“No, I can’t.”

“You can, you’re strong. I’m not. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“You have to do it. We all have to do this.”

“I’m tired, Evelyn.”

He choked up when he said it.

“I’m so tired of doing this,” he repeated.

What was I supposed to say? I couldn’t tell him he didn’t feel this way or didn’t have a right to.

“I want you to take care of her.”

We sat in silence and watched the lightning bolt jump from cloud to cloud, erupting over us without a drop of rain, and then the thunder began and my mother called for us to come inside. I didn’t want to be the only one to know how badly he wanted to die. But I was.

26.

As I crossed into Arizona, I thought about how, when he went into the hospital for the second time, it felt like a relief. I no longer needed to wait for the bad thing to happen. He was once again nearly successful in his plot.

When I found him in the hospital room, he was in a gown, covered in cuts and bruises, his index finger swollen. He had lost weight again, become grayer, no longer salt-and-pepper-haired. He smiled at me. He didn’t look like he was dying at all, though his voice was weak and gravelly as he waved his finger around to show me the damage. He had slipped on rocks by their house and hadn’t even tried to break his fall, because he had been too busy protecting his glass full of whatever he was drinking. We laughed at this fact, like it was obviously absurd. He was nothing if not consistent. The gashes on his legs were trying to scab over, and my mother told me they had happened days before his admittance into the emergency room. I stared at them both and he shook his head.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You’re in the hospital,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want to be here. Ask them if I can go home.”

“You’re not even on solid foods yet,” my mother screamed.

She told me it was time for me to take over. She did not want to be here anymore, to be his caretaker. That was his role to play for her, not the other way around.

“How about you drink some water,” I said.

“He has an IV for that,” my mother said.

Every few seconds, a moan would erupt from a room nearby. Hospitals were full of moaners, the aggrieved.