Chapter 28 - WHAT CLAIRE CHOSEDiane gave Zion Claire’s final letter on his tenth birthday.
Not the medical one.
The one written to him years earlier.
He read it alone.
Then came downstairs carrying it.
He sat beside Emily first.
That hurt for approximately half a second.
Then made sense.
“Did you know my mom wanted Dad to love somebody else?”
Emily smiled.
“Yes.”
“Was that weird?”
“Very.”
“Did you feel bad?”
“Sometimes.”
He looked at me.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because grief confuses loyalty.”
He frowned.
“That sounds like therapist language.”
“It absolutely is.”
He rolled his eyes.
Then his face became serious.
“Did Mommy Claire choose the surgery?”
“Yes.”
“Did she choose to wait?”
“Yes.”
“Was that why she died?”
“We don’t know.”
“So she made a bad choice?”
I looked at the boy whose entire existence had once made me terrified of wrong decisions.
“Maybe.”
He absorbed that.
“Can people we love make bad choices?”
“Yes.”
“Can dead people?”
“Yes.”
He looked relieved.
I understood why.
Children turn dead parents into mythology because adults do.
Zion needed permission to let Claire be human.
“She was scared,” I said.
“She made a decision with incomplete information.”
“Like you when you fired Mommy Em?”
Emily made a choking sound.
I stared at him.
“I regret teaching you pattern recognition.”
Zion grinned.
“Was it like that?”
“In a way.”
He looked toward Claire’s photograph.
“So she wasn’t perfect.”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Why good?”
“Perfect people are creepy.”
Emily laughed.
Claire would have loved him.
That evening we went to the cemetery.
Zion placed the letter against Claire’s headstone.
Not to leave it.
Just to show her.
“I know what happened now,” he said.
Then after a moment:
“Mostly.”
That one word was the closure I had been unable to find for thirteen years.
Mostly.
May you like
Not everything.
Enough.
