12:30 p.m., November 2, 2015

I wave the preschool carpool away, then shut my door and stand in the silence. There is so much I should clean in my hours alone in here, but the bright November sun slices in through my half-closed blinds, striping my kitchen and beckoning me outside. I’ve been stagnant here. I need to move.

 

I put on my running shoes, grab my iPod, and head off down the sidewalk. They say there’s a storm coming in. The sky is blue and alive; blinding white clouds race each other northward ahead of some unseen aggressor at their heels. The leaves are fleeing, too, skittering across the road, scratching at my ankles as I speed-walk along with them through sunny, solemn streets.

As I approach the elementary school, the squeals and shouts of children cut through the sound of my podcast. I squint across the road and through the chain-link fence. These are the bigger kids—is this Ellie’s class? If it is, she’ll be playing four-square, her recess activity of choice now that her friends are no longer interested in “playing pretend.” There. I see her. Tall, slender, purple jacket tied around her waist, long brown hair flying in the wind. She jumps after the ball, then stoops as she chases it, the way she used to run as a dinosaur or a horse or a swooping peregrine falcon. Is she laughing? I try to read her body language, distant blur that she is. She stands still as her hair lifts and dances, and I silence my iPod as though that will help me see her better, take in that familiar duck of the head, one arm bent, holding the other straight down in front of her. Is she content?

She’s a world unto herself, this girl, so much like me it’s almost hard to know her. She keeps her feelings close but will treat me to glimpses here and there. Like last night, as we all stood making awkward small talk in that tiny room of the cardiovascular ICU, and she sidled up next to me and whispered, “I don’t want to be here anymore, Mom,” and I remembered being ten, and hospitals feeling so wrong, and the strained smiles of grown-ups and the feeling of duty colliding with my desire to run.

My grandma has been in the intensive care unit for nine days now. As my feet pound away from the school I picture her in that hospital bed, apologizing for her appearance as we all look down at her, amused. Grandma, we say, you had a heart attack. This is not a beauty pageant. She’s so herself, even here—so fully here with us, as she has always, always been. It’s easy to welcome complacency and denial, to believe she will always be here, despite what the doctors and her age and my logic and experience are yelling at me. But really, how long can a person stay in the ICU, being poked and tested and told that her heart and her lungs are simply not doing their jobs? How long can she live in that chair she’s confined to, strapped up to oxygen and dreaming of pain-free days? How long can she really stay?

I turn south—uphill—into an onslaught of wind. It’s gusting against me so fiercely I have to lean forward to counter it. I let it roar past my ears and extinguish all thought. There is nothing but this blast of air and this burning in my thighs. I bend and push, breathe and reach. It feels so good to fight against something.

I turn my head to the west and just like that the sound abates. Here is the view that is always waiting just past the edge of our tidy development—miles of golden fields, far-off hazy mountains, a wild swirling sky, untouchable space. Why don’t I come out here more often, leave the sidewalk, fill my lungs full of this air, and remember? There is more than my walls and my mess and my own private weariness.

A careening tumbleweed approaches from the south. I keep my straight course, sure it will pass on my left. At the last moment it veers right at me and I have to leap to miss it. My yelp is swept off in the wind and I keep battling my way up the hill. My heart pounds, my blood rushes. Fight. Pump. Move. Push. The brown, dead leaves are a rushing river my feet wade through.

The coming clouds are deep and gray, bringing rain or maybe snow. Night will come earlier this time, but I will be awake. I will walk outside and watch it fall, let the darkness wrap around me, feel the water on my face.