Chapter Thirty-Two

  For the next week, Alex fell into a ritual. In the morning she roused her mom, helped her to the bathroom, and made a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast with apricot jelly. After eating, her mom would fall asleep again.

  In the afternoon in the lull between the rounds of pills, her mother was awake enough for conversation. They didn’t talk about the cancer or Gamemakers Hall, but the one thing left Alex could do with her mother: knitting.

  When Alex had been younger, her mother taught her how to knit, but it'd never been a task she enjoyed. But in the sunset of her mother's life, she would have done anything that her mother wanted.

  Working the needles and yarn was more soothing than she remembered, but maybe it was because Alex didn't want to think. She let the pattern—wrap, poke, tighten, loop—smooth away the maelstrom that lay beneath the surface.

  Her mother usually managed to knit for an hour, sometimes a little longer, but when she couldn’t move her hands, she set the needles and yarn back in the basket and told stories about Alex when she was younger. The patterns her mother knitted looked like spiderwebs that had had rocks thrown at it, but Alex said nothing. When her mother grew tired again, she slept on the couch, which had become her bedroom.

  Alex turned on her gaming computer once in the middle of the night when her mother was snoring, but she couldn't bring herself to click on the start button. The only thing she could picture when she thought about playing a game was the swarm of terrorbees stinging her over and over.

  Even though Alex had no way to get to the store, food wasn't an issue because neighbors and friends from town took turns bringing a casserole, or a bag of groceries every day. They would stay for a short time and chat, usually with Alex, except for the rare occasions when her mother was awake and could mumble responses to their questions.

  As the weather warmed and the flowers bloomed, Alex called every hospital within two hundred miles to see if there was one that would treat her mother's tumor. She tried Golden Willow in Invictus, but they would only take her if she was a student at the Hundred Halls, or had the requisite health insurance. Even then, the doctor she spoke to said that it was unlikely spells alone could fix a tumor that far along.

  One night when Alex's hands grew tired from knitting, she pulled out the notebook she'd filled with the Transference spell notes. She had no use for the magic, since she was no longer a member of the Hundred Halls, but the mathematics behind the spell intrigued her. After a few hours of searching the internet, she learned how what she'd been doing mimicked topographical theories. When transferring the nodes from one thing to another, she was creating transitive structures and using the elasticity of the faez matrix to complete the spell.

  In high school, she'd taken college-level classes, scoring near perfect scores on the standardized tests. There were times back then she'd thought about going to college for mathematics, and with nothing to keep her in Kentucky, maybe it was worth a revisit.

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  "Mom," said Alex, sitting across from her mother, who had already set down her knitting needles and was staring at the evening sunlight coming through the kitchen window.

  "Yeah, sweetie," said her mom, followed by a little cough.

  She could barely talk without a chest rumble. The doctors had said the tumor was interfering with the signals going to her lungs. They'd warned her it would get worse before the end. Alex wasn't sure she was going to be able to handle it.

  "What did you want to be when you grew up?"

  Alex wasn't really sure what prompted her to ask this question, except that they'd already been through all the polite conversation and she wanted to have some real discussion with her mom before there wasn't time left.

  "A ballerina," said her mom, wistfully.

  "No, seriously."

  Her mom looked back, eyes ringed and sunken, but a spark still remained deep in them. "I am. I wanted to dance in the New York ballet, or at the Met."

  "But you never danced, or took lessons," said Alex, perplexed.

  "That doesn't mean I didn't want to do it. We didn't have money for that kind of stuff, but it was fun to dream." A secret smile formed on her mother's lips and she lowered her voice as if she were keeping a secret. "When I was eight, I tried to run away so I could go to New York and join the ballet school. I thought it was something like the circus that you could just decide to join. I made it as far as the bus stop before your grandmother found me."

  "You never told me that story before," said Alex.

  Her mom stared at the sunlight. "I haven't thought about it in a long time. I didn't want to think about it, I guess." After a long silence, she said, "What do you want to be? Are you going to be a professional gamer? Is that why you left Gamemakers?"

  Alex shivered, remembering the way the swarm pursued her through the forest relentlessly.

  "No, it didn't work out like I thought it would."

  "Alexandria, dear, it's never been like you to let something beat you. I remember when you were five and you decided you just had to climb up the slide at the park, rather than use the ladder. You must have tried a hundred, maybe two hundred times, before you finally made it."

  "Oh yeah," said Alex, the memory floating into view. "I'd forgotten that. What was I thinking?"

  "I don't rightly know, but you were persistent," said her mother. "It's the reason I didn't tell you about the cancer. I didn't want that to interfere with your opportunity. Which was why I was so surprised when you left."

  "I didn't give up," said Alex, squeezing her lips together. "I ran into a problem I couldn't solve."

  "Alexandria..."

  "Yeah, I know, but whatever, it got me back here. I'd rather spend," she almost said your last days but choked up and had to switch words, "time with you than beat my head against a stupid problem."

  "Sweetie, let's face it," said her mom. "I'm going to be gone soon enough. Please don't let what's happening to me keep you from living. It'd break my heart to think my dying screwed up your life."

  Alex let the knitting drop into her lap. Screwed up your life? As if it wasn't screwed up enough with Dad dying and now you. How much pain can one heart take?

  "It's...it's okay, Mom," she said. "I wasn't learning anything anyway. Gamemakers wasn't what I was expecting. It seemed kinda broken, for a hall."

  Her mother made that little infuriating noise in the back of her throat that usually received a comment from Alex, but with her mother's condition she swallowed her response, and while holding back tears, looked away.

  Speaking quietly so her mother didn't hear, she said, "Nobody from these parts ever did anything. Why should it start now?"