now Mom said she’s tired of being here, and I don’t know if she’s being literal or figurative. And I don’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” I go with finally. “I know this sucks.”
She closes her eyes and smiles faintly. “The universe unfolds as it should,” she murmurs. This, too, is what she always says. She’s not religious, but she believes in this greater force: the universe. Which somehow, in her mind, anyway, makes her heart problems part of some bigger picture. She has faith in that.
Her leg jerks slightly, her hand relaxing in mine. Her breath becomes even and deep. She’s fallen asleep. She does that a lot—conks out mid-conversation. I tuck her in, being careful not to tangle the covers in the hand with her IV. Then I sit watching the rise and fall of her chest, trying to commit every part of her face to memory. The gentle curve of her eyebrows. Her nose. The shape of her ears.
People who don’t know I’m adopted always tell me I look like her. I choose to take it as a compliment. Mom has long blond hair and gorgeous hazel eyes that are this perfect mix of green and brown. I don’t resemble her at all, really. But everyone keeps saying I’m the spitting image of my mother, unless they don’t know her, in which case they tell me I look like my redheaded, green-eyed, freckle-faced dad. Whom I resemble even less.
I turn her words over in my head: the universe unfolds as it should. If that’s true, then I have issues with the universe, because it’s not fair. My mom has the best heart, and it’s failing her.
Screw you, universe, I think. But I also kind of think: Please help?
I stand up and turn off the light, waiting in the dark, listening as the vitals monitor beeps and beeps, a steady, comforting sound, because it means she’s still here.
“Good night, Mom,” I whisper, and then I sneak out and close the door.