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want me to take them to the park or something?”
“No, no, they’re fine.”
“Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed or something?” The bed was already gone, reclaimed by
hospice.
“Hazel,” his dad said, “you were there every day with us. You— he wasn’t alone much, sweetie. He wouldn’t have had time to write
anything. I know you want . . . I want that, too. But the messages he leaves for us now are coming from above, Hazel.” He pointed toward
the ceiling, as if Gus were hovering just above the house. Maybe he was. I don’t know. I didn’t feel his presence, though.
“Yeah,” I said. I promised to visit them again in a few days.
I never quite caught his scent again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Three days later, on the eleventh day AG, Gus’s father called me in the morning. I was still hooked to the BiPAP, so I didn’t answer, but I listened to his message the moment it beeped through to my phone. “Hazel, hi, it’s Gus’s dad. I found a, uh, black Moleskine notebook in the magazine rack that was near his hospital bed, I think near enough that he could have reached it. Unfortunately there’s no writing in the
notebook. A ll the pages are blank. But the first—I think three or four—the first few pages are torn out of the notebook. We looked through the house but couldn’t find the pages. So I don’t know what to make of that. But maybe those pages are what Isaac was referring to? A nyway, I hope that you are doing okay. You’re in our prayers every day, Hazel. Okay, bye.”
Three or four pages ripped from a Moleskine notebook no longer in A ugustus Waters’s house. Where would he leave them for me? Taped
to Funky Bones? No, he wasn’t well enough to get there.
The Literal Heart of Jesus. Maybe he’d left it there for me on his Last Good Day.
So I left twenty minutes early for Support Group the next day. I drove over to Isaac’s house, picked him up, and then we drove down to
the Literal Heart of Jesus with the windows of the minivan down, listening to The Hectic Glow’s leaked new album, which Gus would never
hear.
We took the elevator. I walked Isaac to a seat in the Circle of Trust then slowly worked my way around the Literal Heart. I checked
everywhere: under the chairs, around the lectern I’d stood behind while delivering my eulogy, under the treat table, on the bulletin board
packed with Sunday school kids’ drawings of God’s love. Nothing. It was the only place we’d been together in those last days besides his
house, and it either wasn’t here or I was missing something. Perhaps he’d left it for me in the hospital, but if so, it had almost certainly been thrown away after his death.
I was really out of breath by the time I settled into a chair next to Isaac, and I devoted the entirety of Patrick’s nutless testimonial to telling my lungs they were okay, that they could breathe, that there was enough oxygen. They’d been drained only a week before Gus died—I
watched the amber cancer water dribble out of me through the tube—and yet already they felt full again. I was so focused on telling myself to breathe that I didn’t notice Patrick saying my name at first.
I snapped to attention. “Yeah?” I asked.
“How are you?”
“I’m okay, Patrick. I’m a little out of breath.”
“Would you like to share a memory of A ugustus with the group?”
“I wish I would just die, Patrick. Do you ever wish you would just die?”
“Yes,” Patrick said, without his usual pause. “Yes, of course. So why don’t you?”
I thought about it. My old stock answer was that I wanted to stay alive for my parents, because they would be all gutted and childless in
the wake of me, and that was still true kind of, but that wasn’t it, exactly. “I don’t know.”
“In the hopes that you’ll get better?”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s not that. I really don’t know. Isaac?” I asked. I was tired of talking.
Isaac started talking about true love. I couldn’t tell them what I was thinking because it seemed cheesy to me, but I was thinking about
the universe wanting to be noticed, and how I had to notice it as best I could. I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person
yet. What my dad had told me, basically.
I stayed quiet for the rest of Support Group, and Patrick said a special prayer for me, and Gus’s name was tacked onto the long list of the dead—fourteen of them for every one of us—and we promised to live our best life today, and then I took Isaac to the car.
When I got home, Mom and Dad were at the dining room table on their separate laptops, and the moment I walked in the door, Mom
slammed her laptop shut. “What’s on the computer?”
“Just some antioxidant recipes. Ready for BiPA P and A merica’s Next Top Model?” she asked.
“I’m just going to lie down for a minute.”
“A re you okay?”
“Yeah, just tired.”
“Well, you’ve gotta eat before you—”
“Mom, I am aggressively unhungry.” I took a step toward the door but she cut me off.
“Hazel, you have to eat. Just some ch—”
“No. I’m going to bed.”
“No,” Mom said. “You’re not.” I glanced at my dad, who shrugged.
“It’s my life,” I said.
“You’re not going to starve yourself to death just because A ugustus died. You’re going to eat di
I was really pissed off for some reason. “I can’t eat, Mom. I can’t. Okay?”
I tried to push past her but she grabbed both my shoulders and said, “Hazel, you’re eating di
“NO!” I shouted. “I’m not eating di
you here alone and you won’t have a me to hover around and you won’t be a mother anymore, and I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about
it, okay?!”
I regretted it as soon as I said it.
“You heard me.”
“What?”
“Did you hear me say that to your father?” Her eyes welled up. “Did you?” I nodded. “Oh, God, Hazel. I’m sorry. I was wrong, sweetie.
That wasn’t true. I said that in a desperate moment. It’s not something I believe.” She sat down, and I sat down with her. I was thinking that I should have just puked up some pasta for her instead of getting pissed off.
“What do you believe, then?” I asked.
“A s long as either of us is alive, I will be your mother,” she said. “Even if you die, I—”
“When,” I said.
She nodded. “Even when you die, I will still be your mom, Hazel. I won’t stop being your mom. Have you stopped loving Gus?” I shook
my head. “Well, then how could I stop loving you?”
“Okay,” I said. My dad was crying now.
“I want you guys to have a life,” I said. “I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves.”
A fter a minute, Mom said, “I’m taking some classes. Online, through IU. To get my master’s in social work. In fact, I wasn’t looking at
antioxidant recipes; I was writing a paper.”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t want you to think I’m imagining a world without you. But if I get my MSW, I can counsel families in crisis or lead groups dealing
with illness in their families or—”
“Wait, you’re going to become a Patrick?”
“Well, not exactly. There are all kinds of social work jobs.”
Dad said, “We’ve both been worried that you’ll feel abandoned. It’s important for you to know that we will always be here for you, Hazel.
Your mom isn’t going anywhere.”
“No, this is great. This is fantastic!” I was really smiling. “Mom is going to become a Patrick. She’ll be a great Patrick! She’ll be so much better at it than Patrick is.”