“She’s toilet trained?” Cecily asked, as if she were suddenly remembering a script from decades ago.
“Of course. She won’t need to go, she’s a camel.”
And she was off, with only a couple more instructions, a quick hug for Nicolette—who stared at her two grandmothers with interest after her mother had left, but didn’t seem afraid in the slightest. She must have been used to sitters.
Fiona sat on one of the benches by the playground and unpacked the bag so Nicolette could see the crackers, the sippy cup of juice, the Pénélope books—a little mouse playing a color game at school in one, learning about seasons in the other. But Nicolette was content for now to do the slide, run up to the two women and grin while they clapped, circle back and do it all again. There was time yet to call her over, see if she’d sit on someone’s lap, if she’d speak to them in either English or French.
Cecily said, “She’s just so beautiful.”
That Fiona should double over crying at that precise moment made a kind of sense, absurd as it was; this was the first time Cecily had shown any real emotion at all, and so Fiona’s tear ducts seemed to have taken it as an invitation. She could feel Cecily staring at her with concern, and when she looked up she saw that Nicolette had stopped her circuit and was standing in front of her, her little eyebrows squinched together.
“Did you fall down?” she said in English so perfect and clear that Fiona could only cry harder.
“She’s fine, dear,” Cecily said. “She’s just a little sad about something.”
“What is she sad about?”
What a question. She managed to say, “I’m sad at the world.”
Nicolette looked around as if there were something wrong with the garden square.
She said, “My friend has a globe!”
Cecily said, “Don’t worry about it, honey. Fiona will be fine.” This was convincing enough for Nicolette, who was off again, making cat noises. Cecily put a hand on Fiona’s back.
Fiona said, “I sent away his mom.”
It was the thing she hadn’t let herself blurt out to Julian in Richard’s studio the other day, the thing she hadn’t let herself think about when she learned that Claire had been through labor without her, the thing that had been buzzing at a low vibration beneath her every thought about Claire since she’d disappeared, and before that as well. The thing she’d mentioned only once to her shrink, even then changing the story enough, downplaying it enough, that Elena had barely noticed the telling.
“I don’t understand.”
“Yale’s mom.”
“Okay. Yale? You did what?”
“I sent—at the very end. I was there, and you had to be in California.”
“Yes. Fiona, you can’t—”
“No, listen. You had to be in California, which wasn’t your fault, and I was pregnant with Claire.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. Okay, so I had power of attorney. And this was when he was—all the lung stuff was going on at the same time.”
“It was terrible,” Cecily said, more like she was affirming Fiona’s memory than reliving it herself. “I remember he could barely get two words out. And the indecipherable handwriting. It bothered me; his handwriting had always been so tidy. And he’d write those notes, and I couldn’t—”
“There were some better days too.” Fiona felt bad interrupting but she needed to get this out while she had momentum. “At the end, and maybe this was when you were gone, it seemed like the treatments were suddenly working for some of the lung stuff, and he could talk, he really could. But then his kidneys went, from all the drugs they were pumping in, and the fluids were building up—I can’t even remember, but then it was his heart. He drowned. I said that to the doctors and they said, no, that wasn’t quite it, but I know what I saw. He drowned.”
Cecily said, “You handled it all so beautifully. I can’t imagine what you went through, but it was the right decision, keeping him off the ventilator. It was what he wanted.”
Nicolette had quit the slide and was making a careful pile of small dried leaves. Fiona breathed in as deeply as she could, tried to start again. “I count it as two whole years,” she said, “that he was really sick.” Yale had first gotten pneumonia in the spring of 1990, after that stupid fucking cracked rib at the medical protest. It had cleared up, but not really; he had asthma to begin with, and so the pneumonia weakened him more than it otherwise would have. Another issue followed, and another, until he joked that his body was a nightclub for opportunistic infections, joked that he’d named his last remaining T cells after the Cubs’ lineup. “And then at the end—Okay.” She put her hands on her knees, arms stiff. “Four days before he died, his mother showed up at the hospital.”
Cecily’s face went still.
“I knew who she was, because she’d been in this Tylenol commercial, and every time it came on I’d stare at her face and try to figure her out. I guess his father—you remember his father came down a couple times, but he just kind of stood around and it was so awkward.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, he did, and Yale hadn’t thought he was really in contact with the mom, but apparently he was, or he figured out how to reach her, and she showed up. She was wearing this yellow sundress, and she looked so nervous. It was at night. He was asleep.”
Her expression had been so much like the one Yale made when he was anxious—a look that had always reminded Fiona of a rabbit. It might have made Fiona love this woman, just as she loved Yale, but instead she resented her even more. That one of her favorite things about Yale came from someone who’d abandoned him.
“And you sent her away.”
Fiona let out a sob that made Nicolette look up from her leaves. Her hair translucent in the sunlight.
“I wasn’t a mother yet, not really. I—all I could think was it might upset him to see her. But I was being possessive, too, I know that now. He was mine, and here this woman came, and I didn’t think about what she was going through. Or what it had taken for her to walk in there. I thought it would kill him. I thought he’d be so upset, and I imagined her messing up the treatment, trying to take charge the way my parents had with Nico. And I hated my own mother so much. I walked her to the elevator and I pressed the button for her, and I told her he’d specifically said he didn’t want to see her.”
“Was that true?”
“Yes, actually. Yes. It was one of the things we’d gone over. But I could have told him when he was awake. I could have asked what he wanted to do. And I never did. I was going to tell him. I kept being about to tell him.”