I could give her the coastline, but only as much as could fit in a room.
I could make her a mermaid, but she couldn’t go back to the sea.
That’s why I’ll move heaven and earth for my clients. To make sure they get that last heart’s desire. That there’s nothing they haven’t had a chance to finish, before they leave.
—
TWICE DURING THEday, I’ve called Meret to see how she is doing. The second time, she told me to stop treating her like one of my clients, and I nearly cheered. I will take an angry daughter any day over one who is weeping, or—worse—silent and blank.
Win starts running a fever after dinner and complains of pain urinating; she likely has a bladder infection. I wait for the hospice nurse on call to show up and confirm the diagnosis and give her antibiotics before I leave. It is nearly 11:00P.M. by the time I get home.
The house is dark. Even the light in Meret’s room is out. I open the door as quietly as I can, to find a small candle flickering in the entryway, set right in the middle of the floor. In the near distance—at the juncture of the entryway and the living room—is a second candle burning.
I blow out the first flame and move to the second. From there, I can see another candle pointing toward the staircase, and then three dotted like lighthouses all the way up.
The last candle burns just outside the closed master bedroom door.
Inside, the four posts of our bed have been strung with Christmas lights. They provide the only light in the room, but it’s enough for me to see that hanging from the ceiling are photographs. They twist on short lengths of fishing line, buoyed by the currents of air-conditioning. There’s a picture of Brian, holding the stuffed monkey that he shoots from a cannon to explain vectors to freshmen. One of Kieran—still lanky and young, holding a lobster he’d taken out of a trap. Meret as a toddler, wearing a lopsided strawberry hat—the one and only item I’ve ever knit. There’s a picture of Meret as a newborn, and another of her at an elementary school holiday concert in a red velvet dress. There is a photo of Brian standing next to the sign announcing the top of Mount Washington, and another of him in a tuxedo. There is the last picture I have of my mother, smiling from a hospice bed.
I see a movement from the corner of my eye, and Brian steps forward from the corner, where he has been watching me. “What’s all this?”
He doesn’t answer directly. “You don’t see black holes, you know.” His voice shakes, as if he is nervous. “They just pull you in. No light escapes, so you wouldn’t either. They say if a person actually approached a black hole, he’d be torn apart, because the gravity is that great.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“Since astrophysicists can’t actually see black holes, they had to figure out another way to find them. They look at how planets and other matter moves and reacts around them. They see things falling in, or at the brink.”
Images pirouette above my head. “There aren’t any pictures of me.”
“No.” Brian steps forward and pulls me up, positioning me in the dead center of the room. “That’s because you’re our star. You hold us together. Without you, there’s no life. No gravity. No me.” He hesitates. “No us.”
I realize that he is trying to communicate in a language he knows and understands. That for him, this is crystal clear.
“You think you know the edges of your world,” Brian says. “And then it turns out there’s all this dark matter out there. I fell out of orbit, Dawn.”
I look at him, the familiar planes of his face, the level of his chin, the sickle-shaped scar that cuts through his eyebrow. He is trying to find his way to me again; I can meet him halfway. So I put my hands on his cheeks. “How do we get back on track?”
In response, he sways forward. He stops before we touch, I inhale what he exhales. It makes me think of Abramovic, the performance artist, and her lover, fainting in the same square of air. “Is this…” he asks. “Can I…”
I rise up on my toes and press my lips against his.
For a moment, he goes still. His heart, flush against mine, kicks hard. Then he grabs me tighter, his palms skimming from my shoulders to my waist, as if loosening his grip means I might float out of reach.
We kiss like we haven’t in years—like that is all we are going to do, like we could taste the world in each other. We lie down on the bed and stay like this for hours, for centuries. I move against him, wanting more, but he holds my hands flat on either side of my body. He kisses his way along my jaw, scrapes his teeth at the base of my throat. When I manage to reach for his shirt and try to pull it over his head, Brian darts away. Instead, he skirts his fingertips over me. Brian has always been a scholar, and I have become the subject.
I’m completely undressed, and Brian isn’t. I arch against him and try to cage him with my legs. Instead, he crawls off the bed, leaving me to ache. I come up on my elbows, thinking he will finally take off his clothes, but instead he kneels. He bows to me, sliding his hands from my knees to my thighs, and his mouth closes over the core ofme.
This. This is what it means to be alive.
It feels like lightning when I come, so stark that I look down at my hand against the sheet, expecting a burn. “I’m sorry,” I gasp, and Brian looks up at me, surprised. “I wanted us to be together.”
I realize, with an aftershock, that I mean it.
With a strength I didn’t know I have, I pull Brian down to me and roll so that he becomes my feast. I taste each patch I uncover. He catches bits of me as I move—a wrist, a shoulder, the underside of a breast—but I am everywhere at once. I rock on him, over him. I look into his eyes.
I can’t remember the last time we did that. Usually, we hide in our own pleasure. We use each other to get where we need to, in our own little hedonistic bubbles. It’s safer than peering through the windows of his eyes and glimpsing something I might not want to see.
Or letting him peer through mine.
