Mom’s dying. Officially, this time. It apparently started yesterday morning with a low-grade fever and a cough, which developed, in the afternoon, into a massive fluid buildup in Mom’s lungs, what the doctors call pleural edema. She was basically drowning. They tried to drain the fluid using a tube inserted into her chest, a fairly simple procedure except that it went wrong somehow, and her lung partially collapsed. Then she had to go into surgery, where she nearly bled out on the table. But they got her through.
She’s still here. Still kicking, is how my grandma put it. Still fighting. Still alive.
But the doctors say she’s in what they call a spiral. This is all way too much stress for her already stressed-out heart. They say she has six weeks, if that.
I try to wrap my head around it. Six weeks. I wonder how they come up with these numbers, like if there’s a kind of handy chart somewhere where they can calculate the expiration dates for people. Because they can’t really know, can they? But they always sound like they do.
Six more weeks with my mother.
If that.
“But there’s a silver lining to this cloud,” Dad says the next morning when we’re all sitting around her bed at the hospital—me and Dad and Grandma and Uncle Pete, trying to act like this isn’t the beginning of the end of our world. “She’s been moved up to the top of the donor list.”
“That’s right,” Grandma says. “Now we’re going to get you a brand-new heart.”
“A superhero heart,” says Uncle Pete.
Right. I try to imagine then that there is a heart for my mom out there somewhere. A person walking around using that heart, unaware that disaster is about to befall them—a car crash or an aneurysm or a freak accident that will mean that person dies and my mom gets to live.
It feels wrong, hoping for it.
Mom squeezes my hand three times. When I was little that was the secret message she taught me: three hand squeezes = I love you. She’d do it when she dropped me off at swimming lessons, or at the doctor’s office when I was about to get a shot, or when I accidentally dumped out the entire contents of my backpack in the middle of the hall at school one morning and a group of boys laughed at me. When she first had the heart attack there were a lot of times she couldn’t talk for one reason or another, but she would squeeze my hand, so weakly sometimes I could barely feel it, but I’d hear the words loud and clear, and I’d squeeze back.
Squeeze squeeze squeeze. I love you.
“I’m sorry you had to rush home from the drama competition,” she says when the rest of my family’s gone home and we have a minute alone.
“It’s fine. The competition was over. We won first place,” I say, trying to smile.
For a second I plunge right back into that awful moment, the governor and Nyla and me and the realization that I am not going to go to C of I. I consider telling Mom about the epic fail regarding the scholarship situation. But then I don’t. I don’t want to put that on her.
“I wish I could have seen it,” she says, with effort. “I feel like I’m missing everything good and exciting in your life.”
“You aren’t missing much of anything,” I say, but what I think is, But you will. I know that’s not her fault, but it still feels unfair. If she dies—and I force myself to think the word if and not when—there will be a giant Mom-shaped hole in the rest of my life.
She’s quiet for a while, and I think she’s gone to sleep. I stare at the oxygen tubes in her nose. Her face is the color of chalk, her lips, in spite of the oxygen, a weird mix of pink and gray.
“Don’t you have rehearsal tonight?” she whispers.
“What? No. It’s Sunday.”
But of course I’m going to quit the play.
Her eyes open. “I need to tell you something.”
I lean forward so I can hear her. “Tell me what, Mom?”
I brace for a goodbye, the “I’ll always be with you, in your heart” speech you see in the movies. I swallow back my tears. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk.”
“There’s a letter.” She sits up a bit, clears her throat, and says it more loudly. “There’s a letter for you.”
“You wrote me a letter?”
“Not me,” she says. “Your birth mother.”
“What?”
“I know you’re curious about her. Your dad told me you were asking questions.”
“I was, but . . .” Right then I’m tempted to confess everything, the real reason I requested my birth certificate, the way I’ve been thinking about my birth mother so often these days, my conversations with Nyla, my unproductive search of an adoption registry, but I can’t see how this information wouldn’t upset my mom, and it’s important for nothing to upset her right now. Better for her not to know that only yesterday I was at the Boise Public Library scouring the high school books, searching for my birth mother. “I don’t think—”
“It’s okay.” Mom puts her hand over mine. “I want you to find her.”
I’m so shocked it takes me a few minutes to form a one-word response. “What?”
“I’ve always thought about her, out there somewhere,” Mom says. “I want to meet her. I have some things I’d like to say.”
I sit back. “You want me to find my birth mother because you want to talk to her?”
“I want to know more about her. Don’t you?”
“But you chose a closed adoption,” I rasp out. “You were fine with not knowing who she was before, right?”
“Your dad and I were scared, especially in the beginning,” she answers. “We didn’t want to risk that someday she might want you back. We thought it’d be for the best if we didn’t have contact. The other way seemed messy.” She smiles faintly. “But you’re eighteen now. And you have a right to know about this part of yourself.”
She takes a minute to rest from all this talking.
I still can’t catch my breath. “And Dad wants me to search for her, too?”
Her smile fades. “He’s not in complete agreement, but he’s okay with it. If you are.”
My heart’s beating fast, my palms suddenly sweaty.
“The day we got you”—Mom smooths the sheets down over her legs—“the social worker told me about a program they had, in the state of Idaho, where the birth mother could leave a letter for her baby.”
“Wait, what?”
“And the social worker told me, even though I don’t think she was supposed to, that there’s a letter there for you. Your birth mother wrote you a letter.”
I sink down at the edge of the bed again. Right. The letter. “She wrote me a letter.”
“And the social worker said that when you turned eighteen you could request that the letter be given to you.”
I’ve been eighteen for weeks, and she never said a word. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“I don’t know. I—maybe I didn’t want to share you. But I’m thinking about things differently now.” She tries to laugh, but it comes out as a cough. “Come here.”
She hugs me, but she’s so weak we both just kind of lean into each other.
“Are you sure?” I ask her, because my birth mother seems like the last thing we need to be thinking about right now.
“I’m sure, sweetie.” She pulls back and tucks a loose piece of my hair behind my ear. “Get the letter,” she says. “Then we’ll go from there.”