“I’m sorry,” he said. “We couldn’t get a hold,” and the room became a crowd, too big and close. I counted seconds in my head to stay inside it. One one hundred, two one hundred, three one hundred. I was supposed to stay alert inside it. I looked down at my phone, then up again. I heard myself speak. “Wait, she’s dead?”

“How can we help you?” the social worker said. “Is there someone we can call?”

The doctor gave me his business card. The social worker went for water, came back with a nurse, who offered me a Valium and told me to sit down.

I sat, swallowed the pill. My mouth was dry but the water wasn’t right in it. “What happens now,” I heard myself ask. I looked at the cup. It didn’t shake in my hand. It should have shaken. I should have fainted or fallen. My failure to do so meant I didn’t love, hadn’t loved. The women in the room with me would see my failure and know the truth about me.

“I have some forms for you,” the social worker said. I tried again to give her the ones I’d filled out, a child offering a toy to an adult who didn’t need it.

“Not those,” she said, and something about advance directives.

“What does that mean?” I asked. She told me, but it meant nothing. She said, “If you’d like to see your mother, now is the time.” I stood, carried my phone, buzzing. I wasn’t thinking, I was only following, walking behind the women to a curtained cubicle. I felt the Valium start its seep, up to my chest where the breath was trapped. “Ready?” the nurse said. I need to see, I thought, and nodded.

My mother was alone. She was alone.

“What the fuck,” I said. The nurse was quiet, the social worker was quiet. “Fuck,” I said through a kind of crying. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Now is when we ask if you’d like a priest or rabbi,” the social worker said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “No.”

She brought me a plastic bag. In it was the hoodie I had zipped, the pants and hospital socks.

“I don’t want these,” I said but they told me to keep them, so I did.

I WALKED ALONE to the ER parking lot, opened the car door, sat in the driver’s seat. I said the time aloud, 5:07 A.M. Not a whole day since she had sat beside me. “We’re free,” she had said, infection at work inside her. 5:07 a.m., I said again because I had read it was a trick, to see if you were dreaming. In dreams there is no time, something like that. But I spoke the numbers and didn’t wake up. I pressed the button to start her car.