He got to his feet, then bent down and kissed me. “I love you.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
He kissed me again, and I kissed him back, one hand on his cheek, the other on the soft down at the back of his neck, pressing him toward me. “Love you, too,” I said.
THIRTY-SIX
“You missed last Sunday,” Cara said. I’d been at the Ronald McDonald House for forty-five minutes, and she hadn’t said a word to me. She’d just followed me into the kitchen and sat at the table with her arms folded across her chest, staring at me with her eyes narrowed while I did the dishes and put away the cereal boxes and sponged the counters clean of what looked like the aftermath of oatmeal cookies.
“I had to go somewhere,” I said, and tossed her a sponge. “Hey, do you want to help me out with this?”
“Not really,” she said, tilting her chair back on two legs.
“Don’t do that. You’re going to fall.”
“So what?” she asked. “I hear there’s a good hospital right nearby.”
“Ha ha ha.” I squirted more cleanser on the countertop and went back to attacking the dried-on brown sugar with my sponge. When the counter was as clean as it was going to get, I folded the dish towel next to the sink. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here last weekend.”
“Whatever,” said Cara.
“How’s your brother?” I asked. She shrugged. “How are your parents?”
She shrugged again. “They’re at the hospital. They sleep there most nights.”
I dried my hands. She tilted back in her chair, farther than she had before, staring at me, before she thumped back to the floor.
“Do you want to go outside?” I asked.
She looked out the window at the thick green leaves of a chestnut tree waving gently in the wind, and didn’t answer. “You’d be doing me a favor. I’m grounded. I’m not allowed out of the house except to go to school, and my bat mitzvah lessons, and to come here. So if we went out . . .” I looked out the window, making calculations about time and money and how much of each I had. “We could go to the coffee shop, or we could go to Cereality, or we could look at clothes at Urban Outfitters.”
“Why are you grounded?”
I pulled up a chair beside her. “I stole my mother’s credit card and went to Los Angeles.”
Her chair thumped down on the floor. “No way! What did you do? Did you see any movie stars? Did you go to Disney World?”
“Disneyland,” I corrected her. “Disney World’s in Florida.”
“So did you go? Did you go to Universal Studios? You went on an airplane all by yourself? I’ve never been on an airplane.” She stared up at the ceiling. “I guess I’ll get to go on one soon, though.”
“Really?” It seemed like an odd time for Cara and her family to be planning a trip.
“Well, maybe. You know, those Make-A-Wish people. Stupid Harry’ll probably ask to go to Sesame Place. You can drive there,” she said. She lifted her legs off the floor. Her chair tilted sharply backward. I jumped up and grabbed her before she hit the floor, surprised by how small she was, how light her body felt.
I set her chair onto the floor. “See?” I said. “I told you that was going to happen!”
She inched back toward the table. “So what’d you do in Los Angeles?”
I sat down again. “I went to meet my grandfather.”
Cara’s eyes were shining with interest. “What happened?”
“Not much,” I said. “He’s kind of a jerk.”
She pulled a ponytail holder out of her pocket and wrapped it around and around her index finger. “Oh.” She bent her head and mumbled something.
“Huh?”
“My brother,” she said. “I’m supposed to go see him.”
“Oh.” I got to my feet and started wiping a counter that I’d just wiped. “Are your parents coming to get you?”
“I guess I could wait for them.” She tilted her chair back on its legs again, and this time I didn’t stop her. “Maybe you could . . .”
“Could what?”
“Take me to the hospital. It’s visiting hours now.”
I felt my palms go cold. I hated hospitals. I had ever since I was a kid. Hospitals were where bad, painful things happened. “Don’t you need an adult to take you?”
She pursed her lips and pouted. “You went all the way to California all by yourself, and you won’t even walk me across the street to go to the hospital?”
When she put it like that, there was no excuse. Plus, I couldn’t be a baby forever—not with my bat mitzvah coming up. I told Deborah at the front desk where we were going. I got my backpack out of the closet, stuck my cell phone in my front pocket, and walked Cara across the street.
The hospital stood on a corner, a big building that stretched the length of an entire block, with ambulances lined up in front of the entrance and people clustered by the doors, smoking (some of them were in wheelchairs, with lit cigarettes in their hands and IV bags dangling from poles over their shoulders). Cara walked ahead of me with her head down and her arms swinging at her sides. “It’s the sixth floor,” she said.
“Wait,” I said. “Hang on.”
She stared up at me. “You don’t have to be scared,” she said. “It’s not catching or anything.”
“No, I . . . I just . . . Wait.” There was a fruit cart across the street. I waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and bought three oranges, better versions of the fruit that had dropped onto my grandfather’s lawn. For years I’d watched my mom go to the hospital to visit people, sick friends or ladies who’d just had babies. It’s always nice to bring something, she’d said.
We walked through the revolving doors into the lobby. Cara signed us in at the desk and got us stickers that said VISITOR and our names. We walked down the wide white hallways, over scuffed tile floors with empty gurneys parked on the sides. I took one of the oranges out of the bag and sniffed it, then held it in my hand, thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets underneath the skin.
The elevator doors slid open. I followed Cara’s pink shirt down the hallway to room 632. A little boy sat in the bed wearing a hospital gown and a Phillies cap. He had an IV in his arm and dark shadows under his eyes. His parents sat on either side of him, and there were cards spread over his lap. They were playing Concentration.
“Hi, Harry!” Cara sang out. I blinked in confusion, wondering where this cheerful, beaming little girl had come from as Cara crossed the room and kissed her brother. I smiled and said hello when she introduced me to Harry and her parents, who looked more tired than I’d ever seen two people look and still be awake. I sat quietly, perched on the edge of a radiator, thinking how maybe there were faces we only ever wore in front of our families, the ones who’d known us the longest and loved us the best.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Cara’s mother said to me, trying for a smile. “We’ve heard a lot about you. Let me find you a chair.”
“I’m okay here,” I said. I lined the oranges up on the windowsill. Someone had tied balloon Bert and Ernies to the curtain pulls, and there was a bouquet of daisies wilting in a vase. I filled the vase with fresh water. I untangled the strings of the balloons. Then I perched on the windowsill and watched them play cards under the fluorescent lights while nurses came in and out to check Harry’s temperature or peer at the screen on his IV. I stayed with them until the sun went down, until my oranges were the brightest things in the room.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I’d been digging in the garden when the call came. It was an unreasonably hot Sunday morning. Peter and I had slept late, then he’d gone to the office to catch up on paperwork, and I’d spent the morning outside, cutting back the roses, fertilizing the hydrangeas, replanting sweet peas and stargazer lilies.
It had been a quiet weekend. Samantha was in Pittsburgh at her brother’s wedding, which she’d finally, re
luctantly, decided to attend on her own. “How bad can it be?” I’d asked, helping her carry her bags to her car. “Don’t ask that if you don’t want the answer,” she’d said. I’d hugged her and told her to call if she needed me.
I was on my knees, up to my elbows in dirt when the phone started ringing. “Joy, can you get that?” I yelled toward the house. No answer. The phone kept ringing. I wiped my forehead on my shoulder. “Joy!” I shouted. Nothing. Maybe she’d left for the Ronald McDonald House. She’d already done her six weeks of bat mitzvah–mandated service and had just kept going. “What do you do?” I’d asked her, and she’d shrugged and said, “Dishes, mostly. And I listen to people, if they want to talk.”
I jogged over to the little table next to the gas grill. I had time to glance at the caller ID as I lifted the receiver to my ear. U OF P HOSP, it read, but it wasn’t Peter’s extension.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Krushelevansky?”
“Yes?” I said.
“This is Dr. Cronin at the University of Philadelphia Hospital. I’m calling from the emergency room. We need you to get here as quickly as possible.”
I was detached enough to think, even as I sank onto a white wicker chair next to the koi pond, that on some level I’d been waiting for this call for over thirteen years. In a voice that didn’t sound like mine, or even human, I heard myself asking, “Is it my daughter? Joy Krushelevansky? Did something happen? Is she—”
The voice—young, female, harried, worried—cut me off before I could finish. “We have a Peter Krushelevansky here. In the emergency room, ma’am, and it’s urgent that you come as soon as you can.”
I said, “Oh my God.” I said, “Yes, of course.” From my knees, on the bricks, where I’d somehow landed, I turned my head toward the doors and screamed my daughter’s name. No answer. I scribbled a note: At hospital, call cell. I told myself as I whizzed along Front Street, then up Lombard, that it could have been a mistake or a mix-up. Peter sometimes saw patients in the emergency room. He could be with a patient. It could all be a big misunderstanding. But as I turned the car onto Twentieth Street, then onto Walnut, I knew that hospitals didn’t make that kind of mistake. I knew it in my breath, in my bones, with every step I took through the shocking cool of the lobby and into the emergency room, as the doctor, who had blue eyes and freckles and the kind of lovely alabaster skin you have only, if you’re lucky, until you’re thirty, took my arm and led me to a chair beside the window.
It was a cardiac event. It was quick.
• • •
“So he’s . . .” I swallowed hard. It felt like my mouth was full of cold caramel. “Peter’s dead?”
Dr. Cronin patted my knee. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry.” I could see her hand on my knee, could observe its movements, but I couldn’t feel anything. It was as if I’d left my body, had floated up to the tiled ceiling and was looking down without feeling anything at all.
“Event,” I repeated. “That makes it sound like a party.” I laughed. “Was it catered?”
She stared at me. I wondered whether young Dr. Cronin had had a lot of experience with the bereaved, whether I was the first person she’d ever had to tell that a loved one had died in her care, and whether, for the rest of her working life, she’d expect every brand-new bereaved person to be my particular brand of spacey and strange. “I want to see him,” I added.
“Of course,” she said, not even trying to hide her relief. Was it catered was confusing. I want to see him she could deal with. “The nurses cleaned him up.”
“So you tried—”
“I’m so sorry,” she said again then repeated what she’d said before. It was a cardiac event. It was quick. He was dead by the time he’d gotten to the emergency room, and no, there were no symptoms, and no, there were no signs, no way of knowing, no way of telling. He’d had a stomachache, his administrative assistant, Dolores, had told them, and he’d put his head down on his desk, and when she went to check on him to see if he wanted some water or Alka-Seltzer or just to lie down, he was unconscious. Dr. Cronin said cardiac event again, until I just wanted to shake her and say, Heart attack, just call it a heart attack! She said quick. Her voice was like a radio station fading out of range as I drove away. He didn’t . . . Such a wonderful . . . All of us who worked here . . .
I watched from my perch on the ceiling as my body got up off the chair and lurched down the hallway. I observed my hand pushing back the curtain and my legs crossing the green-and-white tiled floor over to the bed where my husband lay.
Someone had pulled a white sheet up to his chin. His eyes were closed, and his hands had been folded on top of the sheet, on his chest, and whatever tiny spark of hope that still existed—that this was all some monumental mix-up, that maybe my father had come back to Philadelphia and that it had been Dr. Shapiro, not Dr. Krushelevansky, who’d had the cardiac party—guttered briefly and then went out forever. Peter looked like he was sleeping, but when I bent closer I saw it wasn’t like that at all. His body was still here, more or less the same, but Peter, my husband of eleven years, the love of my life, was gone.
“Oh no,” I heard. “Oh no.” The voice came from the doorway. I turned and saw Dolores, who’d baked him biscotti every December since I’d known him. She stood at the edge of the room with her hands bunching up the neckline of her blouse. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”
“It’s all right,” I said, and patted her arm before going back to the bed. My hands, as I smoothed the sheet over his chest, were dirty; the back of my wrist was bleeding from where I’d gotten slashed with a thorn. I bent over him, then knelt in front of his bed, the way I’d knelt in front of the roses.
My cell phone rang. I yanked it out of my pocket with nerveless fingers and let it clatter to the floor. “Cannie?” asked Samantha’s disembodied voice. “Can you hear me? Listen, you won’t believe it! I met a guy. Here! In Pittsburgh! At the wedding! There’s some kind of magicians’ convention at the hotel . . .”
Dr. Cronin must have picked up the phone from the floor where I’d dropped it and carried it outside. I don’t know what she told Samantha. I don’t know where Dolores went. I didn’t hear anything, couldn’t see anything, except my husband’s body on the table, my dirty hands, grimy fingernails on the clean white sheet, my mouth warm against the cool curve of his ear. “Peter,” I whispered low, so that only he could hear. “Cut it out. You’re scaring everyone. Wake up. Come home.”
“Mrs. Krushelevansky?”
Someone took me by the shoulders and guided me into a chair. Wake up, I whispered again, knowing that he wouldn’t, that this wasn’t a fairy tale, that no kiss, no wish, no amount of love could bring him back to life. Peter. Oh, Peter, I thought . . . and then, How will I tell Joy? I pressed my fist against my mouth, tasting dirt and salt as I started to cry.
• • •
Cannie.
I groaned and rolled over with my eyes still shut. I had been having the sweetest dream about Peter, the first time we’d slept together, in his old apartment.
Cannie.
“Five minutes,” I muttered with my eyes still shut. Not fair. Not fair. Did I really want to live in a world without him? Oh no. No, indeed. No más. Maybe I’d just stay in bed.
Cannie, wake up.
Fuck that, I thought. Fuck that noise. I had a black satin eye mask with ALMOST FAMOUS written on the front in sequins—Maxi had given it to me as a joke, years before. I had blackout blinds on the windows. I had frozen pizzas and frozen waffles and frozen vodka in the freezer, money in the bank, and many pairs of comfortable pajamas. I could stay up here a long, long time.
I heard a door opening, then shutting. Snatches of conversation, female voices. Do you think and Should we try. I yanked the comforter over my head. Peter wasn’t dead. We were together in his apartment. There was light streaming through the blinds, dust motes dancing in the air. He was sitting on the couch, legs spread, leaning back. Let me see you, he’d said. Take me dancing first, I’d sai
d. I could hear his breath coming faster as he’d said, I’ll take you wherever you want, but I want to see you right now.
Cannie?
I squeezed my eyes shut. I was in Peter’s old apartment. I was twenty-eight years old, three months postpartum, half out of my mind with anger and desire. He was on the couch and I was standing above him, thumbs hooked into the waistband of my jeans, bra still on but unhooked in the back, hair bed-tossed, lips swollen and parted. He was looking up at me like I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. If I tried hard enough, if I blocked out everything, I could feel the way the temperature changed as I leaned closer to his bare chest, I could see a trace of my lip gloss on his shoulder, I could will myself back to that apartment and stay there as long as I had to. I could stay there and never come back.
• • •
Rise, huntress.
I opened my eyes on the bone-white sands of the plains of Said’dath Kahr. A hot wind blew my hair into my eyes. I sat up, blinking, brushing grains of sand from my palms. Lyla Dare stood over me with her back to an empty firepit, smoke curling into the darkening sky behind her.
“So you’ve come,” she said.
I looked around at Lyla’s desert, an ocean of white beneath the twinned moons. There were the caves, and there the oasis, just the way I’d imagined them for the last ten years. Everything was where I’d left it. A thousand stars, pinpricks of light in the darkness, wheeled in the sky. Lyla sank onto the ground beside me, twisting her hair into a careless knot at the nape of her neck. “Will you stay?” she asked.
It was a thought. To live here forever, to go with Lyla on her adventures through the cosmos, to kick ass and take names and never look back and never go home.
Lyla gave me a slanting half-smile and pulled a skin bag from her shoulder. I watched as she poured the wine into embellished gold cups. I recognized them from my own bat mitzvah. They were the gift that my congregation’s Sisterhood had given me for when I’d celebrate Shabbat in my own home, light my own candles, pour my own wine. If I lifted one and ran my thumb underneath it, I would feel my own name engraved there.
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