Chapter 32

• I know before I open my eyes that she’s gone. It isn’t the dream I had, nor the shrieking sobs of Amy close by. It is simply the emptiness in the room. The void that’s left. Like the room was sucked out by a huge vacuum and took something valuable.
• My whole body feels like it’s been beaten. I groan as I stand. The nurse removes the needles from my mother’s corpse. Amy is inconsolable. My heart feels worse than my body. The weight of it is suffocating. I no longer have any living parents. The one just died and the other is dead to me. I don’t walk toward the bed instead I walk out of the room. I need air.
• When I get to the garden it all reminds me of her. My mother tended to this garden with her own hands. When we moved into this house Amy and I were barely 3 years old. I remember flashes of this house being much bigger than it is now and struggling to get up the stairs. When we’d managed to toddle our way to the glass door that leads to the back of the house, we’d find our mother knee-deep in the dirt. She’d be planting from morning till night and I remember not understanding any of it, only that I’d wanted her to pick me up.