“Grammy’s cough is bleeding again,” MJ said.

Leni pulled a tissue from the box by her mother’s bed and leaned close to dab the blood from her mother’s face. “Give Grammy’s hand a kiss and go, MJ. Grandpop has a new model airplane for you guys to put together.”

Mama’s hand fluttered up from the bed. The whole back of her hand was bruised from IVs.

MJ leaned close, banging the bed so hard it jostled her mother, clanging a knee into the oxygen tank. He kissed the bruised hand carefully.

When he was gone, Mama sighed, lay back into the pillows. “The kid is a bull moose. You should get him into ballet or gymnastics.” Her voice was almost too quiet to hear. Leni had to lean close.

“Yeah,” Leni said. “How are you?”

“I’m tired, baby girl.”

“I know.”

“I’m so tired, but … I can’t leave you. I … can’t. I don’t know how. You are it for me, you know. The great love of my life.”

“Peas in a pod,” Leni whispered.

“Two of a kind.” Mama coughed. “The thought of you being alone, without me…”

Leni leaned down, kissed her mother’s soft forehead. She knew what she had to say now, what her mother needed. One always knew when to be strong for the other. “I’m okay, Mama. I know you’ll be with me.”

“Always,” Mama whispered, her voice barely heard. She reached up, her hand shaking, and touched Leni’s cheek. Her skin was cold. The effort it took for that single motion was evident.

“You can go,” Leni whispered.

Mama sighed deeply. In the sound, Leni heard how long and how hard her mother had been fighting this moment. Mama’s hand fell from Leni’s face, thumped to the bed. It opened like a flower, revealing a bloody wad of tissue. “Ah, Leni … you’re the love of my life … I worry…”

“I’ll be okay,” Leni lied. Tears slid down her cheeks. “I love you, Mama.”

Don’t go, Mama. I can’t be in the world without you.

Mama’s eyelids fluttered shut. “Loved … you … my baby girl.”

Leni could barely hear those last, whispered words. She felt her mother’s last breath as deeply as if she’d drawn it herself.

TWENTY-NINE

“She wanted you to have this.”

Grandma stood in the open doorway to Leni’s old bedroom, dressed in all black. She managed to make mourning look elegant. It was the kind of thing that Mama would have made fun of long ago—she would have looked down on a woman concerned with appearances. But Leni knew that sometimes you grabbed hold of whatever you could to stay afloat. And maybe all that black was a shield, a way to say to people: Don’t talk to me, don’t approach me, don’t ask your ordinary, everyday questions when my world has exploded.

Leni, on the other hand, looked like something washed up by the tide. In the twenty-four hours since her mother’s death, she hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth or changed her clothes. All she did was sit in her room, behind a closed door. She would make an effort at two, when she had to go pick up MJ from school. In his absence, she swam alone in her loss.

She pushed the covers back. Moving slowly, as if her muscles had changed in the absence of her mother, she crossed the room and took the box from her grandmother, said, “Thank you.”

They looked at each other, mirrors of grief. Then, saying nothing more—what good were words?—Grandma turned and walked down the hall, stiffly upright. If Leni didn’t know her, she’d say Grandma was a rock, a woman in perfect control, but Leni did know her. At the stairs, Grandma paused, missed a step; her hand clutched at the banister. Grandpa came out of his office, appearing when she needed him, to offer an arm.

The two of them, heads bowed together, were a portrait of pain.

Leni hated that there was nothing she could do to help. How could three drowning people save each other?

Leni went back to bed. Climbing in, she pulled the rosewood box into her lap. She’d seen it before, of course. Once, it had held their playing cards.

Whoever had made this box had sanded it until the surface felt more like glass than wood. It was a souvenir, maybe from the road trip they’d taken a lifetime ago, when they’d lived in a trailer and driven all the way to Tijuana. Leni was too young to remember the trip—before Vietnam—but she’d heard her parents talk about it.

Leni took a deep breath and opened the lid. Inside, she saw a tangle of things. A cheap silver charm bracelet, a set of keys on a ring that read Keep On Truckin’, a pink scallop shell, a beaded suede coin purse, a set of playing cards, a Native tusk carving of an Eskimo holding a spear.

She picked up the items one by one, trying to put them in the context of what she knew of her mother’s life. The charm bracelet looked like the gift one girl would give another in high school and reminded Leni of all the missing pieces in her mother’s life. Questions Leni had failed to ask; stories Mama hadn’t had time to share. All of it lost now. The keys Leni recognized—they were to the house they’d rented on the cul-de-sac outside Seattle all those years ago. The scallop shell showed her mother’s love for beachcombing, and the suede purse probably came from one of the reservation gift shops.

There was a SALTY DAWG shot glass. A piece of driftwood, into which had been carved Cora and Ernt, 1973. Three white agates. A photograph of her parents’ wedding day, taken at the courthouse. In it, Mama was smiling brightly, wearing a tea-length white dress with a bell-shaped skirt and holding a single white rose in white-gloved hands; Dad was holding her close, his smile a little stiff, dressed in a black suit and narrow tie. They looked like a couple of kids playing dress-up.

The next photograph was of the VW bus with their boxes and suitcases lashed on top. The door was open and you could see all of their junk piled inside. It had been taken only a few days before they headed north.

The three of them stood beside the bus. Mama was wearing elephant-bell jeans and a midriff-baring top. Her blond hair had been twined into pigtails and a beaded headband encircled her head. Dad wore pale blue polyester pants and a matching shirt with oversized collar points. Leni was in front of her parents, wearing a red dress with a white Peter Pan collar and Keds. Each of her parents had a hand on one of her shoulders.