Nothing More to Say

The plate glass window leaned against my head, cool, immov-able, flattening out the skin of my brow, while fifty feet away our mother lay dying of cancer. Inside she lay dying, and outside the sky unfurled beyond the glass, beautiful and serene and perfect and ceaseless. The sun had only just set, and the sky was still blue almost everywhere. It reddened around the lip of the horizon, swelling out orangey and yolk-yellow farther up, and then a delicate watercolor green that faded out into the tender blue. A wide, wide rainbow diving head first off the edge of the Earth. I saw it through the spotless glass as clearly as if it were right there, as if I were in it.

"Excuse me," said somebody. I didn't turn, and let them say it again. "Excuse me."

I looked around and saw a nurse staring at me with an awful, plasticky melancholy on his face. I didn't know if I'd seen this particular nurse before. "Your mother wants to talk to you," he said, wincing apologetically, for some reason.

I saw when I entered the room that my mother did want to talk to me, because her eyes grew for a moment when she saw me, and then shrank again, smaller than before. I stayed watching them as I shuffled over to her bedside, but they weren't watching me, or couldn't.

"Lily-" she said. "Lily- Lily-" Her voice strained, reaching up at something and not finding it. I watched her swiveling, skittish eyes, silty and shallow, drained. "Lily," she said.

She said more, but I didn't hear it, or didn't listen, but didn't hear it, anyway, and didn't write it down. I sat there and knew I should write it down, and should have, and didn't. I heard snags of words, but a big, flat sound filled my head and the room, and the words caught in the dense tar of the sound. And I saw her death, but did not hear it, through the tar.

In the hallway I called Michael and did not cry and saw the sky beyond the plate glass window, dead purple now. Michael didn't pick up. I walked up and down the hallway and thumbed through a magazine I couldn't read and felt something at my center sucking in everything around it, out to the edges of my being.

I called Michael again. This time he picked up. "Hey there," he said. "How's Mom looking?"

I told him.

"Ah shit," he said. "Ah shit, Lily, I'm sorry." I could smell him through the phone, smoky and overwhelming, and I could see him standing there, too, with his shirt untucked and his nose dripping a little and his skin the color of cigarette ash beneath his eyes.

"Thanks," I said. "I'm sorry, too, Mike."

"Sorry?" he said, his voice straightening out. "You don't gotta be sorry for me on account of nothing."

"Ah, well."

"But it's real tough, Lily," he said, voice slouching again, "I'm sorry."

"So am I." And I sort of was.

He coughed, the way she used to cough. "Say, when's the funeral gonna be?"

"What?"

"When's the funeral?"

"I don't know. Next month, I guess."

"Sure."

The phone felt wintry cold in my hand, but maybe it was my hand that was freezing.

"Will you come?"

"Will I- 'course I'll come, Lily."

"Good." I looked at the night through the window. It wasn't night for him yet, I knew.

"She was a heckuva woman, wasn't she?"

"She-yeah, she sure was, Mike."

"Heckuva woman. But, y'know, goddamn."

"Sure." My mouth felt dry and sticky all at once. "Hey, Mike, by the way, I wanted to"

"I'll see you there, all right?"

"What's that?"

"At the funeral. See you there, all right?"

"Yeah, all right, I guess. But, Michael-"

"Love ya, Lily."

"I love you, Michael."

He was gone again. I stared out the window at the fragments of glinting white and yellow jutting through the glass and iron of the city and wished in vain that one of them, any of them, was worth looking at.

Griffin Bonnin Jones