Удушье (Choke)

Paige leans over and breathes into my mom. She stands again. She breathes into my mom's mouth again, and each time she stands there's more brown pudding smeared around Paige's mouth. More chocolate. The smell is everything we breathe.

Still holding a cup of pudding in one hand and the spoon in the other, I say, 'It's okay. I can do this. Just like with Lazarus,' I say. 'I've done this before.'

And I spread my hands open against her heaving chest.

I say, 'Ida Mancini. I command you to live.'

Paige looks up at me between breaths, her face smeared with brown. She says, 'There's been a little misunderstanding.'

And I say, 'Ida Mancini, you are whole and well.'

Paige leans over the bed and spreads her hands next to mine. She presses with all her strength, again and again and again. Heart massage.

And I say, 'That's really not necessary.' I say, 'I am the Christ.'

And Paige whispers, 'Breathe! Breathe, damn it!'

And from somewhere higher up on Paige's forearm, some­where tucked high up her sleeve, a plastic patient bracelet falls down to around Paige's hand.

It's then all the heaving, the flopping, the clawing and gasp­ing, everything, it's right then when everything stops.

'Widower' isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Chapter 44

My mother's dead.

My mom's dead, and Paige Marshall is a lunatic.

Everything she told me she made up. Including the idea that I'm, oh I can't even say it: Him. Including that she loves me.

Okay, likes me.

Including that I'm a natural-born nice person. I'm not.

And if motherhood is the new God, the only thing sacred we have left, then I've killed God.

It's jamais vu. The French opposite of deja vu where every­body is a stranger no matter how well you think you know them.

Me, all I can do is go to work and stagger around Colonial Dunsboro, reliving the past again and again in my mind. Smelling the chocolate pudding smeared on my fingers. I'm stuck in the moment when my morn's heart stopped heaving and the sealed plastic bracelet proved Paige was an inmate. Paige, not my mom, was the deluded one.

I was the deluded one.

At that moment, Paige looked up from the chocolate mess smeared all over the bed. She looked at me and said, 'Run. Go. Just get out.'

See also: 'The Blue Danube Waltz.'

Staring at her bracelet was everything I could do.

Paige came around the bed to grab my arm and said, 'Let them think I did this.' She dragged me to the doorway, saying, 'Let them think she did it to herself.' She looked up and down the hallway and said, 'I'll wipe your prints off the spoon and put it in her hand. I'll tell people you left the pudding with her yes­ terday.'