June 30

It's raining umbrellas. The little paper ones that usually come with tropical drinks, and always decorate the hot fudge sundaes at her favorite diner. Black strokes mark their colorful tissue --- Chinese characters, she once said, the symbols for luck and long life. The umbrellas open and close like butterfly wings, rustling, tearing; toothpick ribs creaking, snapping. The shower becomes a storm I can't escape.

"Will she die?" I asked over dinner.

Dad covered his face for a moment, then lowered his hands and looked at me, his eyes tired and red.

"Yes," he said.

I think he meant soon, though he didn't say this. For three weeks now, a hospital bed has pushed back the other furniture in our living room. We keep the bed's wheels locked so it won't roll away. Mom lies there all the time, growing smaller. Sometimes she is so still, I can't see her breathing beneath the covers. Other times she thrashes around, trying to get comfortable, I guess. She kicks off the covers, and finally falls asleep with her limbs all twisted like something hit by a car --- something made of skin and bones and nothing else.

I'm so tired --- tired for no reason --- like last night and the night before. Crashed on my bed again. Only tonight is different. For the first time, I've opened this journal. I've written down my question and Dad's answer. His "yes." I've made it real. The long shadows nod, Yes. Yes, the wind hisses through the willow's branches. Yes.

No.

In eight weeks, it's my birthday. I'll be seventeen, nearly a junior, because the following day school starts. According to last year's idiotic personality assessment test (the result being that I would make a great nun), I like to set goals and I like to be prepared. Maybe that's why I vowed to ask Dad about Mom before too much more time passed --- before I woke up and realized that I was no longer sixteen, and Mom was no longer alive. My goal was to Be Prepared. Maybe I should be a Boy Scout instead of a nun.

But it's hard to be prepared when you've got the shakes. When I even thought of asking Dad about Mom, I trembled like I'd been left out in the cold. I felt like I was leaning over a deep, dark hole. I tried to imagine something inside the hole, something to fill it. All I came up with was empty.

So tonight I put down my forkful of dinner and asked before I could even think. And now I believe that the hole closed up with Mom inside, far away, finally gone. I bet I won't even dream about her, the way I used to every night.