I settle in beside Win. Her son’s blanket has been spread over her. The door closes behind Abigail.
“I told you I’d be here when it happened,” I say softly, when I am really thinking:Thank you for waiting for me.
Her skin is cold and dry. Her breath saws from her lungs in gusty, uneven wheezes. “I found him for you,” I whisper. “He’s so handsome, Win. He had just come back from biking and his cheeks were red.”
Beneath her closed lids, her eyes shift. “I have something to confess. I didn’t give him your note. I know I promised. But you see, he has a daughter, and a son, and a wife. When I saw that, I thought,That’s not what Win wanted.And then I thought a little more, and wondered if maybe itwas. I think that what you really hoped I’d get for you was knowledge, which you could take with you, when you go. The understanding that he’s all right. That he was as happy in his life as you have been.” I smile sadly. “I mean, who gets such an embarrassment of riches? One love that sends you into orbit…and then another that guides you home?”
I let go with one of my hands to wipe away a tear. “If you want to hate me for not carrying out your wish, I understand,” I tell her. “But I hope you don’t. Because even though I was the one who was supposed to be giving you the tools to make the most out of the life you had left, you turned out to be the better teacher. What I did…what I found…Oh, Win. There’s really no such thing as a right or wrong choice. We don’t make decisions. Our decisions makeus.”
I bite my lip. “You asked me once what it was like, when we die, and I said I didn’t know. But now, I do. I almost died in a plane crash. I’ve been trying so hard to remember it, to feel every minute of it again, so I could tell people in the future what to expect. I felt like I had to go somewhere, but it was so hard to stick to the path. It’s like when you finally reach the top of a mountain you’re hiking, but look down and realize how small you are by comparison. Your heart is in your throat, because it’s beautiful and terrible all at once, and if anyone asked you to describe it, you wouldn’t be able to find the right words, because how can you be so alone and insignificant and also so full and complete at the same time?” I shake my head. “I know this isn’t what you were hoping for. You want to know if there’s a white light, or a hundred dogs, or an angel who comes to get you. I don’t know any of that. But I do know that all the answers were there, to questions I would never even think to ask.”
Win’s chest stops moving. I stare down at her, waiting. I search for the broken thread of her pulse.
“But I came back,” I tell her. “Maybe I wasn’t ready to hear those answers.”
I feel it then, the slightest squeeze of my hand.
One more shallow breath. A long pause.
“Felix?” I call out. “I think you should come now.”
I lean down and press my cheek to hers. “It’s okay to let go, Win,” I whisper.
The door flies open and Felix stands there, wide-eyed and frightened. “Is she…?”
“Not yet,” I tell him. “But now would be a good time to say whatever you need to say to her.”
Felix sinks onto the edge of the bed. He leans down, whispering something into her ear that I cannot hear. Her breath rushes out, a soft susurration stirring his hair, and then she is gone.
He folds himself into her, an origami of grief.
I step outside the room to give them a final moment of privacy. I take my phone from my pocket and add Win’s name to my list of ghosts.
—
ABIGAIL TAKES ONElook at me and my scar and tells me she will take care of contacting the funeral home but she’d really like it if I didn’t keel over myself, so I should go home. She calls me an Uber and even though the ride is only fifteen minutes, I fall asleep. Sadness sits with me, another passenger.
I text Wyatt to tell him Win has died, and then I text Brian, but neither of them responds.
When I enter my house, I witness something I never expected to see. Brian and Meret and Wyatt are all sitting around the kitchen table, eating pizza. Wyatt and Brian have bottles of beer, and Wyatt is telling a story about how, as a graduate student, he licked something fossilized to figure out if it was bone or rock, and had a coughing fit and inhaled it. “I’m likely walking around with a piece of a pharaoh in me,” he says, and then he looks up when I walk through the doorway.
Immediately he gets to his feet, reacting to something written across my features. He takes two steps forward, and there’s only one more before he can reach me and let me fall apart in his arms—but then he stops abruptly and jams his hands in his pockets, remembering where he is. “Your client…?”
“Died,” I say, and for the first time the word is not a statement or a fact but something as delicate as an egg that I have to deliver over rough terrain.
“I’m so sorry, Olive.” The endearment slips out. Brian’s eyes narrow when he hears it.
Brian rises, too, and takes a plate from the cupboard. On his way back to the table, he squeezes my shoulder. “Sit down. I’ll get you a slice.”
Even Meret is sympathetic. She brings me a paper napkin and hugs me. She is the glue, I realize, that connects this oddly shaped group of people before me.
I push my grief behind a curtain, the ugly sweater I will take out and try on later, before closeting it for the next time. I force a smile. “I hope you got sausage.”
“God, Mom,” Meret says. “You realize pigs have been taught to play videogames and are smarter than chimpanzees?”
And just like that, everything should be back to normal. As normal as it can be to have Wyatt and Brian sitting on either side of me at a table. To be methodically eating pizza even though a wide swath of my hair has been shaved away. And the most important point: I am here. Win is not.
I hope that Abigail takes care of Felix. I hope he can make it through this first night in an empty house, which is always the worst.
