that her mother didn’t hold it against her.
There was one time in the past when she had hurled the words “I hate you” at her mother. It was during the time in middle school when she railed against her baldness, fought against it, demanded a wig. In the back of a horse magazine she’d found an advertisement for a cure for baldness—it was targeted at men, of course—but it had jumped off the page as if it were meant just for her. The Orchid Cure was a product made from natural oils and plant extracts, marketed by an Indian doctor, Chandrasekhar. She stabbed the ad with her finger at the dinner table, as her mother serenely and silently watched.
“This is a hoax,” said her mother. “There is no cure.”
“You don’t know!” Sunny yelled, feeling overcome by a rush of heat in her face. “You don’t know what I have.”
“You need to calm down, dear. There’s no point in getting yourself crazy.”
“This is what I need,” Sunny insisted, thrusting the magazine across the table. “This is meant for me. Why won’t you let me try? I’ll pay for it with my own money.”
Her mother shook her head, wouldn’t get mad, wouldn’t argue. “It’s good to want things, Sunny,” she said. “It’s even good to need things.”
“I hate you!” Sunny had shouted. “I hate you!”
Then she had slammed out of the room, but not before hearing her mother say, “It’s even good to hate things.”
A nurse came into the room.
“Do you want me to call someone for you?” said the nurse.
“There’s no one to call,” said Sunny. “My mother is here, my father is dead, and my husband is in space.”
The nurse nodded consolingly. “I just have some paperwork for you to sign.”
“Are you going to do this right away?” asked Sunny.
“Yes,” said the nurse, as if it was obvious.
After the paperwork was signed, she took Bubber to the bathroom. She quietly threw up in the sink, which made Bubber angry, and then she cried some more. She was worried she would have a contraction. She knew that being pregnant and alone on the Earth, and being the mother of Bubber, she would have to be very mechanical about what was happening. She would have to write her name down where it was necessary, and make arrangements that were necessary. She would not be crying, crawling under the bed, walking off into the woods. She knew her mother would want her to do what she could to maintain her equilibrium. She was alone on the Earth, the whole entire Earth. No Maxon anywhere on the planet. A unique situation for her. He might as well have been temporarily dead. If Maxon were here he would do all of this for her and it wouldn’t even bother him a bit.
She imagined a box, a box into which she could pack everything that was happening to her and her mother, a box she could lock tightly and open later, or never. She knew she had to put in the wildness of death, and the emptiness of the last hours of life, and the fear of standing before the world without a mediator, because if she kept these things in her hands, she would not be able to keep living, driving, feeding her child, gestating her baby. So she invented the box. It could go under the bed, next to the box that contained her father’s death and all of that mystery. Then she could move to a new house, and buy a new bed.
When she got back from the bathroom, the nurse was all ready. There was not a lot to do, to kill the person in the bed, to stop keeping her living. The breathing machine had to be switched off, the tube removed from her mother’s throat. The doctor had told her, at another time, that taking the breathing tube out would definitely kill her. They had discussed this all before, when Sunny had been asleep under the wig. Back then, she had felt that the pressing issue was how to get the grass mowed at her mother’s house back in Pennsylvania. She had gone home to Maxon saying, She looks better. She’ll be home soon. The doctor had urged her. It would be quick, he had said. She hadn’t realized that it had been a really urgent situation this whole time.
“You should stand outside the window, where you can protect your boy. Turn his head away,” said the nurse. “Sometimes things happen.”
What things could happen? Would there be thrashing? Would the body fall off the bed? Would it dance around like a man on the end of a rope? Maybe she would need to run away, out through the hissing door, flying away into the universe. Sunny stepped outside the door, ready to just watch, but that was wrong. She knew she needed one more minute of the heart beating, the brain passing electricity through itself. One more minute before her mother died.
She went rushing back in, pushed the nurse out of the way, and grabbed her mother’s swollen hand.
“Mother,” she said, “listen.”
It might be the last thing she ever got to tell her mother. Her mother would never find out the resolution of the war, she would never know what happened on her favorite shows, she would not be aware if her neighborhood burned to the ground or if Sunny went to jail or if Maxon landed on the moon. She would not be aware if the baby was born or evaporated, wouldn’t even know that the baby was a girl. She would say no further words. The last thing Sunny could remember her mother saying to her was that she was a little afraid of her new maid. “There’s something wrong with her,” her mother had said, “and I can’t put my finger on it.”
“I lost my wig,” Sunny said, leaning down to put her mother’s hand on her head. “I took it off, and I’m not going to put it on anymore. I had to tell you that. I’m not going to put it on anymore.”
She felt the cold hand slipping around on her head, and there was no grip. There was no electricity. She laid the hand back down and nodded to the nurse. The nurse switched off the machines. Sunny clutched Bubber to her side, and looked over her shoulder. The crab-handed doctor was in the hall. Her mother was on the bed. The nurse removed the breathing tube and a throaty sound came out, like a machine that was grinding down to a stop. But her mother did not die at that very moment. The throat took in a breath and then another. Her mother kept on living. Sunny looked over her shoulder at the doctor. He shook his head. She felt the glass wall between them shatter, explode all over him, keep blowing out through the building, out into the world beyond, as if the room had erupted from the pressure of her packing away everything that was happening into a tight little padlocked box. The doctor shook his head and walked into the room. He took the pulse of her mother.
“She is holding on,” said the doctor.
“You’re kidding,” said Sunny.
“She won’t hold on for long,” said the doctor.
“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I have to go.”
The doctor gave her a withering glance.
Only Maxon could have understood what she was doing. It was as if there was a waterfall of glass, and only eating the glass would keep it from cutting the baby and Bubber, so she was eating the glass up as fast as she could. She couldn’t pause in her glass consumption to explain things to doctors. Her mother was holding on. For now, she was holding on. Her decision, not Sunny’s. Her choice. Maybe she would get better after all. Sunny packed the box, full and firm, and took Bubber by the hand.
“Kiss Grandma,” she said to Bubber. “We have to go.”
“But wait. We’ll have to move her to another room,” said the nurse. “She can’t stay in ICU now.”
“Fine, call me,” said Sunny. The weight of the whole hospital was resting on her lungs, crushing the baby. She had to leave. She had to walk her legs away, and take her children away. It was a point of motion. After a slingshot has been pulled back far enough, it has to be shot. It cannot stay there forever.
THE MOTHER WAS NOT dying. The mother was living. The mother was thinking. Inside the dark cocoon of her deathy body, there was thinking going on. Weightless, she maneuvered through her memory and what else was inside already. She stayed tethered, always, to a thread of pain and grief that kept on clutching her back into her arms and legs, into her torso where the tumor was eating away. But she remembered everything that she had ever seen. It was just a matter of dragging it up to the top, and shaking it out, and turning it over.
11
Sunny’s first memories were of Burma. When she was three years old, Sunny and her parents were sitting
