My axis—my center—my sanity.
Who am I without her?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
34
BEATRICE
Iam weightless.
Not the kind of weightless you feel when you fall asleep on a plane or sink into hot water, but a terrifying, infinite kind, like I have slipped out of my body and the world has forgotten I was ever here.
There is nothing.
No bed.No ceiling. No walls.
Just a vast, pale silence that presses against my skin, if I even still have skin. I try to breathe and there is no air. I try to move and there are no limbs. All that is left of me is awareness, suspended in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
A tremor starts somewhere inside me. My whole being shakes, like I am made of loose glass that might shatter at the slightest touch. Panic claws up from a place that does not feel physical. It is deeper, older, the kind of fear that lives where the soul remembers every loss it ever suffered.
Then, through the muffled quiet, I hear something.
Voices.
Distant at first, like sound traveling through water. One is low and rough with strain. Matteo. Of course it is Matteo. Even here, whatever here is, I would know him. The other is higher, thinner, frayed with terror.
Daniele.
My son’s voice cuts through the nothingness, thin but sharp, like a thread of light.
“I love you.”
The words hit me like impact. Not in my chest, not in lungs that refuse to exist, but in the core of whatever I have become. Something convulses inside me. My whole self jolts.
I am on my knees before I realize I have fallen. There is no ground but I feel it anyway, hard and cold beneath hands that are not really there. I clutch at my chest out of instinct. Pain blooms there, fierce and consuming, not from a failing heart but from the thought of being pulled away from the two voices that mean everything.
“I love you!”
He says it again, louder this time, as if volume is the rope that might drag me back.
I try to answer. I try to scream his name, to call out to him, to tell him I love him more than any word he has ever spoken. My mouth opens. No sound comes. My throat feels full of static.
I claw at the emptiness, desperate to reach them. My arms swing through nothing. I am trapped in this between-state, this nowhere, and the harder I fight, the more it slides away from me like fog.
Somewhere beyond this void, a sharp beeping begins to race.
It grows louder. Insistent. A frantic, mechanical alarm.
My chest spasms. My back arches. I feel my body even though a moment ago I was certain I did not have one, and a wild, animal terror rips through me as if I am being dragged in two directions at once.
“CODE BLUE! Cardiac arrest!”
The shout tears through the dark.
I see flashes, broken images like shattered glass.
White light. Blue scrubs.
