But it’s none of those things, of course it isn’t.
Stone is calling.
I hold the phone in my fingertips. I can feel my hands start to shake.
The staccato beats of my ringtone formulate another verse.
I curl my lip over my teeth and answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She hates hospitals, but doesn’t everyone hate hospitals? The lights, the staccato beeping, the impending, hovering reality of death. Yes, everyone hates hospitals, but people have different levels of tolerance for the things they hate. Marcella has little.
She paces outside her husband’s room. Her mother sits inside with him, chattering on about something to do with the house. He is awake, conscious, lucid. But he is not well. The disconnect between these things—his appearance, the reality—is not hard for her to grasp. She is used to the power of invisible things.
The doctors have told her the reality she has feared for the past thirty years has come to pass—his heart, in its current configuration, is giving out. After his open-heart surgery, way back in this very same hospital, they created bypasses. Two of those bypasses closed over the years, but he has been kept alive by a series of small capillaries—God’s bypasses, the doctor called them. The body’s response to needing a route to the heart. But now they are being impacted—whether because his liver is not as good at breaking down fat as before or because the concoction of medications has stopped being as effective, they are not sure. Regardless, it’s a hard situation to operate on. These bypasses are little—not theones they replaced years ago but much, much smaller. They are a miracle, the doctor has told her. But even miracles have expiration dates.
It had been a normal day. Nothing particular to write home about. He hadn’t gone surfing, but she knew. The truth is there was little she did not know. She knew that he snuck regular coffee, not decaf, into the cannister and that he didn’t change the pillowcases when he said he did. She knew all of these things already. Why hadn’t she said anything? Why hadn’t she insisted they visit the cardiologist earlier than their annual? The truth is, she didn’t want to know because knowing would make it true.
All he did was come up the stairs.
She saw him sway from the window at the sink. At first she thought he was being silly, playful—interpretive dance on the water, listening to the music in his own head—but then she saw him fall.
He was lucky. He was close to the sand, and there was a pile of beach towels on the bottom step. Dave still brought them down for the surfers, for anyone who came out of the water and needed a little warmth. Sometimes they’d stay down for days, getting damp and crunchy from the salt water. She’d ask him to bring them up so she could wash them, but he always forgot.
They broke his fall.
She called 911 before she even stepped outside. They told her to do CPR, but she didn’t remember how. She had learned, of course. In all the years of worrying, of hospitals and doctors and medications, she had taken the course. But she never thought she’d have to use it, not really. She couldn’t remember if it was eight pumps or six. She couldn’t remember if it was on the breastbone or below.
Please, she said.Just come.
She started screaming. Down the beach at whoever could hear. Maybe someone knew how to turn back time. Maybe someone else had a ticket they hadn’t yet spent. That’s the truth—it took almost no time for her to know she was out of cards. She didn’t think about it down the road—minutes or hours later. She thought about it instantly. She thought about it while she still believed he was kidding. If. When. I have no way to save you.
Now she is in his hospital room. Sylvia laughs, and Marcella turns away. She knows that Lauren thinks her feelings toward her mother are warranted, understandable. Lauren does not know that Marcella resents her, too. She resents the obvious ease of Lauren’s life—two parents, a healthy husband, a second chance.
She thinks about her daughter then, earlier, again, than she’d like to admit. She thinks about her in the hospital, and she thinks about her on those steps, before the towels break her beloved husband’s fall. She thinks about her ticket. She knows that it is unused.
She waits to call Lauren. She waits until she knows what is happening. Until he does not die but instead wakes up in a hospital room, tethered to a bed. A cardiac arrest. A damaged aortic valve. A blocked artery. No possibility of a stent, not anymore. She waits, but she already knows. She calls her daughter because this is her father, she needs to inform her—of course, of course. She calls her daughter because Lauren has the one thing Marcella does not and can’t get back.
Time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the back of the Uber headed to Cedars-Sinai, I clear my throat and press the receiver to my ear.
“Hi.”
“Lauren, hi. Wow. It’s been a long time.”
I let myself for the first time think about the parking lot six weeks ago. I think about the flip of the driver’s seat, the sharp edge of the metal belt. Stone’s hands and words. All the things I erased.
“Yeah, hi. I heard about Bonnie. I’m so glad the trial is working.”
“Oh.” He pauses. “It’s… we got another few weeks, but ultimately things took a turn. The doctors say that happens sometimes. There’s a rebound and then…”
I feel my hands go numb. I switch the phone to the other ear.
“When did that happen?” I say.
