Tessa sniffed and Kate looked up, not surprised by the tears. Tessa cried when she couldn’t make a joke and even she didn’t have one in her now.
“Kate, I cannot lose both of them in a year,” she repeated, wiping her nose. “I really can’t. I don’t have it in me.”
“We’re not going to.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know what Mom is. She’s not done.” Kate said it with more conviction than the chemist in her actually had. The chemist had run the grim numbers.
But sweet Tessa, whom she’d known since they shared a womb, needed hope.
“I know I’m not a medical doctor, but I do know a little about what’s going on here. She’s going to pull through. She’s going to laugh about the EMTs and complain about her bald spot and make Maggie do something outrageous to celebrate her recovery.”
Tessa swiped her face and tried to smile. “They’re like teenagers, those two. What were they doing at that biker bar?”
“We may never know,” Kate said. “Unless this lady…” She tapped Mom’s hand. “Has one chardonnay too many and spills the beans. I’ll get it out of her.”
Her sad smile frozen in place, Tessa looked at their mother’s hand in Kate’s. “You two were always like that.”
“Like what?” Kate asked.
“Your hand in hers. Hers in yours. You’d be reading on the couch, and she’d come sit down next to you and just take your hand. Like she needed somewhere to put it.” Tessa’s smile was watery. “I used to be jealous of it when we were little.”
“She had two hands and always gave you one,” Kate said. “But you were off with Dad, fishing or…something.”
Tessa breathed out and nodded. “She felt safe with you,” she said. “You were logical, like Dad.”
“And Dad had a crazy soft spot for you because you were silly and fun like Mom. You’d walk into the room and steal all the air, and nobody cared about my report card.”
Tessa snorted. “And did you see him weep when you walked the stage at Cornell?”
They smiled at each other. The truth was, neither sister had gotten less than the other. They had each gotten the parent who had been theirs, and they had loved both, and now they were sitting on opposite sides of a hospital bed at three-thirty in themorning realizing what it would cost to lose Mom and Dad this close together.
Immeasurable. Incalculable. Unfathomable loss.
They didn’t talk for a long time, but sipped coffee and split a way-too-sweet glazed donut.
Around four, the door opened and the ICU nurse came in. A Black woman in her early fifties, tall, with close-cropped hair starting to silver at the temples and a name tag that read Marlene.
“Hello, ladies,” she said softly. “I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“Please.” Kate put Mom’s hand down and stood, but Marlene waved her back into her seat.
“You can stay for a bit more. The day nurses aren’t so lenient, but you’re…her daughters, right?”
They both nodded.
“We’re twins,” Tessa said, which was surprising because they’d stopped announcing that to strangers years ago.
“Really.” She looked from one to the other, a frown pulling. “Fraternal, obviously.”
“Yeah,” Kate said. “She’s the beautiful one.”
“Stop it,” Tessa replied and pointed at Kate. “She’s the genius.”
Marlene chuckled and moved around them with the ease and grace of someone who had navigated this situation a thousand times.
She glanced at the monitors. She adjusted a piece of tape on Jo Ellen’s wrist where the IV had pulled at the skin.
