Once, sitting at the kitchen table, I was scribbling answers to math problems with a stubby yellow pencil. She walked by in her housecoat carrying a piece of buttered toast, and waved it in my direction. "Want some, Skye?"
I didn't want the toast, but quickly answered, "Sure, I'll have some, Grandma."
She pulled a chair up next to me and tore the bread in half. Crumbs fell on my homework. I accepted the slightly burned toast and took a big bite from the middle. She watched me with sharp, lucid eyes. We ate the toast together, bite after delicious bite. We held one another's gaze as we licked our fingers. Then she slid the chair back and left the table, muttering something about how they never let her out of the house anymore.
Another time we walked along the cracked sidewalk in front of the house, her gnarled fingers tangled with my shorter straight ones. I looked up at her, and she was smiling. "It's a nice day, Skye," she said, swinging my hand in hers. The wind whistled, my hair flew behind me, Grandma's windbreaker rustled.
I couldn't think of what to say. We stopped walking and stood still, the bond between us solid. Electricity hummed from one body to the other through our linked hands.
"Is Daddy home yet?" she asked. She dropped my hand and the line went dead.
Once again, on a balmy summer evening, I joined her sitting on the back deck. The jays were rioting around the bird feeder, squawking in splashes of blue. I sat next to her, listening to the birds argue. I noticed her watching me from the corner of my eye, and she put her cool hand on my arm.
"Skye. You are so beautiful." She smiled and looked young. Her eyes, the same color as the jays, studied me carefully. They roamed my face, taking in the snub nose sprinkled with freckles, the high heart-shaped hairline, the small triangular scar near the corner of one eye. "I love you," she said, squeezing my hand. "Remember that." Then I watched her eyes glaze over.
And today, lying in the hospital bed. She had been in a coma-like state for almost four days. She hadn't eaten a morsel in ten. They said it wouldn't take more than nine. We sat, family woven tightly around her, accompanying Grandma as far as we could on her journey. Her breathing was loud, clacking, and unnerving all afternoon. When the yellow sun slanted through the blinds in bright horizontal stripes, her labored breath stopped. We jerked up from our tattered paperbacks and darted to her bedside. Her eyes were open. She was looking at us.
She knew my name. She didn't say it, but I could tell that she was thinking it, holding my name firmly in the grasp of her mind. She looked at each of us, then beyond us, seeing that which we could not.
She took one more breath, a peaceful one, then no more. The silence was loud as trumpets. We held her hands as she went. And I could tell she knew my name.
