KERRY KLETTER
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 re-
sponse, 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
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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 man-
age 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.
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MAYA
Maya watched as they sped through the streets that had car-
ried 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
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ise—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.
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KERRY KLETTER
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 herself 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 clutch-
ing 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.
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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.
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KERRY KLETTER
“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 f luorescent lights
make, only it was happening inside Blue, an underlying cur-
rent 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.
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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 in-
sect, 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 land-
ing 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 Han-
nah. Never leave the apartment.”
“Prepare to be unprepared,” Blue said, using finger quotes.
“Or accept maybe.”
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KERRY KLETTER
“So easy to know that, so hard to do it.” Blue flicked her
lighter mindlessly with her thumb, the f lame 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 illumi-
nating 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 cheat-
ing 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,
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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 ques-
tion is how much room, how many mistakes? When is a mis-
take 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 recon-
sidered. 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.
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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 con-
cerns, 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.”
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