East Coast Girls

by Kerry Kletter

  “What is it?” she heard herself say. She was suddenly two Hannahs at once, the Hannah living this moment and the Hannah observing herself in it, aware that something enormous, dark, nuclear was about to crash into her life, drastically change it, change her, that nothing would be the same after. Oh, it was so awful—that awareness—watching your heart lunge for hope, that last desperate clutch on the life you knew.

  She looked at the children, wanted them to have their innocence and joy for as long as possible.

  “There was an accident.”

  It was as if all of her systems stopped at once. Heartbeat, lungs, thoughts. The terrible purgatorial pause.

  “An aide was moving Henry into his chair and I guess he lost his grip on him and he fell. They took him to the ER. They ran tests. There was a minor brain bleed, which is why I called you the other night. I assumed it would resolve. But there continues to be some swelling on the brain. On his breathing center.” Vivian paused. “He’s on a ventilator now.”

  The world seemed to dilate around her. Too big, too loud, too much. And she too small to hold so much sorrow. But just as quickly, hope leaked in. “Okay...that’s not good. Obviously. But he’s still okay, right?”

  He had been on a ventilator once before. He still had the trach scar.

  Eventually they had gotten him off. He’d been okay.

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  Tears sprang. “They can treat it, right? I mean, even if he has to stay on the machine for a while?”

  Hannah’s throat constricted.

  She heard a sigh. “I had a long talk with the doctors again today,” Vivian said. “Hannah, I think we need to consider whether...”

  Hannah braced. “Whether what?”

  “We’ve held out hope for so long,” Vivian said finally. “He wouldn’t want this. For him or for us.”

  “What are you saying? No—you can’t.”

  “Please consider—”

  “There’s nothing to consider! Vivian, please!” People on the beach were looking at her. She didn’t care. “You’re not thinking straight.”

  “I think it might be time to come home,” Vivian said. “It would be good for you to see him. And then we can talk about it in person. And you can talk to the doctors. I’m really sorry. I didn’t want to disrupt your trip.”

  “I’ll be there in...” She tried to remember how much time the drive to DC took, but her brain was shutting down. “Like five or six hours. Please, I beg you, don’t make any decisions without me.”

  She hung up, returned to her friends, aware only of the dissonant joy all around her, of carrying her body in a new way, like an overfull glass. The sky brightened and sparked, jarring and surreal in its absolute separateness from her. Tears pushed. She shoved them back. No time. She would drive there; she would stop this.

  Maya held her arms out when she saw her.

  Hannah thought she might collapse, that her bones would not hold her anymore.

  “We need to go. Right now.”

  They stopped at the house, packed quickly and silently, shoved their bags into the trunk. If they left anything behind, Blue could have it sent.

  “I’m driving,” Hannah said. She did not wait for their response, though she felt their surprise. She didn’t bother to address it. She just knew she needed to be in control of something.

  Maya handed her the keys.

  Hannah got in, put her hands on the wheel, reoriented herself to the driver’s seat. She heard the sound of three seat belts clicking as she backed out and onto the road. She felt no apprehension in driving—only necessity—as if her fear had always been one of speeding into the inevitability of this moment when tragedy would strike again. And now that it was here, her mind was so preoccupied with trying to survive it that her body became a separate automatic animal, quietly taking over all functioning without thought.

  Almost immediately they hit traffic, vacationers leaving the beach, and all at once she was slamming her palms down on the wheel. “Come on, come on.” Lying on the horn at cars that were just as helplessly stalled as she. Honking at the unfairness of everything, at the cruel randomness of the world.

  “It’s okay,” Maya said. “We’ll get there.”

  “I never should have left him,” Hannah said.

  “You didn’t cause this,” Maya said.

  “They’ve never dropped him when I was there.” She slammed the horn again. “Go, dammit!” To Maya she said, “Don’t try to make this better for me.”

  She slipped into herself as if behind a door, trying to manage feelings too big to share. She couldn’t bear to sit in the uncertainty again, this most violent of places.

  At last the traffic eased slightly, just enough. Soon they’d be off Route 27, and she could press down on the pedal, make the minutes fly. There was no caution in this car today. No frightened Hannah. Only determined, only racing, only please, please, please.

  MAYA

  Maya watched as they sped through the streets that had carried them here, framed in the last tangy light of sunset. The fruit stands on Montauk Highway were already closed and boarded for the day. The sky ahead was turning dim and gray as the road, as if evening were a city they’d soon be passing through. In her mind she kept going over everything she’d packed, unable to shake the nagging feeling that she’d left behind something important. What was it?

  She wanted to turn on the radio, the silence too loud, Hannah’s desperation radiating off her like a nuclear spill and nothing Maya could do about it. Never before had she been so aware of love’s limitations—how it could soothe but not save, help but not fix. How some sadnesses were so big they came with a moat around them, stranded a person in their grief. She was right beside her best friend and utterly helpless to stop her pain. How did anyone accept love’s false promise—an end to aloneness? How to forgive people for that? And how to be forgiven in return?

  They merged onto the Sunrise Highway, where the traffic was lighter. Maya watched the speedometer rise as Hannah pressed down on the gas. Slow down a little, she thought. We’re going too fast. But it wasn’t even Hannah she wanted to say it to.

  She glanced at Blue and Renee, their faces tight and worried.

  Would it be so bad? she wondered. To let Henry go. Wasn’t he just a body now?

  And yet the thought of just losing her house was so gutting, to say goodbye forever to a place that held her memories, provided security and comfort. And what was a body if not that? What was a body if not love made tangible by borders so that it could be recognized and touched, provide refuge, contain history inside it? Without Henry, Hannah would be homeless, totally and utterly. The thought made her swallow on something sharp.

  Hannah’s phone pinged. Maya reached for it, read the text from Vivian out loud so Hannah could keep her eyes on the road.

  “Still stable,” she said. She watched as Hannah breathed with relief. There was time.

  The hours stretched long and tedious, the usual landmarks startling and strange somehow, at once familiar and foreign, the way a place sometimes looks when it is intensely the same but you are not. Hour after hour they drove and life passed and something inside Maya grew and grew.

  Off the highway now and winding through the streets of DC until she saw the lights of the hospital, the white slab of it stretching for half a block. She remembered so vividly those long nights in the waiting room, her friends like corpses with coffee cups, haunting hallways and sleeping in chairs. The presence of death everywhere.

  Hannah pulled in to the lot. “Okay,” she said. She took a deep breath. “We’re here.”

  Maya had a sudden vision of herself running. Away from the hospital. Fast as she could. The black shadow of her tearing across the nearly empty lot. Just like Renee had run from Henry’s house, blind, unthinking, desperate. Just like Hannah fleeing into the cocoon of h
erself in that claustrophobic apartment, clutching her Xanax bottle like it was mace against all the terrors of the universe. Just like Blue working away the hours of her life, letting them pass by unlived, unfelt, without dreams attached. She was desperate to run. It felt like survival.

  Instead she climbed out, followed the others inside. Through the glass doors, left at the end of the lobby.

  “There’s Vivian,” Hannah said, and Maya looked down the hall where Vivian was standing by the elevators clutching a coffee cup.

  Maya was saddened to see how time and grief had aged her. Vivian had always been a presence with her regal stature and winter-blond hair. Even after that night she’d remained sturdy and in charge as she dealt with doctors and bad news and hope and more doctors. But the ensuing years had left her frail and faded, her hair turned white, a shell-shocked look in her eyes like she couldn’t quite grasp where her life had gone, why she couldn’t find it.

  “I think we should wait in the lobby,” she said to Hannah. “So you two can talk.”

  Hannah nodded, took a deep breath. She seemed to be searching Maya’s face for something she needed. Hope, maybe. “Wish me luck,” she said.

  “Good luck,” Maya said softly. If only she knew what that might look like today.

  BLUE

  The lobby had long been updated since the last time they were here, but to Blue the air still carried the weight of that traumatic night, those weeks of visiting Henry in the ICU, his body barely visible beneath all those tubes and wires, the only sign of life the small tidal rise and fall of his chest. All of that terrible waiting.

  “Sometimes I forget how much we went through,” Renee said as if reading her thoughts. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  “Good,” Maya said.

  “Bad,” Blue said at the same time.

  “Who wants to dwell?” Maya said. “I never want to think about it again. I never want to be here again.”

  “There’s a difference between dwelling and remembering why we are the way we are,” Blue said.

  “How are we?” Maya asked.

  “Fucked up,” Blue said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Maya said.

  “You can speak for me too,” Renee said. “I’m a total mess.”

  Blue glanced down the hallway. “What do you think they’ll decide to do?”

  Maya shrugged, shook her head. For all her bravado, Blue noticed a pallor beneath Maya’s tan, an unusual tension around her mouth as if the strings had been pulled too tight.

  They fell back into silence, the air too heavy for talking.

  There was a dull buzz like the sound fluorescent lights make, only it was happening inside Blue, an underlying current of anxiety. The news played on a TV mounted high on the wall, something about a former child star turned drugged-up teenager being arrested for sending an unsolicited nude Snapchat to his Uber driver. In the corner a gray-haired couple held hands as they sat on an upholstered couch and frowned up at the TV.

  The walls closed in, as claustrophobic as blindness.

  “Be right back,” she said. “I’m going to have a smoke.”

  “That shit will give you cancer,” Maya called after her.

  Blue hurried down the hall, stepped out into the summer air, into the surprise that the world was still there. Sometimes you could sit in a room that made you forget that it was.

  She walked over to a low retaining wall, lit a cigarette, sat down and inhaled deeply.

  The night was huge and she felt the black emptiness of the sky as if she had swallowed it.

  “Hey.”

  She turned to see Renee. She looked tired and somehow younger, her makeup almost gone, her hair pulled into a messy ponytail.

  “Thought you might want company,” Renee said.

  Blue remembered Renee’s pregnancy, put out her cigarette.

  “Oh, thanks,” Renee said. “You didn’t have to. I can just stand over there.”

  “No, it’s fine. I should quit anyway. Not that I really smoke.”

  “Right,” Renee said as she sat down beside her, the two of them so small inside the night.

  In the near distance, a chorus of crickets. Blue pictured a male cricket running one of its wings across the teeth of the other, opening both to create acoustic sails, calling for a mate across the dark titanic night. It seemed at once lonely and beautiful—the need to connect reduced to the level of an insect, the way it never got too small to disappear entirely. Even though Blue sometimes wished that it would.

  “So weird that we were on the boat just this morning,” Renee said, leaning back. “Seems like forever ago.”

  Blue nodded. It was as if sorrow was its own country and they’d been rerouted to it, forced to make an emergency landing here. She stared up at the parenthesis of moon, how little light it gave. “When does it stop being so hard?”

  Renee sighed. “I don’t think it does. I don’t know that it’s supposed to.” She kicked her heels lightly against the wall. “I wish there was, like, a weather report you could get for life. ‘Dress warmly, there’s going to be a monster storm for the next ten days, but then you’ll have sunshine for three straight months.’”

  “Seriously.”

  “But then if I tried to prepare for everything, I’d be Hannah. Never leave the apartment.”

  “Prepare to be unprepared,” Blue said, using finger quotes.

  “Or accept maybe.”

  “So easy to know that, so hard to do it.” Blue flicked her lighter mindlessly with her thumb, the flame stoking and dying again and again. The sky seemed deeper and wider and darker than Blue had ever noticed. So infinite and impersonal. She was suddenly acutely aware of her own impermanence, of a world with none of them in it. “Sometimes I think about the fact that, like, right now, at this very second, there’s a lion lying in the grass in Africa, or...a...a penguin waddling across the Antarctic ice, or a camel roaming in a desert. It’s weirdly comforting that the world is so big. So many creatures, so many lives. Sometimes it’s when it feels too small that it’s... I don’t know...harder, like magnifying or something. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  A car passed them in the parking lot, its headlights illuminating them for one quick moment and then gone.

  “You have to call him, you know,” Renee said.

  “Jack? And say what? I completely humiliated myself.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I high-fived the man, Renee.”

  She tried to make light of it but underneath she was all ragged shame and loss.

  “I think you have to at least try to make it right.”

  “I don’t even want to think about that right now,” Blue said. “Nothing matters but Hannah and Henry.”

  “I know,” Renee said. “But it will.”

  They sat without speaking, the city air so still—it never moved in summer in DC.

  “Why does any part of you want to stay if Darrin’s cheating on you?” Blue asked.

  Renee sighed. “Because I’m weak? No, that’s not fair. I mean, I think I am, sort of. But also just human. You know, want to save him, want to save myself. All that stuff you can know you shouldn’t do and still do. Or maybe you should. I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out where forgiveness fits in.”

  “It’s a tough one,” Blue said.

  They looked at each other.

  “There has to be room for mistakes, you know? The question is how much room, how many mistakes? When is a mistake too big to forgive? I don’t know. Sometimes I think we’re all too tough on each other. Being a person is hard. For everybody. Other times I think the opposite—that we accept behaviors we shouldn’t because loneliness sucks.”

  And sometimes, Blue thought, we accept loneliness when we shouldn’t. She sat with this for a moment. Then she reconsidered. Maybe that was
too simple. Maybe most people just accepted what they could tolerate because it was familiar. She thought about Renee. How she found a guy just like her father. She thought about herself. How she couldn’t have anyone, just as she’d never had anyone in her own family. Maybe it was just too frightening to be loved in an unfamiliar way. Maybe most people were stuck their whole lives on the same song, playing over and over, sung by different people. Or by no one at all.

  Who the hell knew?

  She stood. “We should go back.”

  Renee nodded and they headed back into the building, found Maya where they’d left her, staring up at the TV.

  “What took you so long?” Maya said, though they’d been gone only a few minutes.

  Blue was about to answer when she looked down the hall, saw Hannah turn away from Vivian and face them. Even from a distance she could see a deeper strain on her face.

  HANNAH

  Hannah moved down the white antiseptic corridor toward her friends feeling like a foreigner in her own life, a reluctant tourist to it. She was no longer in her body but somehow above it, watching herself traffic through her experience the way an author might observe a character, with interest and remove and best wishes.

  Against the numbness, a sudden piercing longing for Henry. Not hospital Henry but the Henry in the before who would’ve held her in his arms until she felt contained, squeezed her whole again. The Henry who would have listened to her concerns, helped her know what to do.

  What should she do?

  Blue, Maya and Renee met her halfway.

  “What did she say?” Maya asked.

  “She wants me to think about it more,” she said. “So I said I would. Even though I still plan on saying no. Obviously.”

  “Okay,” Maya said.

  “They did an MRI and an EEG. There’s almost no brain activity at all anymore.” The words rubbed at her throat. She saw a jagged sadness in the eyes of her friends, reflecting her own. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she said suddenly. “I need water.”