I stood there with a warm dish in my hands and let her finish, and then I went to the door, because I’d spent seven years assuming she’d simply stopped wanting me and I would rather have almost anything than another year of that. The woman inside was her sister. Renee opened the door and saw the cobbler in that dish and put her hand over her mouth and didn’t say anything for what felt like a full minute. My mother refused treatment in January 2016. Not couldn’t — wouldn’t. She’d been given a plan with reasonable odds and she said no, and she made Renee swear not to tell me, and Renee argued with her about it for eleven weeks and then did what she’d promised. Everything I was told that spring — the doctors trying everything, the decline nobody could stop — was a story two women built so that a twenty-six-year-old wouldn’t spend the rest of her life knowing her mother had chosen it.
Renee sat in her kitchen and told me she’d stopped answering because she couldn’t be in a room with me and hold it. She said every phone call was forty minutes of me talking about my mother in a way that wasn’t true, and she’d get off and be unable to breathe. She said disappearing felt like the only thing she could do that wasn’t a lie, and that she’d known exactly what it would cost me and had decided I’d survive it. Then she said she’d been wrong about that, and she’d known she was wrong by about 2018, and by then she couldn’t work out how to come back.
We’ve been talking since June. It’s not fixed and I’m not sure what fixed would even look like — some days I’m furious at my mother, which is a difficult thing to be at somebody who’s dead. But I know now why she was so calm that last month, and why she kept telling me to go back to work, and why she wanted the window open. Renee kept the dish all these years. It was in her cabinet the whole time, and when I handed her the cobbler she said she’d been waiting seven years to give it back and had never once believed she’d get the chance.
