“Was she—” I started, and then didn’t know how to finish. Was she alone? Was she scared? Was she thinking of me? Did she know I was sitting on a veranda in Roatan laughing while her heart stopped? “Did she say anything?”
“She’d been reading,” he said gently. “A journal article, actually. One of yours, I believe. It was still open on the bed.”
Something cracked.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Something deep giving way, the way pressure does when a seal fails—not catastrophic, just suddenly, irrevocably open. The woman who held everything together, who solved problems, who kept moving forward because standing still meant feeling things she couldn’t afford to feel.
“Thank you for calling,” I said, because that’s what you say. Because there are scripts for these moments and your body follows them even when your mind has left the building.
I ended the call. Set the phone on the arm of the chair. Watched it sit there, dark and ordinary, an object that had just delivered the worst news of my life and didn’t even have the decency to look different.
Sarah was dead.
Sarah was dead, and I’d been sitting on the terrace drinking wine.
Sarah was dead, and the last thing I’d said to her two days ago was “I’ll call you Thursday” and now Thursday would come and there would be no one to call.
The grief didn’t arrive the way I expected. I’d imagined this moment—of course I had, everyone with a sick mentor imagines this moment—and in my imagination I was always composed. Sad but functional. The kind of person who handles things.
What actually happened was that my legs stopped working.
Not metaphorically. I stood up from the chair and my knees buckled like someone had cut the strings, and I grabbed the railing and missed and went down hard on the wooden deck, my hip taking the impact, my elbow cracking against the chair leg.
The pain was clarifying. For about two seconds I focused on the physical—the throb in my hip, the sting in my elbow—and then the other pain arrived, the real one, and it swallowed everything.
My mother dying when I was twenty-two. Standing in a hospital corridor in Columbus in shoes that were too tight because I’d run from campus without changing, and a nurse saying, “I’m so sorry, honey,” and the fluorescent lights buzzing and the world rearranging itself around an absence that would never be filled.
And now Sarah. Sarah who’d found me six months after my mother’s death, a hollow-eyed grad student running on caffeine and fury, and had said, “You’re brilliant but you’re burning out. Come work in my lab. I’ll teach you to pace yourself.” She hadn’t. I hadn’t paced myself a day since. But she’d given me a place to put all that fire, and she’d stood behind me for a decade, and now she was gone and I was on the floor of the terrace in Roatan and I couldn’t breathe.
I kept seeing her. Specific, stupid, random images that had no business being the ones my brain chose to serve up. Sarah at her desk with reading glasses pushed into her hair, holding my first published paper and saying “Table 3 is sloppy. Fix it and we’ll celebrate.” Sarah eating terrible cafeteria soup and arguing with me about sample sizes. Sarah calling me at two in the morning because she’d had an idea about pressure differentials and couldn’t wait until a reasonable hour because “science doesn’t care about your sleep schedule, Charlie.”
Sarah, sick but still sharp, still reading my work, still reaching for a pen to tell me my confidence intervals needed checking. Still showing up. Even at the end.
The sound that came out of me wasn’t crying. It was something more animal than that—a sound from the bottom of whatever part of you stores the things you refuse to feel. Ten years of holding it together. Ten years of “I’m fine” and “I’ve got this” and “I don’t need help.” Ten years of Wyatt’s number in my phone and the call I never made because what would I even say?
I fumbled for my phone. Not to call just anyone, but to call Wyatt. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely navigate to his contact—still listed as W with a rocket ship emoji from when we were teenagers and he wanted to be an astronaut.
It rang four times and went to voicemail.
His voice, recorded and cheerful and from some other version of our lives: “Hey, it’s Wyatt, leave a message or don’t, your call.”
I opened my mouth to speak and nothing came out. Just a breath. A ragged, wrecked breath into my brother’s voicemail at almost midnight, and then I hung up because there were no words for this. The two people who had made me feel safe in the world—one was dead and the other wouldn’t pick up the phone.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the compass. Held it against my chest with both hands. The thing my brother gave me when we were kids. When he still showed up.
I curled around it on the floor of the terrace. I didn’t try to be quiet. I didn’t try to be dignified. I didn’t try to be anything at all. I just let it take me—the grief, the fear, the loneliness, all of it—and I made sounds I didn’t recognize as mine and I pressed the broken compass to my heart and I fell apart in a way I hadn’t since I was twenty-two years old standing in too-tight shoes in a hospital corridor.
The waves kept going. The tree frogs kept singing. The world kept turning, indifferent to the fact that mine had just stopped.
I don’t know how long I was on the floor. Minutes. Maybe longer. Time doesn’t work right when you’re inside the thing.
At some point I became aware that my face was pressed against the wooden planks and they smelled like salt and teak oil and that my hands had gone numb from gripping the compass too hard. My body had done the thing it does after a certain point—gone quiet. Not calm. Just empty. Like a storm that’s spent everything and all that’s left is the flattened landscape.
Sarah was reading my paper. She was reading my paper and her heart stopped and she probably didn’t even look up from the data first. She probably had notes. She always had notes. She was probably reaching for a pen to write “Charlie—recheck your confidence interval on Table 3” in the margin when?—
I squeezed my eyes shut.
I thought about calling someone. Mia. But it was after midnight on the East Coast. Mia would answer—Mia always answered—and then what? She’d hear my voice and she’d know and she’d want to come and she couldn’t because she was a thousand miles away and I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t make someone else feel helpless tonight. There was enough of that going around.
