The Dying Game

I

My four-year-old daughter, Lydia, is lying on a satin blanket on the living room floor, eyes closed, plastic flowers scattered over her pink dress. Her friend Monique is a year older and has blue eyes and what Lydia calls “princess hair.” As in, “Why do I have to have dumb brown hair instead of princess hair like Monique?” I tell her she is beautiful, that her hair isn’t dumb brown, but chestnut like her father’s, and that brown is the color of chocolate, but all she sees is dirt. “I have brown hair, too,” I sometimes say, but Lydia only huffs. “You’re my mom.” Moms cannot be princesses, although occasionally they are mean queens, mysterious beings in possession of poison apples and magic mirrors. At the moment, Monique’s golden locks are covered with a black veil (a lacy stocking I allowed Lydia to steal for her dress-up box), and the expression on her round face is uncharacteristically solemn.

“Pretend you’re my daughter,” Lydia says, her eyes still closed, “and I just died of cancer.”

“What kind of cancer?” Monique asks.

“A really bad kind. First you get a fever of 280 degrees, then you have strep, and then it turns into cancer,” Lydia says.

“Should I get the doctor? Maybe you need medicine.”

“Okay, pretend I’m about to die.” Lydia sits up. “And every time you visit me in the hospital I remind you what a bad daughter you were.”

I’m in the kitchen, washing dishes. Lydia is old enough now that when she has playdates I can get stuff done instead of having to entertain her and her guest. She and Monique are especially good at achieving a state Lydia’s preschool teacher calls “flow.” Their ideas bubble up and bounce off each other in endless, ever-changing dramas. Lately, with Lydia’s grandmother back in the hospital, it’s been all about death and dying.

“Sara, Lydia’s dying,” Monique tells me.

I put a freshly rinsed mug in the dish rack. “That’s terrible,” I say.

“She needs medicine.”

I feel a flutter inside, a kind of urgency. Usually I give them crackers, sometimes strawberries when they’re in season. This time I go for the brightly colored tin we keep up on the high shelf and get out the M&M’s. “This is really strong stuff,” I say, as Monique’s face brightens. “It kills cancer fast.”

“Pretend even that medicine can’t save me!” Lydia calls from her resting place on the living room floor.

Monique bounds over to her. “I think you might live.”

Lydia gives her a withering look, takes an M&M, and flops back down on the satin blanket. “Pretend I’m still dying. And you’re jealous because I get to go to heaven and you don’t. You don’t even believe in it.”

“Okay,” Monique says.

I hang the dish towel on the rack and try to think of another chore for my helpless hands.

II

I was three years old the first time someone I knew died. I remember my great-grandmother lying on my grandmother’s couch, beneath a blue blanket. My parents and I were visiting my grandmother for Easter, and the guest bedroom I stayed in had a framed wedding photo of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather on one of the bedside tables. I had trouble believing that the sickly old woman on the couch was the same woman in the black-and-white photo, with the beautiful, serious face, her lips full and—you could tell, even without color—red. She was tall and buxom and my great-grandfather, who was only nineteen and terribly thin, looked tiny next to her.

Now my great-grandmother looked tiny, dry and brittle like an old rose pressed between the pages of a Bible, the blue blanket barely moving with her breath. We were alone; the rest of the adults had gone outside to look at the bunnies in the backyard hutch. It had seemed a good opportunity to raid my...