“Will you be okay now that I said it?” the boy asked.
“Why you cryin’, honey?”
“Because you’re sick and I don’t want you to die.”
Branwyn sat up. Thomas crawled up close to her and leaned against her slender shoulder.
“Are you scared ’cause I’m goin’ to the hospital?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s only for some tests,” she said. “Will you do what Dr. Nolan tells you while I’m gone?”
“Yes.”
“And do you know that I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not gonna die, baby. I’m gonna go in there and stay for a day or two and then I’ll be back here and wide awake.”
“But sometimes people die in the hospital,” he insisted.
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “But even when they do they don’t really die.”
“What happens to’em?”
“They just change. They’re still here in the hearts of all the people that loved them. Your grandmother says that she talks to granddaddy every night before she goes to bed. He’s still there for her whenever she gets sad.
“But you don’t have to worry about that. I’m still strong and healthy. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. You know that, right?”
“I guess.”
“Come here and lie down next to me,” she said. “Sleep with me in the bed tonight.”
And Thomas nestled up next to his mother, and they whispered secrets and little jokes until he finally fell asleep in her arms.
The next morning Thomas went to wake up Minas Nolan in his bed.
“Mama won’t wake up,” he told his mother’s lover. “But she said that it’s okay ’cause nobody never dies.”
3
Ahn set up a cot in Eric’s room for Thomas — not for the sake of Branwyn’s son but for the doctor’s boy. Eric was desolate over the death of the woman who was the only mother he ever knew. He understood that she was sick, but he never thought about her dying. Thomas, on the other hand, thought about death all the time. The dead bugs and small animals that he’d find in the garden fascinated him. And his many months of isolation in the intensive care unit had often been the topic of conversation between him and his mother.
“What would have happened if Dr. Nolan didn’t say for you to take me out of there?” he’d ask.
“Then you would have stayed small and gotten smaller,” Branwyn told him. “And if you stayed long enough you would have probably died.”
“And then would you come to the cemetery to visit me?”
“Every day for my whole life.”
At night Eric sobbed in his bed, and Thomas would come sit next to him and tell him stories about their mother.
“She was always talking about having a small house near the desert where we could grow watermelons and strawberries,” Thomas said.
“Just you and me and her?” Eric asked.
“Uh-huh,” Thomas replied. “And Dr. Nolan too. And maybe Ahn if we were still little.”
“How come you don’t call Daddy ‘Daddy,’ Tommy?”
“Because I have a father, and he’d be sad if I called another man that.”
“Are you gonna go live with your father now that Mama Branwyn’s dead?”
Thomas had never thought of this before. Would they make him go live with the man that taught him the riddle? He didn’t want to go. And he couldn’t see why they’d make him if he just said that he wanted to stay with his brother and Dr. Nolan and Ahn.
“I sure miss Mama Branwyn,” Eric said.
Thomas put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“She’s not gone away... just in her body, she is. But she’s still in the world lookin’ at us and smilin’.”
The funeral was three days later.
By then Eric had recovered from his deep sadness. Thomas sat up with him every night telling him all the things about Branwyn he never knew, or at least never paid attention to.
Eric was a strong boy filled with energy. He loved roughhouse games and running, and though he could be very sad for short periods, he always came back laughing and running hard. So when he woke up on the morning of the funeral, he was happy again, with Branwyn’s death behind him. He told Thomas that he didn’t need him to sleep in his room anymore. He helped his diminutive pretend sibling carry the cot back to the attic where Ahn had gotten it.
When Thomas went back to his bedroom, he realized that something was different. It was as if there was a film over his eyes that made everything just the slightest bit darker, like a lightbulb dimming when lightning strikes outside or a cloud coming close to the sun but not enough to make real shadows.
Thomas tried to look hard at things around him, to make them shine as they had done only a few days before, but the luster was gone. He sat down on the floor in the center of his room, looking around at the new world he inhabited. He tried to remember how things had looked before, but slowly the memories of the glitter he’d always taken for granted dissipated and all that was left was what he could see.
After a while he forgot what he was looking for. When he tried to remember why it was that he sat there, he thought of what his mother had told him: I will always be with you through rain and shine, thick and thin. And he thought that he was waiting for his mother to tell him more.
Sitting there on his knees on the floor, Thomas felt the world settling around him. It was completely still, but he knew that over time all things got heavier and sank into one another until they became one thing rather than many. He didn’t remember where he’d learned that — whether it was from Dr. Nolan or big Ira Fontanot, his mother’s friend. But he knew that it was true and that if he sat in that room long enough, his knees would bond with the floor and he’d know everything that happened in the house. And the house would become part of the ground, and he and the house would be a part of the whole world. Once this happened he would be joined with everything, and then he would know where his mother was and they could talk again.
So Thomas closed his dimmed eyes and waited for his knees to become one with the floor. He heard the wind rattle a loose pane of glass in the window and, every now and then, the hard thumps of feet through the wood. Dr. Nolan’s measured pace was continual as he moved around on the distant first floor. Ahn’s tapping footsteps could often be heard. The loudest footfalls were Eric’s. He would run hard and then stop and maybe leap, landing with a loud thud that shook the house, if only slightly. Thomas felt that he was already becoming a part of everything. He raised his head, expecting his mother to appear to him at any moment. Then came a quick tapping and the whine of his door opening.
“Tommy,” Ahn said in her clipped voice. “You not ready.”
He opened his eyes and saw her. He wanted to explain that things were not the same and that he was trying to find his mother in the wide world. But he didn’t have the words or the heart to try.
“Get up,” she said. “Put on your clothes. We have to go say good-bye to your mother.”
The nanny was wearing a one-piece black dress that buttoned down the front and went all the way to her feet. She had a boy’s figure and was very short, though still taller than Thomas.
“Hurry, hurry,” the nanny said.
“Did your mommy die one day, Ahn?” Thomas asked, not moving from his place on the floor.
There was a long black shawl hanging from Ahn’s toothpick-thin shoulders. She came up next to the boy and descended to her knees. She put her arms around him and hugged him to her bony chest. After a while Thomas could feel her body shivering, and he knew that she was crying for his mother.
“I was born in a war, Tommy,” she whispered to him. “I remember being a child. I was very frightened, and we were running down a dirt road. It was my mother and father and older brother, Xi’an. There were big bombs falling, and everywhere they fell fire went up like dragons in a child’s storybook. And we ran and ran, and I wondered, even when I was running, where was I coming from? Where was I going?