I fumble with the key to my mom’s apartment. I felt crowded in the confines of Justice’s Range Rover, but in the open hall, with him at my back, I feel positively claustrophobic. It isn’t that he’s close. It’s that he’s here. After so long, he’s here. And everything about him presses on me. The burn of his eyes on my neck. The familiar clean scent of him invading every breath I draw. The rugged beauty of him eclipsing everything around him into a vague blur. He hasn’t even touched me yet, and I feel assaulted on every side. Drowning in him.

And loving it.

I finally steady my hands enough to get the door open, gesturing for him to follow me inside.

A hair dryer drones from the back of the apartment, but otherwise the place is as quiet as a mausoleum.

I turn to Justice and give him the smile I’ve used so often apologizing for Mama’s flightiness.

“She may have gotten the time wrong altogether if she’s just now blow drying her hair.”

Justice sketches a deep line between his dark blonde brows, concern accumulating in his eyes.

“She gave me the right time, and said she’d see me there.”

My smile disintegrates.

“Mama.” I glance around the neat apartment, keeping my tone even, at odds with the picking-up-speed pace of my heart. “You back there?”

I head toward the bedroom, hearing Justice’s slower steps dragging across the carpet behind me. No one in the bedroom. The pretty green dress Mama and I chose for graduation stretches across the bed, wrinkle-free and waiting.

The blow dryer moans into the preternatural quiet. I open and close my fingers across damp palms before clamping them into tight fists at my side. Something bad is in that bathroom. The sick certainty slithers along my skin.

“Come on, Fi.” Justice slips his big hand around my fist, not even bothering to thread our fingers together. He steps ahead of me, putting himself first in line for whatever waits in the bathroom. I lag behind a step or two, delaying something that feels inevitable.

Justice’s sharp inhalation is the last sound I hear for the next few minutes. For an eternity. I lose all perspective of time when I see Mama splayed on the bathroom floor, bright red hair blazing against the stark white tiles. Eyes closed. Face serene. Wearing only the silky lilac slip we bought at the boutique a week ago.

I thought it was only in the movies that all the sound sucks out in the big scenes. That it was a special effect, the way the players move in a vacuum of slow motion and silence, but tragedy sometimes bends time and space. It’s real. So real when Justice falls beside my mother. So real when he places his lips over hers, forcing air into her lungs. So real when he pounds on her chest. Unrelenting. Banging. Begging. His face twists with the urgency of these moments.

So real and yet surreal because I find myself in two scenes at once. I’m here in this bathroom watching Justice fight a futile fight for Mama’s life. But I’m also in a grocery store, more than a decade back in time, my two braids in the wind as I race back over to the aisle where I left my grandmother. I’m rounding the corner, the cans of corn I found suspended in triumphant satisfaction, but I drop the cans, not even noticing where they roll. Grams is jerking on the dirty grocery store floor and clutching at her heart, face almost unrecognizable in reddened agony.

And I didn’t have this blessed silence. I heard Grams’ last pained wheezes. The choke of her heart surrendering to the defect it had been secreting away all her life. I’d watched and cried as the store manager intervened. He followed the same script Justice does now. Blown air in. Pounded on Grams’ chest over and over until that dreaded look of resignation took over his face. I had been too young to truly grasp what that look meant then. But now I recognize it for what it was.

Justice is dialing and talking into the phone, but I still don’t hear. I stand by numb, frozen by the thought that this could happen again. That this could happen now when I’ve had so little time with my mother.

“Mama!”

That sound. That tortured sound - like a speared animal – is the first I’ve heard in so long. And it’s coming from me. And I can’t make it stop. Unintelligible vowels and consonants scrape along my vocal chords like barbed wire, cutting and burning my throat. I fall to the floor, resting my back against the garden tub, pulling Mama into a desperate clench. My arms contract around her small frame. I weep into her hair. Whisper a lullaby Grams always used to soothe me.

I do everything but let go.