Chapter 11: Playing by Candlelight in the Dark
The wind continued to buffet the northern side of the house through the early hours of the morning, howling through the eaves like a living thing. Sitting across the small wooden dining table with only the flickering beeswax candle for illumination, the shadows stretched and warped against the whitewashed walls. The electricity remained out, cutting us off from the modern world and leaving only the rhythmic, booming percussion of the surf against the pilings beneath the deck.
My mother reached into the wooden sideboard behind her chair and pulled out an old, faded cardboard box. She placed it carefully on the table between us, the cardboard worn soft at the corners from decades of handling.
"I found this in the bottom drawer when I was looking for spare batteries," she said, her voice quiet and steady above the drone of the storm. "Your grandmother used to bring this exact deck of cards down here every summer. It’s a terrible game, really. Too many rules for no good reason. But she insisted it built character."
I watched her lift the lid, revealing a stack of paper cards yellowed with age, the edges frayed and softened. A faint smell of old paper and dust drifted up between us, mingling with the scent of melted wax. "What kind of game?" I asked, leaning closer as the amber light caught the fine lines around her eyes.
"Something called Euchre. Though I doubt either of us remembers the scoring," she replied with a dry, self-deprecating smile that felt entirely free of the guarded tension from our first day here. She began sorting the cards into faded suits, her fingers moving with a deliberate, practiced care. "We used to sit right at this table during northeasters just like this. The power always went out in these old coastal towns before the county upgraded the lines in the nineties."
I picked up the discarded deck remnants, feeling the strange, tactile weight of history resting in my hands. For years, I had built an entire psychological fortress around the idea that my mother viewed me as a disappointment—a career-driven daughter who couldn't balance her life, who needed constant correction. Sitting here in the pitch black of a storm-battered coast, stripped of phones, screens, and professional armor, that architecture felt impossibly small.
"Why this week, Mom?" I asked softly, holding my cards against my chest and looking across the flame at her. "Really. When you booked this place, or when the system got confused... why did you need to be here so badly that you stood your ground like you did?"
She stopped shuffling. Her hands rested flat against the scarred wooden surface of the table, illuminated from below by the small pool of yellow light. She didn't look away, nor did she retreat into the chilly formality that usually guarded her private life. Instead, she took a slow, deep breath, her chest rising and falling beneath the white cardigan.
"The clinic called me three days before I drove down," she said, her voice dropping an octave, blending into the room's acoustics. "Just routine annuals. They found a shadow on the lower left lobe during the scan. Nothing definitive. They wanted to run a biopsy, but the appointment wasn't scheduled until after the spring break window."
The air in the room seemed to thicken, the sound of the ocean suddenly feeling very loud against the windowpanes. My fingers tightened around the worn paper cards until the cardboard bent slightly under my grip.
"And you didn't tell me," I whispered, the words tasting like ash.
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"I didn't want to bring anyone into it until I knew what we were dealing with," she said, looking up, her gaze meeting mine with an unflinching clarity. "I didn't want panic. I didn't want pity. I just wanted five days where nobody expected me to be strong, or organized, or sensible. I wanted to sit by the water where my own mother used to tell me that everything passes in time."
A heavy, aching lump formed in my throat. I stood up from my chair, walked around the corner of the table, and knelt beside her wooden chair, wrapping my arms around her shoulders. She stiffened for a fraction of a second—a lifetime of reflex guarding her physical space—before collapsing inward against me, her hands coming up to grip my forearms with fierce, trembling strength. We stayed like that in the candlelight while the storm raged outside, holding onto each other in the dark.
