Page 63 of Goode Vibrations

“What—” I didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to know—it was a weight I didn’t want. The intimate knowledge of his pain was a burden I’d been avoiding. “What happened when you were twelve?”

“Mum got sick.”

My throat closed, my heart skipped a beat, dropped out of my chest. “Oh, Errol.”

He stood with his hands in his hair, elbows facing out, head tipped back to watch the stars in their slow wheeling dance. “I found her in her studio one afternoon, after school. On the floor, paint all over the place, in a pool of vomit. She’d been going to chemo while I was at school. For fuckin’months. She’d been dying for fucking months, Poppy. And she never fucking told me. Until it got too bad, until the chemo was killing her as fast as the cancer was.”

Hot lump in my throat, burning eyes. “God.”

“He wasn’t in it,” he muttered in response to my epithet. Bitter. Furious. Aching with old pain. “She hadn’t told Dad either. Made me promise not to tell him.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “Fuck if I know. Some weird thing they had, I guess. Same reason she ignored the…finer details…of his life on the road. She loved him, he loved her, and they both loved me. But it was…just fucked up, I guess.” He sucked in a breath through his teeth, summoning the courage to tell more. “I took care of her. She’d lost weight and I’d got bigger, so I could and did carry her around. Couch to bed. Bed to bathroom. Helped her bathe. Helped her onto the toilet. Fed her. I used to brush her hair. She loved that. She’d make me brush her hair till my arm hurt.

“Then the money started to run out, and…and she was out of it by then. Out of it from the pain. She’d stopped chemo, refused treatment. I never got up the sac to ask what kind of cancer it was, and don’t care to know, now. Aggressive, killing cancer is all I know. She was going to die and she knew it, fought it for a while to try and keep things in some semblance of the shitty normal I knew, but then it just became obvious death was…the only possible outcome, and soon. So, when she started to pass out from the pain, when money to buy food and all ran out, I had to call Dad. I never even—I never even knew she had a way to call him. Figured he just showed up when he felt like it, and they never talked during his tour. Turns out, they had a system in place. He’d send her postcards with his next location, and a hotel phone number, in case of emergencies.”

“She never called him?” I asked.

“Not in front of me, no.” He walked into the water, knee-deep; I waded in after him, and the bottom was squishy, muddy, soft, cool, and the water was blood-warm.

“Did he come back?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

He glanced at me, and the moon was the only light but for the dull orange flicker of the low fire behind us. The moon’s silvering shine was brighter, though, washing the lake and our skin and his hair till everything seemed to bloom silver, the color of melted mirrors.

“How long what?” he asked.

“How long did she…last?”

“Six months.” He swallowed, ducked his head. I didn’t dare look at him for fear of seeing tears, seeing pain too deep to put into human expression; another weight I was reticent to pick up. “Six months from finding her on the floor of her studio to the moment I watched her breathe her last.”

“When did your dad show up?”

“Two months before. I took care of her alone for four months.”

“Fucking god, Errol. You weretwelve.”

“She was my mom,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “I would sit on the bed next to her and read to her. Her favorite was Nora Roberts. I read so many books to her. Books a twelve-year-old boy had no business reading, but she was too weak to even hold the book at that point.”

“You dropped out of school?”

He nodded. “It didn’t seem to matter, and she needed me. People would come by asking about me not going to school, but I always managed to talk them around to buggering off and leaving us be. Mom just wanted to die in peace, and I wasn’t about to leave her alone for something so stupid as fuckingschool.”

“Then your dad showed up.”

“Yeah. Dad.” He kicked at the water gently, sending circling ripples skimming across the glassy lake. “He was fucking useless. Didn’t know how to understand her dying. He paid bills. Took care of her…estate, I guess you call it. Sold off her paint stuff, put the house up for sale, whatever other stuff a kid my age had no understanding of. Stayed gone, couldn’t help her to the bathroom. He’d sit with her late at night, in the mornings. Talk to her, play for her. The fiddle was his instrument, but he played guitar and sang too, and he’d sing her these old French folk songs.”

Crickets chirped, a frog croaked; a night bird sang.

“We both knew the end was close. She was passed out most of the time, thankfully. When she was awake, she was in…just…just unutterable fucking agony. Unbearable to watch, not a damn thing we could do. She refused to go to the hospital. They’d drug her up and for some reason she wanted to…toknowwhen the end came. She made Dad leave. He threw a fit, but he left. She told me to find what was beautiful in the world.” He swallowed. “‘Find what’s beautiful in this world, Errol. Make art out of the beautiful. Be the beautiful. There’s beauty out there, Errol. Find it. Play it as music, paint it, photograph it, write about it, dance about it, whatever it is. You have art inside you, Errol. I see it in you.’” He quoted her words with a soft, quiet inflection to his voice. “‘Just don’t let it consume you like it did me.’”

“What did that mean?” I asked.

I could feel the weight of his pain gathering in me, felt myself taking it up.