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It was deep into the night by the time we finished at the hospital and got home.
I had just pulled the blanket up over Grandma when she called my name, clear as anything.
"Nick."
I froze.
It had been so long since she'd looked at me like that, fully aware.
She stared down at the gauze on her knee, silent for a long while, then asked in a trembling voice,
"Was today your engagement party?"
"Did Grandma... crawl on the floor and act like a dog?"
My throat closed up.
"No."
"Grandma was just sick. You didn't do anything wrong."
Her eyes reddened slowly all the same.
"I remember."
"All those people laughing. Someone filming me."
"Today was supposed to be a happy day for you, and I shamed you again."
She reached out and touched my face.
That hand was thin and rough, the knuckles badly twisted out of shape.
When I ran a high fever as a boy, this was the hand that carried me miles down the mountain roads.
When there was no money for school, it was Grandma who got up before dawn to sell vegetables, scraping together my tuition one bill at a time.
Back then she always said that as long as her Nick could have a good life, none of the exhaustion mattered.
Now she looked at her own shaking hands and kept apologizing to me.
"Grandma's old now, and my mind's gone."
"You have to take care of me, and people laugh at you because of it."
"If it weren't for me, you and Sybilla wouldn't have fought today."
"I never should have gone to that engagement party."
I crouched down beside the bed and held her hand tight.
"It wasn't because of you."
"You have never been a burden to me."
I told her that in three days we would leave the country.
There was a better rehabilitation center over there, and not a single person who knew us.
She listened for a long time, and finally gave a small nod.
"As long as Nick doesn't mind having me."
I thought I had comforted her.
But in the middle of the night, after I'd finished my work and pushed open the bedroom door, I found Grandma lying quietly on the bed.
She wore her cleanest clothes, her graying hair combed neat.
A row of empty pill boxes sat on the nightstand.
Blood pressure pills, painkillers, the medications for her chronic conditions. She had taken all of them.
She had even folded the empty blister packs one by one and put them in a plastic bag.
As if she was afraid of leaving a mess, of being one more trouble to me.
The tablet beside her was still playing the video from the engagement party on a loop.
When Malcolm posted it, he'd been smug enough to add a caption.
【Some people act all high and mighty every day. Bet you didn't know I trained his grandma like a dog.】
On the screen, Grandma was down on the floor like a dog.
In the comments, people laughed at the old woman for not dying already, and some said that a man bringing a grandmother like that into a marriage would sooner or later be dumped by the bride's side.
She had watched that video seventeen times through.
Something in my chest felt like it had been carved out while I was still alive.
A sheet of paper was pinned under a weight on the desk.
The writing on it was crooked and unsteady.
【Nick, Grandma won't shame you anymore.】
【Go and have a good life.】
I rushed to the bed and called out to her again and again.
Grandma didn't answer.
Her body had already gone cold, but her hand still clutched that last piece of candy.
As if even in the final moment of her life, she remembered to save it for me.
When the ambulance arrived, the medic took one look and shook his head, sorry.
I knelt by the bed and called for Grandma over and over, my voice soon so hoarse it wouldn't come out at all.
But the old woman who, no matter how many times she forgot everything else, always remembered to save me a piece of candy, never opened her eyes again.
Sybilla had said she would forget the humiliation and the mockery within a few minutes.
But that night, Grandma never made it to the next forgetting.
She swallowed every last pill and stopped forever on the clearest, most agonizing night of all.
