Comeback (14 page)

IT DIDN’T MATTER
that it was about forty-two degrees out and windy enough to blow someone over if they weren’t careful. It didn’t matter that we were all bundled up in winter gear and shivering through the blankets draped around us. It didn’t matter that there were clouds blocking the sun, turning the sea into the same gray as the sky above. Nothing mattered but the tranquility brought by the crashing of the waves against the shoreline, the fact that we were all together, and the look of utter peace on Emma’s face.

Jessica had reluctantly come along, too, making us a party of six. She’d tried to stay behind at the apartment with Henrik and Jim, but Emma and I had both insisted she join us. I was fairly certain she intended to refuse despite my insistence that we wanted her there, right up until the moment when Emma added her computerized voice to the mix, reminding Jessica of a promise. Either way, it just felt right to have Jessica with us at a time like this. I didn’t understand and wasn’t ready to explore the reasons; it just was. At the moment, she was curled up against my side, radiating heat into me even as she had her arms wrapped tight around my youngest nephew.

I lost track of how long we stayed at the beach. Time wasn’t important on a day like today, even with the blustery conditions.

There were lots of sniffles, but there was even more laughter. The kids and I got caught up rehashing old stories.
Do you remember the time Nils got his head stuck in the armhole of his T-shirt and wouldn’t let Mama catch him to fix it? Do you remember the time we tossed a plate of whipped cream in Uncle Nicky’s face and he chased us and covered us in it, too? Do you remember the time Uncle Nicky came back to Sweden for the summer, and we all got in bed with Mama and Daddy and tickled them until Mama couldn’t breathe?
I remembered all the stories we shared, and I would remember this, too.

In fact, I would remember this most of all.

Every now and then, I glanced over to see how Jessica was responding to it all. I typically found her staring off into the distance or watching the waves crash against the shore. Once, she met my eyes and she smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. It seemed distant.
She
seemed distant. I wished I knew how to make her feel more comfortable. As far as I was concerned, she belonged with us. I knew Emma felt the same, or she never would have insisted that Jessica come today.

I was long past the point of feeling the cold anymore by the time Emma decided she’d had her fill of the ocean. We loaded back into the minivan and drove the ninety minutes back to Portland, still laughing and sniffling and sharing memories the whole way. Jessica didn’t talk much. She sat in the passenger seat and held my hand, squeezing every now and again as though to remind me she was there. That I wasn’t alone, even though I suddenly felt very alone in a very big world. Or maybe it was in an effort to remind herself that she was with us, to bring herself back into the moment.

By the time we arrived at the apartment, a hospice nurse had shown up to make everything official and ensure that all proper procedures were followed as Emma exercised her right to die gracefully. Jim or Henrik, one of them, had taken care of making those arrangements while we’d been gone.

Henrik and I settled Emma back into her bed, and we left her alone with the kids for a few minutes while he prepared the lethal prescription.

It was a liquid that she could add to her feeding tube. According to the law, she had to physically do it herself. No one could help her. There was a small part of me that hoped she wouldn’t be able to, that it would prove to be more than she could physically handle at this point. That hope was in vain, though. She still had enough use of her hands and arms that she could type and communicate, so there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be able to manage this task, as well.

Once Henrik finished preparing the dose, we waited, some of us more outwardly patient than others. I paced, unable to hold still for fear of going insane, and I finally took a seat at the dining room table when I couldn’t take it any longer, burying my head in my arms. Henrik and the hospice nurse spoke quietly in the corner. Jim clapped a hand on my shoulder and said a few reassuring words that I didn’t really hear before heading over to join them.

Jessica sat next to me, taking one of my hands in hers, her other hand moving over the back of my head, her fingertips massaging my scalp. She felt so warm. It was tempting to turn toward her, to wrap her up in my arms and lose myself in whatever comfort she had to offer. At the moment, her presence was almost like a drug to me. I needed her. Maybe she sensed that. Maybe that was why she was here, holding my hand and staying by my side when it was clear she didn’t feel she should be.

She didn’t leave, though, and I didn’t give in to the urge to lose myself in whatever relief she might offer.

Elin came out a few minutes later. She put her hand on my arm, and I looked up into eyes that were too old to belong to someone with such a tiny hand.

“Mama’s ready now,” she said, her voice holding strong and steady.

Emma was ready, but was I?

I’D NEVER WATCHED
someone die before. I’d known plenty of people who had died during my lifetime, and I felt as though I had a decent grasp on what the moment of death should look like. It seemed as though it should be violent, or at least sudden and traumatic. It should be a struggle, shouldn’t it? A last battle between the known and the unknown.

I was wrong on many fronts, and I had never been happier to be wrong in my life.

Emma’s death was remarkably peaceful, so completely different from what I had expected. When she was ready, she gathered everyone into her bedroom—even me, despite my protests. Each of her children kissed her cheek and told her they loved her. Nicky did the same, and he said a few private words to her that brought a tear to her bloodshot eyes. Then Henrik handed her the syringe. She squeezed his hand, emptied the contents into the feeding tube, and then reached out to hold on to the people she loved, her eyes passing from one to the next before landing on mine.

I shouldn’t have been there. Not then. But Emma had insisted and I’d sworn to her that I would help Nicky take care of them, so there I was, an outsider intruding on what should have been a private family moment.

Her gaze held mine firmly, and all I could hear was that computerized voice in my head, over and over again.
My children will need him. He’ll need you.
I nodded, telling her wordlessly that I hadn’t forgotten my promise, that I meant to follow through with it, and she let her gaze pass over to Nicky and her kids once more.

Then her eyes closed.

They never opened again.

It was only a few minutes after Emma had taken the drugs—maybe five, if that—before she slipped into a coma. Nicky and his niece and nephews kept holding on to her hands, touching her face. Every now and then the hospice nurse would move in to check for a pulse.

Within less than an hour, Emma was gone.

BRENDEN AND RACHEL
Campbell had been busy organizing the players’ wives to help out in any way they could since early that morning. No less than a small army of women had converged at the Storm’s practice facility not long after sunrise and had been working all day getting Nicky’s house ready for the kids to live there. They were stocking the fridge and pantry, setting up the children’s new bedrooms, and other things of that sort. A couple of the wives had even gone to the airport early this morning to bring Nicky’s minivan back to the apartment.

Jim, Henrik, and the hospice nurse were handling everything on the medical and legal end of things. They were going to take care of calling the coroner and the funeral home, setting those events in motion.

That left me to see to Nicky and the children.

The hospice nurse had barely left us alone in the bedroom after Emma had passed, shutting the door behind her, when Nils lifted his head off his mother’s stomach and looked at me with eyes quickly filling with tears.

“She’s gone?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

In a flash, he was on my lap, his little arms clenching my waist like a vise and his tears drenching my shirt. Hugo followed him moments later. I held them both as snug as I could, not sure what I could say to comfort them even if I’d been able to speak. They didn’t seem to need words, though. They just needed someone to hold them. So I did.

When I looked up, Nicky had pulled Elin onto his lap and was cradling her in the same way I was comforting the boys. She still had Emma’s hand in hers. He didn’t try to break the contact. He just brushed his hand over her head, smoothing her hair as I’d done with him earlier, and spoke quietly in her ear. I didn’t understand him at first and thought it was because he was speaking so quietly, but then I realized he was speaking to her in Swedish.

At that moment, the true enormity of what I’d promised Emma hit me. These were children who had lost both of their parents, as well as a grandparent, within the span of a few years. They’d been taken from their home, from their country, and were in a place where few people spoke their native language. Everything they’d ever known was gone…and I was supposed to somehow become their mother figure.

Panic threatened to rob me of my breath until Rachel knocked on the door to the bedroom and poked her head in. She took in the scene with a quick glance, and then she came over to me and gave me a soft smile, lifting Nils from my lap in the well-practiced move of someone who had been a mother for a lot longer than half an hour.

“Come on, little man. I’ve got someone who wants to see you and your brother.”

She must have brought Tuck and Maddie, then.

Hugo sniffled and wiped his eyes and nose with his sleeve, but then he got up and followed after them.

I headed in that direction, as well, but I stopped at the doorway and looked over my shoulder at Nicky and Elin. They hadn’t moved at all, other than Nicky having put one of his hands over Elin’s where she held on to her mother.

Brushing a tear from my eye, I left them alone and closed the door. Those two needed more time, and time was perhaps the only thing I knew how to give them.

THE REST OF
the day went by in a blur.

Rachel had helped me get Nicky and all the kids over to Nicky’s house, where Mia Quincey and Dana Zellinger had been overseeing things. A hot meal was waiting, although none of us were in much of a mood to eat. We did so more out of habit than desire, and then Tuck took the two boys off to help them settle in their new bedroom. Nicky’s house had enough bedrooms they could each have their own, but Emma had suggested having them share at least for now. Maddie did the same with little Elin soon afterward, although it was far more difficult to get Elin moving. She didn’t seem inclined to leave her uncle’s side if she could help it, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was because she wanted to be close to him, and how much was because she felt she needed to take care of him. Lord knew he looked like he needed to be taken care of—he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week—but it felt as though those two had their roles reversed.