FORTY-TWO

Several hours after my mother died, I woke up on the floor of my room. I heard the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, and thought that my mother was up and cooking breakfast for us. Then I remembered that this wasn’t possible, because she had been bedridden for weeks. Then I remembered that she had died.

I went down to the kitchen. My son was there, fixing himself a bowl of cereal. He looked embarrassed that I’d caught him doing something so ordinary on a day like this. I fixed myself a bowl of cereal too. We sat side by side in silence and ate our cereal.

After breakfast, I went outside to check the mail. I was dressed in the clothes that I had put on the previous morning, when my mother was still alive. There was a thick, damp envelope stuffed in the mailbox. My first thought was that it was from my mother. From There. But it was from our divorce mediator. The final papers. Signed and executed. How strange, I thought, that my marriage officially ended on the same day that my mother died.

But I didn’t have time to ponder that. I saw the car bringing Nathalie home pulling up the driveway. I put the envelope back into the mailbox and went to tell Nathalie that her grandmother had died.

We spent most of the day holed up in my stuffy bedroom, sitting cross-legged on top of my bed, avoiding the rest of the house, because it seemed frighteningly large for the three of us, until I decided to drive us to the beach.

The time was about an hour before sunset, when most of the beachgoers had already gone and the fishermen were starting to arrange themselves along the water’s edge, with their plastic buckets and their long and short rods, and their fishing lines bobbing over the sand.

We walked in perfect silence for a long time, until Nathalie said: “Look at the shadows!” The bright light made our shadows especially pronounced. Every detail was visible, even separate wisps of our hair messed up by the wind. Dan’s shadow was longer than mine. Nathalie’s was the same length. We didn’t look like a mother and children, but like three orphaned siblings.

Now that my mother was gone, I needed to become their mother. I wondered if I’d ever be able to master that.