Jenna saw the tears captured by Millie’s lashes. The relief that tightened the woman’s face and voice both. “Can you give me a few days to wrap things up here?”
“Are you kidding?” The woman’s laugh was fractured. But still. “I’ve hung on this long. I can do a few days standing on my head. Joke.”
“A terrible one.”
“Hey, give the girl a hand for trying.” Another of those looks. Borderline desperate. “This is real?”
“Real as it gets.” Jenna promised to call the next morning Florida-time, then cut the connection. Sitting there. Watching her reflection in the dark screen. Breathing in and out. Wondering at how easy it had been to change her life’s direction.
Hoping she had not lost her way in the process.
* * *
Millie clung to life for another seven months.
Long enough, in fact, for Jenna’s own life to take a new and utterly unexpected course.
Millie remained cynical, bitter, caustic, and funny right to the very end. By that time, they were truly sisters. Petty and peevish one day, the next sharing dreams and all the many absent days.
With Millie’s urging, Jenna enrolled in the University of St. Augustine’s school of nursing and started online courses for her master’s degree.
More important still, she found a calling.
Jenna was going to be nurse to end-of-life patients.
She couldn’t say for certain, of course, not until she had gone through her first final act. But by the time Millie took her place in the checkout line—Millie’s term, not hers—Jenna was fairly certain this was her way forward.
By then they had both endured three dry runs—again, Millie’s term. Those nights had turned endless and it looked like the sunrise belonged to someone else. But Millie pulled through, and recovered to some extent, and life went on. Sort of. In the process, Jenna had gained firsthand experience in the act of letting go. Not fighting for a recovery they both knew would never be real. Which meant accepting that her responsibilities were different from most nursing lessons she had been taught up to that point. Her job, basically, was to be the last and final anchor, the assurance that neither the pain nor the loneliness would ever grow too intense. That her beloved, dear, sweet, infuriating first patient indeed had a friend to the end.
Jenna tried to thank her newfound sister for her new life’s course. Once.
The conversation did not go well.
Millie didn’t even let Jenna finish. “So what you’re saying is, you’re glad I’m dying.”
Jenna had waited for an afternoon when Millie was strong enough to indulge in her last remaining favorite pastime. The rented condo was a four-hundred-yard walk to the Canaveral port, a massive manmade harbor designed to hold three distinct sections. The private-boat marina stood next to a mile-long dockage for cruise ships. And beyond that, utterly distinct from those two, was the super-secret naval base for nuclear subs.
Millie was happiest here. Especially on days like this, when Jenna pushed her wheelchair along the quayside and they waited for another rocket launch. On such days, the Canaveral highways and marinas were blocked to outside traffic. Which meant the marina held a locals-only festival air. But that day, half an hour before take-off, the launch was scrubbed. Jenna could tell Millie was tiring, so she started back to the condo and thanked her sister. Or tried to.
Jenna was so upset by Millie’s response she waited until they were in the condo’s elevator to say, “That was actually all you heard? Really?”
“Hey, it’s what you said.”
“Was not.”
“Was too. I was paying careful attention.”
The doors slid open, and Jenna pushed the chair along the interior hallway. “I was the one talking. And the talkie says, you heard what you wanted and not one word more.”
“Okay, I’m pretty sure ‘talkie’ isn’t a word.”
She unlocked the door, entered the bedroom, and maneuvered the chair up to the rented hospital bed. Helped her sister shift over. “You’re impossible. And that’s definitely a word.”
“So leave, why don’t you.”
“That’s your job. Anyway, the talkie signed on for the long haul.”
Millie watched Jenna prepare the afternoon syringe. “Not so long.”
