I have to find you a place, Pearl. I have to find you a place in this world, before I leave it.

Leaving

Morning breaks. I spend forty-five minutes on the phone with the lawyer who recently helped me write up my will, filling him in on my plans, giving him added instructions on what to do with the house if I don’t return. It’s a strange conversation. I feel like I’m talking about someone else’s impending demise, someone else’s house, someone else’s granddaughter. When he asks about your guardianship, I tell him I’m working on it.

“You’re working on it?” he asks.

“That’s what I said. I’ll straighten it out and be in touch.” I hang up without saying goodbye.

You and I drive out of the city, and it’s a strange thing to think I may never return. Never come home to the house I have lived in for so long. Never walk the alley to your school to pick you up. Never sit on the front porch, taking in the street, waiting for John to come back. Never sit on the floor in your room beside your bed until you fall asleep. I arrived in this town with your father when he was only a few months old. Now I am leaving with you. Sometimes the sadness and beauty of life are unfathomable.

You roll your window down, and the crisp autumn air floods in, whipping around us, holding little of the summer heat of yesterday. I feel one of those moments of true melancholy mixed with happiness—that aching combination of thankfulness and sadness and a sharp sense of being—right there in the moment.

The morning air is chilly.

“Pearl, keep your window up,” I say, finding myself growing emotional in that moment of leaving. I try to cover up the emotion in a voice with hard lines and sharp turns, but I don’t like the sound of it now that it is out, swirling in the air around us.

You start to put your window up, but I reach over and touch your shoulder.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t worry. The air is nice.”

You smile that entire-face smile of yours, your hair is dancing around like wild black thread, and you turn to the window and put one hand out, wrestling with the wind. You reach across your body and take my hand resting on the center console.

“Feel how cold,” you say, your eyes wide.

Cold. Is that what death will be like? Is that what waits for me on the other side—a long sleep? A never-ending dream? Or something else, something better? Or nothing? I have thought about this often since the diagnosis. What, if anything, waits for me on the other side? I feel like a kid on his first roller-coaster ride when it begins click-clacking its way toward the top of the initial hill. What will greet me on the ride down?

“Will I go to school when we get to your hometown?” you ask.