We sit and wait, my sister-in-law says at the deathbedand I do all day, I am dutiful, I remember the hot churchand the fat angels on the altar and the fan oscillatingby the woman who led us in singing, with one handalways up in the air. No one knows I am thinking,Die, die as everyone talks about Jesus and the better placeshe is going. Last week my husband pointed at somethinginvisible and said, Here is the mind, and then he pointedin the opposite direction and said, And here is you,and I said, With the daisies, pointing to the same spotin the air and loving myself hard for seeing a whole fieldof them there. But I love myself less when evening comesand his mother is still drawing her endless breaths upthrough her ribs and I can’t sit anymore, I am thinkingabout the window and how I have to get outside.I am neither Mary nor Martha. No small pitcherof water to wash her feet, no sponge for her lips.When we were alone, I told her things she already knew,like we were in a play and the audience needed filling inon what had already happened. She was a good mother.In her bathroom cupboard, she had the oldest jarof Vaseline I’d ever seen. A bottle of Emeraude,green like Oz or something you could drink, the kindof perfume you tilt and touch to your wrist.I said, Don’t worry, they’ve still drawn your eyebrows on,and now I must tell you that all her life she shaved themand penciled in thick, black lines, she put on a facebecause when she was the girl in the photograph,standing in the cold sunlight of Dunseith, North Dakota,at the age of three, a stern brother on either side,she learned she was nothing. And now she is whittleddown to bones and I can see the small flameof her childhood not going out. I lift the coversand she is wearing almost nothing and her skinis so thin that even the sheet bruises it so we shape itlike a tent. As a girl I liked to pretend my sheetswere a meadow where the Velveteen Rabbit livedand all the other animals I was making realwith my love and my fever, but I didn’t think of howthey would have to be burned. This is what happenswith love, I tell her, as I picture the fire swallowingher body piece by piece, the way sometimes peopleeat paper to destroy evidence. I didn’t know in deaththe jaw sticks open, that the world would keep fallinginto it, that we would continue talking to her as ifshe could hear us, that my husband would askall of us to leave him alone with her for a minutebefore they took her body so he could tell hersomething secret, like when Joan of Arcwhispered something in the ear of the dauphinsomething we’ll never know.