Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (3 page)

“Only, he didn't dump me, because we weren't going out or anything. He said we can't be friends anymore.”

Grandma Beans didn't say anything back, or give me a kiss, or squeeze my hand. She lay in her hospital bed, covered with a white sheet instead of a blue one, and she barely moved at all.

“He says it's because reporters are trying to stir up stuff about the Magnolia Feud, but that's ridiculous. The last time reporters bothered any of us was three years ago, when that tabloid guy tried to hit you up at the hardware store.” Late-afternoon sunlight played across my fingers as I rested my hand on her chest, really light, no pressure, to feel the up-and-down movement of her breathing.

“Everything okay, Dani?” Mom called from down the hall, as if she knew I was having dramatic thoughts.

“Yes,” I said. “Grandma looks fine.”

“Give her a kiss, then, and go eat your dinner. I'll feed her in a bit.”

“Okay.” But my hand didn't move, and my attention drifted to the room's open window. The curtains swayed in a
soft breeze. That window was always open, rain or shine, hot or cold, because way back when we all talked with Grandma about how she wanted things. “When the time came,” she told us, she wanted a lot of fresh air. Since then, we'd had to move her four-poster bed out and replace it with this hospital kind. It sat in the middle of the floor, along with the temporary cabinets Dad had built to hold sheets and incontinence pads and washcloths and wipes and medicine. We could have kept her regular furniture, but Grandma thought this way would be easier on us.

You're going to let me die at home. Least I can do is be considerate and not ruin the furniture.

Don't be silly, Mama.

I'm never silly, Marcus. That would be you, with your big ole grizzly bear head and that hippie beard.

Back when she remembered us every day, Grandma liked to laugh and pick at Dad and spend hours working on her latest paper while I played on the floor at her feet. My eyes darted to the few tables lining the walls, where we kept her papers even though she couldn't write anymore. Before Grandma got Alzheimer's disease, she taught elementary school for thirty years, then taught sociology and civil rights at the University of Mississippi—Ole Miss—for fifteen more. She wrote a lot of books and articles on stuff like
The Social Implications of the “Magical Negro” in Folk Tales
and
Whitewashing History
.

I tried to read a couple of them last year, but I had no idea what they meant. Mom said Grandma was a “fire-breather.” Dad said she was relentless. Grandma called herself a “jaded realist.” That was over a year ago, when she still talked plain and made sense. Now—well, now the times when Grandma still felt like Grandma didn't happen hardly ever.

Heavy sadness settled in my chest, and I blinked fast to keep from crying. No use thinking about Grandma when she could write and talk to me and hug me. That was just more drama. The papers blurred out, then came back into focus. I turned away from them and bent over and brushed my lips against Grandma's soft cheek. She smelled like baby oil, and she didn't have wrinkles like a lot of old people, even though she was so scrawny her skin should have hung on her like an oversized football jersey.

The hospice doctor had given us a booklet,
Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience
, written by Barbara Karnes, R.N. The booklet told all about what Grandma's dying would look like. But with dying, nothing was that certain.

When it's natural, people die on their own schedule,
the doctor told us.
To quote an old proverb, death always comes too early—or too late.

In the “One to Two Weeks Prior to Death” section, the booklet described a bunch of changes, like pulse getting faster or slower, sweating, trouble breathing and congestion. The hospice nurses had taught me how to check her pulse,
so I did it every day, and I looked for changes. This evening, Grandma's pulse was seventy-five, right where it usually was. I watched her breathe a few more times, and didn't hear any rattling. When I scooted my hand off her chest and touched her fingers, they were warm. For now, she was okay.

Sooner or later, Oops, we're all gonna be okay
. Grandma used to tell me that whenever I got upset. It always riled me up. Now, it made a weird sort of sense. Grandma's eyelids twitched as I pulled away, and she muttered, “Marcus?”

“It's me, Grandma. It's Oops. Dad's the giant guy with the beard to his chest.”

“Marcus,” Grandma muttered again.

Her clouded eyes opened, and she stared at the ceiling. Her knobby fingers worried the sheet pulled up to her chest, and she sighed. A tear leaked out of her eye.

My heart broke a little bit, and I kissed her cheek again. “Don't cry, Grandma. Dad's downstairs. I can get him if you want.”

This time as I pulled back, her head swiveled slowly in my direction. Her gaze stayed cloudy and far away, like she could see into a thousand worlds I didn't even know existed. After a few minutes, her lips pulled upward, and I knew she was smiling. Her next word came out garbled, but I could tell it started with an
ew
sound.

I grinned back at her even though I really, really felt like crying instead. “That's right. It's me. Your little Oops. I love you, Grandma.”

Her right hand shook as she tried to lift it. I picked it up for her and I put it on my face, along the side, where she had always patted me. She kept smiling for a second, then another tear slipped out of her eye and plopped down on her pillowcase.

She started whispering, and I had to lean in close to hear her say, “I'm gone, Oops. I'm all gone.”

I kept my ear right in front of her lips. “No, you're right here, in the house with me. With us.”

“Gone,” she muttered, and her eyes closed, but her face looked like she'd swallowed a mouthful of lemon juice. I knew that face. She was upset, and I hated that.

I leaned closer. “Can I do something for you?”

“Get the envelope,” she told me. “Take the key. It's for you when I'm gone. I'm gone, Oops.”

Envelope? Key? What was she— Probably nothing. “You're not gone. Everything's okay, Grandma.”

Grandma turned her head side to side until I stepped away from the bed again. I didn't want her to stay upset or get so worked up she had to have medicine.

“I was there,” Grandma said. She coughed. “You get that stuff out of my bag, you hear me? Get the key. I gave it to history. I let the ghosts keep it for you.”

“Dani.” Mom's voice came from the bedroom doorway, sharp enough to make me twitch. “I told you to go eat your dinner.”

“Sorry, but Grandma's upset about something. She's talking.”

Grandma stirred in the bed, more than I had seen her move in days.

“It's time I tell you. It's time I tell her.” She let out a little sob. “I'm gone.”

When I glanced at Mom, she looked surprised. After a few seconds, she murmured, “Go on now. Eat.”

My first urge was to argue with Mom that I wanted to stay and listen. When hospice first came in, they suggested staying in the moment, going from feeling to feeling and memory to memory with Grandma. They talked about how she might have things to resolve, and how we should help her.

I was there . . . get the key. It's time I tell her. It's time I tell you.

That sounded like something to resolve. But what did it mean? Something about an envelope and key in her bag—she probably meant one of the purses hanging in her closet, but those were her private property. We didn't go into her bags and things, even now, and didn't plan to, not until she really was gone.

Grandma told me to, though. She said to get an envelope and a key from her bag.

“Time to eat, Dani,” Mom said. “Before your lettuce wilts and you get a mind to go for macaroni and cheese instead of something healthier.”

As Grandma calmed back into silence, Dad loomed in the doorway and came to stand beside Mom. He was made out of muscles from years in the Army and all of his gardening, and he had on his black T-shirt and his work-in-the-yard jeans. Sweat glistened on his forehead, from when he was outside earlier.

He looked at his mother, then Mom, and then Dad's eyes fastened on mine. He could probably see how much I wanted to stay, and he shook his head once.

Close that mouth,
the head-shake told me. And,
Your mom is stressed enough,
and,
Don't worry, I got this.

To Mom, he said, “Love you, Cella,” and kissed the side of her head.

Mom relaxed into Dad's kiss, and that fast, I found myself smiling. It was the first time since the cornhole tournament that I'd felt a little happy. Grandma was completely peaceful again, the house quiet except for the sound of everyone's breathing.

As I left the bedroom, I went past the table where some of Grandma's papers lay waiting, with a heavy miniature Liberty Bell weight holding them down so they wouldn't blow around if some of Grandma's fresh air got frisky.

I'm gone, Oops.

My hand was still on the knob of Grandma's bedroom door.

Gone.

I used to think
gone
meant
dead
, but that was before I understood there were sicknesses like Alzheimer's disease
that could eat away a person's mind but leave their body behind.

So what did gone
really
mean?

“Mom told you to go eat,” I muttered out loud, to get my own attention. Everything inside me wanted to go to Grandma's closet and go through her bags. Instead, I went downstairs like I was supposed to. I even sat down and took bites of my salad, tasting nothing much as I crunched away on the greens, which had gotten kind of soggy after all.

But mostly I thought about Grandma's closet and her bags.

It's for you when I'm gone.

“Just talking out of her head,” I mumbled to myself. I ate more limp healthy organic salad, but when I tried not to think about the purses and what might be in them, I thought about Mac. Five minutes of that was absolutely enough, so I got up and fetched the gigantic
Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language
Mom kept in the living room and lugged it to the kitchen.

Surprise, surprise.
Dead
was like, the fifth definition of the word
gone
. Before that came “past participle of
go
; departed, left; lost or hopeless;” and “ruined.”

Wow. By that definition, Grandma
was
sort of gone already, and she
did
say it herself.

“I'm gone, Oops,” I repeated her words aloud, to the few pieces of tough broccoli and cauliflower left in my bowl. My grandmother with all of her quote games and world-changing books, and the Magnolia Feud, and the weird thing she said
about writing something down, and whatever was in her purses that she left for me for when she was gone—whatever
gone
really meant—and a disease that robbed her of the ability to explain it all to me—yep. It was a big ole mystery.

I just had to figure out where to start to solve it.

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 23

Nothing matters but breathing, to be alive. My father forgot about that one rainy September day, when he and his crew pulled up too much wet tobacco during the big harvest. He was drenched from his hat to his shoes when he got home, and fell down drooling and sweating and throwing up. He died before Mama could bring the lady from down the road, who knew about cures and plant medicine. Two men on Daddy's crew died the same way before the night ran out, even with the Granny Woman's help.

Green Tobacco Sickness.

If the farmer had waited a day or two, until the leaves got dry, they'd all still be alive—but that would have cost him plants, and cost him money. More than
my father was worth, I guess. More than all those lives. Work, or get fired and get no pay, and let your family starve.

It wasn't even casual cruelty. That's maybe the worst part, thinking back on it now. Not meanness, or spite, or the darkness of human nature.

It was just life in Mississippi, holding hands with Jim Crow.

W
HEN
I
WAS SURE
I had eaten enough salad and organically raised cage-free boiled chicken eggs to please Mom and Dad both, I cleaned up after myself and lugged the dictionary back to its table in the living room, and went upstairs. I wanted to talk to Indri.

I checked my charging phone, but I had no all-clear text from her, which meant she hadn't spoken to her dad yet. He was serving in Afghanistan, and they barely got any time to speak at all, so I couldn't tie up her line. She was still off limits, like Worm Dung and Grandma's purses, only Worm Dung wasn't here, and the purses were in a closet right next to my room.

After a few minutes of staring at the wall and trying to ignore the purses' existence, I changed Worm Dung's ring and text tones and unfriended him on every social media account I owned. That felt pretty good. Except none of that made the purses go away. I went over to the little refurbished school desk in the corner of my room, lifted the lid, and took
out a book I hadn't started. The cover was cream-colored with a picture of a witch riding a unicorn on the front. She was supposed to be a good witch, I guess, because of the unicorn and her glittery golden dress.

I tried to read a few pages, but I couldn't concentrate. I put back the book and paced up and down across the open part of my room, in front of the windows, going from my closet door past my rocking chairs to my long dresser, the one with my socks in it. Maybe Grandma wrote me a story, and that's what I'd find in one of her bags, hidden deep in her closet. I'd probably regret it if I read it now.