Death and Other Interruptions

Chapter Twenty-Two

My mother woke me up the next Sunday with a pair of tickets in her hand. She never woke me up anymore, and I peered at her grumpily through my grogginess.

"Whazza?" I asked, feeling the first waves of morning sickness roll over me. I'd been finding that avoiding morning altogether by sleeping through it helped me circumvent the nastiest bits of morning sickness, and I did not appreciate this 9 AM arousal.

"Good morning, sleeping beauty. It's nice to see you too."

"Mnhmph," I grunted. "It's too early to be nice."

"I suppose that's fair. So, I've been talking with your sister," she said, and settled on the rocking horse pushed up against my wall. "You can of course turn it down, but she and I agree that you need to get away. I rented you a beach house an hour away from here. Don't feel pressured to go, but...I thought it might do you some good to spend time on your own. I'm not kicking you out. It's just an idea." She stopped abruptly, as if realizing she was starting to babble.

I heaved myself up into a seated position, pushing my pillow-matted hair out of my face.

Swallowing back the nausea in gulps before speaking, I eventually asked, "What are the tickets for?"

Mom grinned sheepishly. "Nothing, really. They're just for dramatic effect." She showed me the tickets, two old movie theater stubs for The Great Gatsby. She shrugged. "I thought they would add some flair."

"You're serious, though?" I asked, finally awake enough to process everything she said.

"Only for a week," she cautioned. "I checked your calendar and you don't have any doctor's appointments this week. I know you'd miss group, but I don't know, I thought this might be good for you."

I hadn't gone to group the previous week either, but she didn't know that. I fought with myself ever since waking up with a crying hangover after the night with Ethan. On the one hand, I would feel better when I was with him, and I would definitely feel better after going through another session of group. On the other hand...I couldn't take another night of self-recrimination, of the pure pain of missing Al combining with the lethal force of my own guilt. In the end, I had driven to group late, then sat in my car in the parking lot debating with myself for another half hour. I pulled out as soon as I saw the first person leaving the building; worse than not going to group would be going just to see Ethan. But being geographically unable to go might be the best possible option, at least for another week. Maybe by then I'll be able to make a decision, though it would be the first in weeks.

"Plus," Mom paused, clearly weighing what she would say next. "It's your birthday on Tuesday."

Oh. That explains it. My family had never been into birthdays, reasoning that every day was special and that should be enough. We had parties when we were little, of course, but those petered out by the time we reached middle school, and there were times we would completely forget each other's birthdays, only remembering a week or two later that someone in the family had reached another year. When Dad died, we started actively ignoring them. He died six days before his fiftieth birthday, when Mom finally decided to throw a big party for him. After that spectacular fuck-up, birthdays became anathema.

Al, though, absolutely adored birthdays. As an only child, already treated like a prince, he'd been showered with so many presents on his birthday that he came to view them as sacred holidays—which was, perhaps, why he eventually turned atheist; the only holiday his parents could agree on was the day celebrating just him. In turn, he treated everyone else's birthday as equally important, whether they found them to be significant or not. After years of being with him, I had come to see my birthday as my Al day. It was the one day he wouldn't let me do anything for myself or for him. He would wake me up with breakfast in bed, cook me lunch, and take me out for dinner. If it was a work day, he would send me flowers and pick me up when I was done. If it was a weekend, he would plan the whole day from start to finish, cramming as much fun as he could into the hours we had.