Mother #1 (freewrite fiction)

Disclaimer: This is a really long story, which I have split up into three posts, for convenience. You may read them one after the other in one sitting, or come back to them, as you feel. It is based around @mariannewest's 3 freewrite prompts.

_{Photo by Jordan Bauer on Unsplash}

Mother was dead. I sat up startled and leaned against the pine headboard of our bed. I didn't dare look over, not just yet, though I could feel it in my bones, as certain as anything. We'd both known this was coming for a long, long time. Armand seemed to be clueless about it, as with pretty much anything. My husband had a way of drifting in and out of his own realm, only catching bits and glimpses of the real world we inhabited. But that was okay, I always had Mother to talk to and look after, especially in the past few years, when she seemed to be slipping up more and more.
I'd first seen it in her eyes some three months before, the certainty that she was dying and I kept thinking that I should be heartbroken, but I was not. It wasn't that I wanted her to die, but as if there was a chunk of ice sunken inside of my chest that I couldn't quite reach. And nothing could ever get through that or past it. And I couldn't feel, but I hoped she knew how sorry I was. I tried to pay special care to her after that, always making sure she had a comfortable pillow to sit on and was warm. That's one of the things, I kept saying, that she must keep warm. As if that would keep her alive as well. But in the end, it did not, and I realized how foolish I'd been to think so.
I wouldn't exactly call it a premonition or some sort of strange sixth sense. I'd known she would die, though nothing was said of it and that it would be in the next 95 days. And as precise as clockwork, there she was.

Dead.

I knew that as well, even before looking. I didn't need to confirm it, I didn't really want to know and to be fair, all I could feel in those waking moments was relief that Armand wasn't there, because I knew he'd try to be comforting and that would only make it harder. He had a good heart, my husband, always, but sometimes it was as if we lived on different planes and he really didn't understand what I was on about. I needed to be clear-headed. Practical. Box up her life and move forward, this was no time to wallow.
And yet, I still didn't look. I refused to see her frail body, now limp and pale. Would it be pale, I wondered? For all my bravado, I'd never seen a corpse before and it was most disturbing that the first would be Mother's. Still, things have to be done and arrangements must be made.
I made my way out of the room slowly, tip-toeing in my thick socks, keeping away from the creaky floorboard on purpose, though there was no one left in the house to hear them creak.
I picked up the phone in the kitchen. I would have to get this out of the way, I couldn't let Armand sway me later on because then I would fall here. I would lose myself and that was no way to go about things.

'Mother's dead.'

The words tasted foreign in my mouth and I felt weird, like trying to speak a different language and pronouncing it wrong.

'Oh dear, I'm so sorry, love.'

And I could already hear his voice breaking. Just a little. Clear-head. I listened to the torrent of words gush out of him, about grief and flying back early and my head started pounding.

'No, it's alright. Really, I'll be okay. Finish your trip and come back on Friday, like we said. I'm really fine.'

'Pam, you shouldn't be alone in the house.'

And I felt the strangest impulse to tell him I wasn't. I had Mother there to contend with, or at least what had been Mother not quite so long ago.

'I'll call someone. Jenna or Francine, I won't be alone.'

Alone – the word of the century, it seemed, at least for Armand. My husband was one of those people who regarded being on your own as a sort of plague, to be avoided at all costs.

'I love you,' he told me, always so honest, so much there, that I could already feel myself getting lost, like I always did in his warmth, so alien to me at times. But I could not let myself go. Mother was dead and I had to do the right thing by her.

'Me too. I gotta go now. Bye.'

I hung up quickly, before he could say anything else. I walked back through the house, no longer paying attention to where I stepped. I had already disturbed the perfect quiet of the morning by announcing – to Armand, as well as to the world – that Mother was dead. I pushed the door open and looked full on, not quite ready for what I would see. Is anyone ever ready for such a sight? She lay there, slumped over on her side and she looked so...empty. They tell you that corpses are sorrowful, but there's no one inside to be sorry. That they are sad or cold or lonely, even that they look like they were still alive, asleep somehow, suspended in a time bubble above our heads. But they don't. They just look empty, like someone who's no longer there.

Read part two here.