Life From Scratch by Sasha Martin Page A

at the hospital. She didn’t want to upset the Dumonts; after all, they were my family now. I pleaded to come home with her, but each time she quietly reminded me that the Dumonts could give me so much more than she ever could.
    There were lots of meetings about what to do with Michael. His hospital bill was $4,000 a day. And though the doctors said he might come out of the coma eventually, he’d never be self-aware. He’d never eat again except through an IV connected to his arm. They said any eye movement was pure reflex. I wondered about Michael’s breathing when Mom had walked into the room: Surely that meant he was still in there somewhere. But no one else agreed.
    Patricia and Pierre offered to put Michael in a home for invalids. Pierre even offered to set up a hospital bed in one of their many living rooms. But Mom shut them down, saying what only the doctors could admit: My brother was already gone.
    She said it was inhumane to drag out the inevitable. The doctors took Michael off life support and moved him out of intensive care into a narrow room. The waiting game began.
    By now Mom had used up all her vacation time. She flew back to Boston, but promised to come back the next weekend to visit. Before she left, she gave me a bear hug and whispered, “Just keep saying, ‘All is well. All is well.’ ”
    Michael’s heart gave out a few days later, before Mom could make that next trip out. He’d been in a coma for a month. Out of confusion or perhaps fear, no one told Mom for three days that Michael had died. Patricia must have been gun-shy from their conversation earlier in the month; but secretly I wondered if anger was the real culprit. Most everyone blamed Mom for giving us up. But they didn’t know what we’d lived through all those ugly, tattered years.
    Mom may not have always made the right choices, but she did her very best. She fought like hell for us. I had witnessed her fierce love. Felt it. Lived it. Sending us with the Dumonts was just one small part of her war—our war. It was a white flag of surrender, reluctantly raised for hope’s sake, for a shot at the peace we all so desperately craved.
    Now 27, my oldest half brother, Connor, finally stepped up and gave Mom the news. He’d been the last person to see Michael before he died. Finding out after everyone else, Mom responded with all the fury of a cornered mama bear who’s lost a cub. She was snarling and crazed and confused, and under it all, just so … sad.
    Michael still had to be buried. Patricia and Pierre wanted Mom to make that decision, but she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t decide what to do with him. Finally, she resigned herself to letting the Dumonts bury him in Atlanta. But as my great aunt told Mom, that would never do. My brother needed to come home— all the way home. After she offered to cover the expense to fly him back to Boston, Mom signed the papers. Her lost little boy finally made the journey back to where he’d wanted to be all along.
    I expected to be on that plane with Michael—or at least, not far behind. I couldn’t wait to see my family at the funeral, to sink into their arms while I cried. But Pierre said I’d missed enough school while Michael was in the hospital. In the end, none of us went: not Pierre, not Patricia, not Lauren, Heather, or Toni. They held a small memorial service in Atlanta instead.
    Mom wrote me a four-page letter describing the funeral. It was at the Holy Name Church, a few neighborhoods over from our old apartment in Jamaica Plain, where she still lived. Mom hired a harpist who plucked notes as delicate as dewdrops. It was spring, and the lilacs would have been blooming, fragrant and unapologetic. Connor, Tim, Grace, aunts, uncles, cousins—they were all there. Grace’s young daughter, Daisy, toddled and made noises all through the mass (“Michael would have liked that”). His old principal was even there (“and says hello!”).
    Mom added that Michael’s baseball