mother is the name for god on the lips and hearts of all children
The house is silent, but for Nara's coughing. It's a small house, only two bedrooms, and it's out on the Taieri. Living there is like living in Mosgiel -- with less worry about whether or not you'll get along with your neighbours, and without the depressing idea that you live in an enormous retirement village. Nara's nearest neighbour is fields away and nobody really visits.
Probably, no one will find her.
Nica is far away from here -- Nara's relieved that her child doesn't have to watch her like this. It doesn't occur to her that Nica, with her capacity to heal, could make the pain go away. She could stop the coughing. If she tried really hard, she could make Nara better again. No, Nara is just glad that at least she will always live in Nica's memory as the woman she was, and not the woman wracked by illness that she has become now.
It frightens her, a little, that she is already thinking of herself in the past tense. It's not fair. None of this is fair. She's frightened and she's alone and she's going to die and nobody cares, nobody but a girl who is thousands of miles away in a foreign country, learning how to be herself. Her hands clench uselessly in the fabric of her shawl (it's still too warm to need it, but it's comforting) and she coughs hard, stumbling from the living room down out the back door and then--
And then--
She collapses lies down in the grass, under her favourite tree. She can feel the garden trying to reach out to her, the way it always has before, and the effort it takes to reach back sends her into another coughing fit. She rolls onto her side, screwing her bleeding eyes shut and she wants to sob, she's not ready, she'll never be ready for this, she's all alone--
In the calm that follows, Nara sits quietly under her tree, staring at what she was before. I used to be so beautiful, she thinks, almost abstractly, reaching out to brush her fingertips down her own pale cheeks, smeared crimson.
It feels like a new kind of freedom -- there's nothing tying her down anywhere, any more. At Nara's heart, she is still a little girl excited by the little things around her, and even death is just a new experience. Perhaps she can explore, now that she's not bound to even her own body.
Narayana walks away.