The End Is Now

Your mother took me aside. Not that first day in the hospital—there was too much crying for that, all that weeping and rending of clothes by your bedside. It’s not natural for a mother to lose a son, she kept saying, like it isn’t the most natural thing in the world, like that isn’t what mothers do every day, like that isn’t why she hated me, no matter what you claimed. After the first day, before the week had ended, before I went home to pack a bigger suitcase for you, because we’d moved past duffel bags, into some new category of traveler, long-term visa to the kingdom of the sick, somewhere in there, she took me aside. You can’t handle this, she told me. You think you can, but you can’t. She thought because her husband was dead, she knew what it took to handle things, and she thought, because you called her sometimes to bitch about me never doing the dishes, and because once, the time you thought I was sleeping with the coffee guy, you made the mistake of telling her why I didn’t speak to my family anymore and why I never went to college and what I did that year in LA to pay the rent, because of everything you let her imagine, she thought she knew me.

She said you can’t handle this, and if you can’t handle this it’s better if you go now than later. I can handle this, she said, and what she was actually saying was he’s mine. You’re nothing and he’s mine. She probably never told you that, and so you never knew it was partly her fault. She made me weak. A witch, like I always said. She put a curse on me and it came to pass.

I am the girl who stays—except somehow, I left.

I left before you could leave me, and I did the same thing with the world, left it out there alone to die, locked myself up tight, huddled around a radio and listened to it burn.

I don’t think about all the millions of people who died. I think about you, and whether your hair fell out like they said it would, and how you looked without it. What we would have done to kill time while they pumped poison into your veins, whether it would have been Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, or if you finally would have guilted me into reading to you, even the crap poetry that you know I hate. How many more times would you have yelled at me for biting my cuticles? How many more times could I have crawled into your bed, snaked my hand around the wires and up your gown, massaged cold, veiny skin until you gasped thank you, yes, please, always polite, even in heat?

I will never leave you, Isaac said, and of course I’ve heard it before, but no one has ever meant it as much as he did. In this life and the next. You will never have to be alone. I promise.

He believes in his word. He believes in eternity. He won’t get bored or distracted. He won’t see the tohu va vohu at my center and realize I am a girl to be left, not loved. He will not leave. I believe he believes that, and I almost believe it’s true.

I promise forever, he said. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what we all want?

Love me forever if you love me at all—fairy tale love, fairy tale happily ever afters, that’s what he believes in, as he should, because he’s still a child.

That’s what I’ve believed in all these years, too. That’s what I’ve wanted, and now that a child wants me to have it, I’m thinking it may be time to grow up.

Because it turns out everybody leaves. And not all leavings are the same.

Not all endings are the same.

Not all endings come at the wrong time, and when they do, maybe it doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Maybe you leaving didn’t mean I wasn’t enough.

Maybe I should have waited for you to leave me, instead of leaving you first.

Sometimes I wonder, what if. What if there was a miracle. A remission. A cure. What if you sat up five minutes after I walked out of there, you tore the oxygen off your face, strength flooding through your veins, tumors shriveling. What if you called out my name but I was already gone.