I felt it again—how tenuous, how brittle she was. How easy to snap her, along with those strings connecting us. Her heartbeat, racing from those few steps across the room, was a butterfly in my hands.
“Write me,” she said. “Real letters on paper.”
“Sure,” I said, wondering what I would write about.
“Just send it to the hospital, with ‘Bellamy’ on it. That’s the awesome thing about a weirdo name. The nurses all know me.”
“They’d know you anyway.” I gently unwrapped myself, placing her hands back on the walking frame. “Even if you had a boring old-lady name—like Jessica.”
She giggled. “You should change your name to Blessica, so you’ll always remember me.”
“I’ll remember all this. I don’t go to hospitals much.”
She took a backward step, looking me up and down, as if judging how likely I was to break again.
The strings between us were humming now, power lines in the wind. It felt as though leaving Bellamy would pull them tighter and tighter, until they yanked my bones out.
“Let’s not say goodbye,” I said.
“Except you just said it.”
I held up my hands in surrender. Bellamy always won this game.
“We can come up with something better,” she said, a graceful victor. “Like: Don’t forget your seat belt!”
An hour later, one of my little cousins bounced into the room, wearing a backpack that squirmed and clucked.
“Trotsky, hush!” she hissed over her shoulder. “You aren’tallowedin here.”
“Good morning, Mary,” I said, rubbing the cuticle on my ring finger, which had grown sharp again.
“Aunt Jessica! We’re here to take you home.”
Relief swept through me. To be out of this place, with its lung-colored vases, fluorescent lights, and security cameras. The children that came with strings.
Mary had no strings. She drifted alone in space, orbiting the star of her own impulses. She shook rainwater from her clothes onto the tiled floor.
I stood up from my visitor’s chair. “You were supposed to be here at ten.”
“Sebastian kept stopping the car, because he was annoyed with me.”
“Sebastian…” I sat down again.
A flash of giggles. “Did you think I drove myself?”
And there he was in the doorway, wearing one of the white linen shirts he kept in his closet at home, safe from the ravages of campus parties. But his hair was rumpled, his eyes tired, his shoes wet. I could see it in a glance—he’d taken a dawn train from Albany to the estate, then driven here in the rain.
He’d come home for me.
Still looking at him, I asked Mary, “How were you annoying?”
“With science!”
“You put your hands over my eyes,” he said, still looking at me. “On the highway.”
“It was an experiment!”
“It’s the sort of thing that makes cars crash.”
