“Please ask him to come.”

There’s silence for a moment as I think. It isn’t true silence. Not here, where the water breaks against rock and wind rolls over the waves. Here, I can pretend away my presence and fold myself into the white air, and here, silence is a kind of heavy sleep, not begging to be filled, not noisily empty. So I do not rush to occupy it.

“I just want to see him,” Mama says. Her voice is faint against the wind and muffled from behind a scarf, but my ears are attuned to listening to her.

A few moments of searching fail to yield the proper response, so I settle for less. “You know he’ll refuse.”

“Just once,” she says. “Does it mean nothing to him?”

She doesn’t know what she’s asking. Of course, it means something to him. It means some twisted mixture of sour regret and waterlogged memory, and it means uncurling fingers from stone fists, even if he will not say so. I know him too well. But that is too much to explain to Mama, too much that requires peeling back too many layers of skin and armor, and I am already shivering. “You shouldn’t get your hopes up,” is all I have left to give her.

Wind whips my hair around my face, and I gather it into my hands, tuck it back under the collar of my jacket. My fingertips have begun to grow numb, and I stuff them into my pockets, grasping for some grain of warmth. There is none.

I know Mama is cold, too. Colder than me. She is confined to a wheelchair, after all, and each lungful of oxygen rattles her bones and scrapes at her throat. But she tells me she likes the smell of saltwater fog hanging over the beach in the morning. She likes the harsh sound of earth meeting sea. Here, she says, she is reminded that the world is really not so small after all.

I think she just likes it because she has no memories here. It is only frigidity and numb skin, and perhaps there is a little part of her that is tired of reckoning with the hot malleability of life.

“Are you tired?” I say.

She turns to look up at me, eyes searching mine. She gazes at the ground, then her lap, and then back out to the smudged white horizon. “No.” It’s a lie, of course. She’s always tired these days.

“You need rest. We should go back.”

She sighs as I take the handles of her wheelchair and turn back from the edge of the precipice. Whatever temporal scraps of warmth I have conserved in the crevices of my pockets are lost immediately as I push her along. I am already thinking about the heater in my car.

As we retreat from the beach, the rhythm of crashing waves fading into a dim background, Mama says, “Why are you still here?”

I ask her what she means.

“Why do you take me here every day?”

Now I understand. She wonders why I bother driving her to the cliffs every day for a few minutes of watching the same part of the sea churn about itself. She wonders why I get up in the early darkness to help her to the bathroom and then say nothing when she whispers thank you, why I have accepted her into my home when I have nothing to give but single-syllable responses and leftover fragments of time.

“Because you’re my mother,” I reply. It’s the first thing that comes to mind.

She’s quiet as I navigate her wheelchair around a rough patch of ground. Then: “That’s it?”

There’s more I could say: I care about you, I want you to be okay, You’d do the same for me, I love you. But they all feel empty and wrong, and perhaps it is only because it is mind-numbingly cold, but I let myself wonder why I am still here, pushing her wheelchair, clinging to what hollow care I have left. Little brother is gone forever, or at least he might as well be, and I am stuck at home with Mama, taking care of her as her body loses its lease on her little portion of the universe’s energy. That is it.

Perhaps my silence is enough of a confirmation. “I know I hurt him,” she says.

This, at least, we can agree on.

“I’m sorry,” she says, as I open the back car door and turn to help her into the seat. “You know I’m sorry, don’t you?”

Sometimes, I think I do. I have not decided whether I believe her today, so I just nod. Her hands are parchment-like in mine as I help her into the backseat. I shut the car door. Her wheelchair goes in the back, and when I close the trunk, for a moment I am alone and at the edge of the world, hands too cold to unfold, cheeks red in the wind.

For that moment ― just a moment ― I let myself wonder what it is like to be my little brother. To split from the body that built mine, to rend blood from flesh and tooth from gum. It is different from where I am, bound by habitual heart and occasional love, led by wind-worn, threadbare hope. It feels almost freeing to imagine someplace other than this expanse of silent white beach, occupied by two moribund half-souls for a few sacred moments every morning.

Then I am sliding into the driver’s seat, turning on the heater, waiting for the windshield to clear of mist. Today, as we drive back in empty warmth, I promise Mama that I will ask him to come to see her. I don’t know if she believes me. Perhaps she already knows that I envy him too much to ask.

– Ashley Kim