Started With a Lie

Chapter Forty

        Brent is silent for a while. “I guess.”

        “Yeah?”

        “Yeah,” he confirms. “Yeah, do it. If anything goes wrong, just give me a call.”

        “I hope it won’t,” I reply, “but thanks. I’ll call you later? I have work soon.”

        “Okay, sounds good. B—” The line disconnects and I roll my eyes. I didn’t even get to say goodbye because of course, Brent is like that. I miss him yet I want to choke him at the same time.

        For a while, I just sit and readjust the blankets on Mom. I make sure they’re not too heavy so she has trouble breathing and not too light that she gets chilly from the air conditioning. Not that I can tell. I can’t tell anything. She hasn’t moved in, well, forever. I hate thinking like that but it’s true. From the moment I saw her on this bed to now, she’s been the same.

        I lean over and brush her hair over and away from her face. I’m sure she’s changing but I’ve been visiting so frequently—to get in as much time as possible before school—that I haven’t noticed. Her hair is probably longer, her skin older. The nurses do their best to wash and bathe her and I thank them for that. But the fact my mother can’t do it herself makes me remember how much I hate this. My mother was—is a strong woman. My role model.  

        Dwelling on thoughts only depress me so I stay away from the fact that my mother is in a coma. I fill my thoughts with the future. She’ll wake up soon. I know she will. We’re both strong women. She’ll wake up and she’ll be so happy and proud I’m already in college. I’ll tell her about how she’s missed nothing—that prom and graduation weren’t even fun—and we can continue our merry way. I’ll tell her about a certain boy and our two separate worlds. Our story. Our ending. And then she’ll hold me in her arms while I cry over my first actual relationship but it’s okay because I’ll have my mother and a lifetime for boys.

        Right?

        My hand slips into her left one. My fingers trail her veins and the slight wrinkles on the back of her palm. The hands that raised me and fed me and worked for me. The hands that created beauty and art with whatever, whomever, and wherever she was. She was—is—magic. She’s my mother.

        “I love you, Mom,” I tell her because I don’t tell her enough. I give her hand a kiss and hold it tight. I’m just glad she’s alive and here with me. I’m grateful. “I love you so much.”

        Suddenly, something happens and I’m fifty percent sure I’m hallucinating from the endless nights of overthinking and missing a certain boy but then I snap out of it because the other half of me is sure it happened.

        My mother grips my hand back.

        She doesn’t grip it back hardly nor intensely but as if she’d been giving me a comforting squeeze. The kind she gave me the first day of high school after she’d dropped me off. I know my mother’s comfort grips better than I know myself. She can hear me. She can.

        I jump out of my chair. “Mom? Mom, can you hear me?”

        Her eyes remain closed and her body is still. I don’t know what I’m expecting. Her to just snap straight up and say, “Yes, Ivory, I can hear you! I’m awake now! I officially quit being a coma patient! Let’s go grab some food now!”? But that little feeling in me doesn’t go away.

        Her breathing hasn’t changed. Her monitor hasn’t beeped. She’s exactly the same as before but what I felt—her hand holding mine back—that’s enough to send me running to get a doctor. It’s hope. It’s a chance.