The Evolution of Man

by Skye Warren

  “No,” I say even though I don’t know what I want.

  A good daughter would already know what’s on the Death Plan. I should have been the one to call the ambulance and gather everyone. A good daughter would have forgiven her mother for being terrible at love, even though I didn’t realize until this second how angry I was.

  Why didn’t she make it work with my father? Why did she have to choose someone so rich and emotionally unavailable in the first place? Why couldn’t she ever settle down? Surely there was a man somewhere in the country who would have loved and cherished a beautiful woman, even if she would never be accepted by the rich society wives.

  I had to experience love to understand the impossibility of it. I had to stumble so that I could forgive my mother for falling again and again. We don’t mean to; we don’t want to. The ground opens up underneath us, and there’s nowhere to go but down.

  “Where is it?” I say, my voice shaky but sure.

  Sutton looks concerned. “Where’s what?”

  “The Death Plan. I need to see the Death Plan. I should have read it when she first asked me to, but it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that I read it now.”

  A notch forms between Avery’s eyebrows. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she says in what I assume is a soothing tone. “Freida and the hospital have everything taken care of.”

  “I still need to see it.”

  There is a grace in accepting defeat that I haven’t acquired. I only know how to fight, how to protest, how to stage an event so big that an entire city bands together to save a library.

  Right now I’m surrounded by the things my mother dislikes the most—the smell of antiseptic and doctors. Because she learned how to accept death with grace.

  A piece of paper appears in front of me, a little crinkled from its journey, darkened spots appearing where my tears mar the ink. I struggle to hold it steady enough to read.

  Now I understand how much bravery it took for her to write down what she wanted to feel, to hear, to see. Now I understand what it means to surrender—not weakness but strength.

  I swallow hard, turning away from Avery and Gabriel.

  Turning away from Sutton.

  “Thank you for coming,” I tell them because I feel an immense gratitude. And the incredible certainty that I’m going to be alone. “According to this we’ll be here for some time… waiting. You don’t have to wait here. I’m sure she didn’t want that.”

  Which isn’t exactly what the Death Plan says.

  “Harper.” Avery whispers my name, her voice pained.

  She already knows what’s on the paper. My mother made sure that I wouldn’t be alone for this. She knows I love Avery like a sister. And she knows I have feelings for Sutton.

  “I’m not leaving you here,” Sutton says because he doesn’t know.

  My throat aches. “Most of her organs are torn up by the cancer. But her eyes are fine. She’s donating her corneas to someone who needs them.”

  “It’s a good thing,” Avery says, but she doesn’t sound sure.

  “It means she has to die in the hospital, because they have to remove them right away. So we have to stay here until it happens. It could take hours. Days. Weeks.”

  “Jesus, Harper.” Sutton sounds angry, which strikes me as odd. Nothing much makes him angry, except maybe loving Christopher. “She’s going to make you watch her die?”

  That makes me turn to look at him, a sad smile turning my lips. “What do you think I’ve been doing? It started before I even came to Tanglewood, before I even saw the library—the cancer that would kill her. There was only one way for this to end.”

  The Death Plan requests the presence of Avery, of course.

  And my friend Bea, who won’t come because she can’t.

  It requests the presence of Sutton, who played gin over milk and cookies. These are all the people I love. And right there in black-and-white—Christopher Bardot, the man my father used to hurt her. Only now, as I stand in the overbright hospital hallway, do I fully realize what it cost her. Only now do I realize what she spent.

  My mother’s in that hospital bed. It’s my personal rock bottom. I’m lying at the bottom of a pond, looking up at my reflection. And there’s only one face I see.

  One person I want by my side at the hardest moment of my life. He isn’t here.

  The beep-beep-beep of the machines drills into my head. It sinks into my soul until all I hear is the sound of beeping when I remember doing yoga with my mom in the mornings before school. Beeping when we watched old movies together. Beeping when I called her from Daddy’s yacht and told her about Christopher for the first time. Don’t get too close, she told me then. It’s only temporary. I’m bloodshot by the time morning comes, splashing my face with water so I can see straight.

  “Didn’t you get any sleep?” Avery asks, gently admonishing. Gabriel insisted she go home at midnight, and I supported that. There was no reason everyone should have insistent beeps playing on a loop in their overtired brains, even when they go to the bathroom where it’s quiet.

  She bustles around with a calm I can only admire, setting down a fresh coffee in front of me. Picking up the ten thousand pieces of Styrofoam that I pulled apart from my last coffee.

  She cared for her father when he was hurt.

  “How did you do it?” I ask.

  “The same way you are,” she says. “I was strong when I had to be.”

  Except she also had to worry about paying the bills. And about someone wanting revenge on her family. About selling her virginity to the highest bidder. God. My problems are small in comparison, but looking at my mother in that hospital bed, so frail and tied up with tubes and wires she never wanted, I feel like I’m falling apart. “I don’t feel strong.”

  A hand covers mine, squeezing softly. “It never feels that way when you’re in it. And then you come out the other side and you realize that you survived.”

  “You mean when my mother’s dead. That’s what the other side looks like.”

  Her face falls. “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” I turn my hand over to grasp hers. “I’m stressed, but I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

  She’s only trying to console me, but I won’t let myself be consoled. I can’t let myself be consoled at a time like this, because the pain is the only thing keeping me grounded right now.

  There’s a small voice in my head that says I’m more like my father than I ever want to admit. When things got hard, he left his wife and found a new one. He shipped his daughter back to boarding school. And he pushed away his wife and his daughter in his will. I’m sitting here in this cold, sterile room, and I don’t know what the easy way out looks like right now—but the weak part of me wants it.

  A nurse comes into the room, checks vital signs and adds a bag to the IV drip, her smile taut with the knowledge that there’s nothing she can really do. We’re all just waiting for someone to die so we can harvest her eyeballs. That’s the grim reality of the Death Plan.

  “When did Gabriel get back?” I ask because I feel like lashing out.

  Because I can hurt my friend as much as I can hurt myself. She flinches. “A couple nights ago. I didn’t want you to worry about me. You have enough going on.”

  There’s a fracture in my heart. The hard stone is only a casing, and once it cracks, I’m back to being fully human. Fully vulnerable. “Oh, Avery. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t,” she whispers, fierce in her loyalty. That’s Avery to the end.

  “I should go punch him in the face. That’s what I bring to the table. A fight. Except I don’t know how to swing at a hungry cancer cell that’s eating my mother. I don’t know how to punish myself for being alive when she’s so close to dying.

  “You definitely shouldn’t punch him in the face,” she says with a sigh. “I just wish I knew what he wanted. He’s right there, standing probably a few feet from the door, but he’s so far away.”

  I rub my eyes
, but they’re filled with grit. “I know this is going to sound dumb but… did you ask him what the problem is? Like really ask him?”

  “Yes,” she says, but the word is drawn out as if maybe she didn’t.

  That makes me set down the cup of coffee. “Avery.”

  She looks guilty. “I did ask him, okay? I ask him almost every day over the phone if anything is bothering him, and he says no, or just work, or is there something on your mind, Avery? But then I’m afraid to say yes, afraid to push him that much farther, because what if I don’t like what comes next?” Her voice drops to a whisper. “What if that’s the end of us?”

  Her hazel eyes are so hopeful, as if I might have the answer, but I’ve never been able to say things with words. That’s why the library is both my foil and my greatest ambition, the thing just out of reach. “You know the first thing I learned as an artist?”

  “That you’re brilliant?”

  “Hah. No. I had to learn about colors before I could make anything with them. If you want to make a color brighter, you put it next to its complementary color, its opposite on the color wheel. It doesn’t actually change the color, but it looks that way.”

  “The fact that Gabriel and I worked well together was just an optical illusion?”

  “But if you mix those complementary colors together, they create the darkest shadows.”

  She scrunches her nose. “Please tell me this analogy isn’t about sex.”

  “Of course it’s about sex. Art is always about sex. That’s the second thing I learned as an artist.”

  “Only the second thing? Didn’t you get into an exclusive summer program at the Harvard Art School when you were in middle school?”

  “And I had this crush on Mr. Mendocino that gave me quite an education. The important thing is that complementary colors don’t want to mix together. They want to be next to each other.”

  “You’re saying that Gabriel is pulling back because we’re getting too close?”

  “No, Avery. I’m saying you are. You’re determined to find something wrong, and I think it’s because you’re scared. Of what, I have no idea. He’s a dangerous bastard, sure, but you knew that when he bid on your virginity, and you still fell in love with him.”

  Her eyes go bright with tears. “I do love him.”

  “I know,” I say softly because I know she would do anything for the man standing outside. And he would do anything for her, including drive her to the hospital at five a.m. in the morning after leaving only a few hours before that. “What are you afraid of, Avery?”

  “My dissertation is finished.”

  “Oh. That’s good, right?”

  “It’s been finished. I told everyone I was taking the semester away from school to work on it, but it was done before I left. It was one thing to do the long-distance, constant-travel thing while I was in school, but Gabriel has a condo in Hong Kong and a building in Dubai, in addition to his mansion in Tanglewood. There are a million places he needs to be, but none of them are in a sleepy, snooty college town.”

  “Why would you be in a college town—Oh. You want to teach?”

  “I don’t have official offers right now, of course, but my advisor at Smith College is already begging me to stay. And I advised on this grant about Feminism and Families in the Trojan War at Berkley, and I would love to work with them.”

  “Oh, Avery. Do you think Gabriel wouldn’t follow you there?”

  “He would.”

  “Then what’s the problem.”

  “That’s just it. He would follow me someplace that isn’t good for him, that wouldn’t make him happy. And how do I know that? Because he isn’t happy now, and he isn’t telling me. What kind of future is that? Him getting quieter and quieter while I traipse around academia, doing whatever I want?”

  “Honestly I love that you can call writing ten thousand pages on mythological ovaries traipsing, but I think you really need to talk to Gabriel. What if it’s actually his greatest dream to live in a snooty college town, wearing a black turtleneck and sipping espresso with his pinky finger up?” At her dubious look, I say, “Okay, probably not. But I still think you should talk to him.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she says, but that probably means she’s going to stare at him and sigh over him and then sacrifice what she loves so she can be with him. It’s almost enough to make me mad, but the truth is, I don’t know the answer. What if two people love each other but they want different things? What if love is nothing but an endless wheel of compromise?

  What if they mix and mix and mix until both of them are shadows of their former selves?

  I grab the chart at the foot of the hospital bed and flip to an empty page, scribbling down some notes. “Can you go home and get this stuff from the house? I need a change of clothes.”

  There’s more than clothes on the list. A portable speaker. The latest copy of Mom’s meditation magazine. All of it might actually get used in the next few hours, but that isn’t the only reason I’m sending her. I need the steady beep-beep-beep as much as I despise it. I’m going insane in this room, a fast and efficient one-way trip to despair, and I don’t need company for the ride. At least not in the form of a sweet, steady friend.

  I wait until she’s gone before I pull out my cell phone.

  Christopher does not answer his phone.

  “It’s me,” I say to a thousand volts of mindless electricity. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here. How does it feel like my heart is being burned right here in my chest, on fire, but I’m not doing anything but sitting here? I need you to… God, Christopher. I just need you. Where are you? Why won’t you come?”

  There’s a commotion in the hallway, and I close my eyes to shut it out. It doesn’t go away, though; it gets louder. Voices filter through the fog in my head like rays of too-bright sun.

  “The ER is downstairs!”

  “She’s not here to see a doctor,” says a haggard voice in a smooth accent I recognize. “She’s here to visit someone. Room three hundred forty-two.”

  That’s where I’m sitting, except why would Hugo have come with Bea? Oh God. I rush into the hallway in time to see my good friend retch into a waste bin. “I’m fine,” she mumbles, clearly miserable. And very pregnant. “Ignore me. I’m fine.”

  “Oh my God.” I lean down to stroke her red hair. “I hate you right now. I can’t believe you left the hotel for this. You shouldn’t have, but I love you.”

  She laughs weakly. “I thought I could make it.”

  Beatrix Cartwright has been severely agoraphobic since the death of her parents over a decade ago, not even leaving the penthouse hotel where she practically raised herself ever since. She’s been making strides lately—short visits to the Den, to the museum, to a park. Those required a great deal of planning, not a phone call in the middle of the night.

  Her usually pale skin has turned a deathly white with a faint greenish tinge. Her eyes are wide in her face when she looks up at me. I suspect her current state has way more to do with being out of her home so unexpectedly, but it can’t be good for her. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

  I think she’s apologizing for my mother’s condition, but I’m not ready to deal with that, so I pretend it’s still about throwing up. “Nonsense. Hugo is the one who should be sorry. I can’t believe he let you leave in this condition.”

  Hugo Bellmont is perpetually cool and effortlessly suave pretty much every time I’ve met him, but he looks frayed at the edges for maybe the first time ever. His hair is all out of place, his shirt wrinkled. Lines of stress bracket his mouth. “She insisted,” he says, and in the hoarseness of his voice I hear every argument he must have made to her.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I say, and as I say it, I realize it’s true. Part of me wants to shove my head into the ground, but that’s the cowardly part. The stronger side of me wants my friends to help me through this. “Come inside the room. If you throw up again I’ll hold your hair back.”

/>   I help her inside, where she looks at my mother’s still form on the hospital bed with such a severe expression that I wonder if she’s going to throw up again. She must be remembering her own mother. The plane crash. “My God,” I whisper. “Was your last memory at the hospital?”

  “Close,” Hugo says, his expression grim.

  “I’m completely fine,” Bea says, her voice weak and very much not fine. It’s only a testament to her loyalty as a friend that she’s holding it together, but I feel the fine tremors shake her where I’m helping her stand.

  “Sit down at least.” The gray cloth chair has questionable stains and is probably permanently molded into the shape of my ass, but at least she stops swaying when she’s there.

  Hugo kneels down beside her, a look of worry on his handsome, angular face. There’s nothing of the seducer in him now. He looks elemental, all the walls he’s built up torn down to reveal a love so raw it hurts to look at it. “Rest, ma belle. We’re here now, so you can rest for a moment.”

  “You must be dehydrated.” The last inch of coffee in my Styrofoam turned cold and lumpy a while ago. “Sutton went down to the gift shop in search of food a few minutes ago. I’m sure he’ll come back with a water bottle or something, or we can send him out again.”

  Sutton will know how to fix this. That’s what he’s done for me the past few hours, for the whole time I’ve known him—found the sharp points in my world and smoothed them down. There’s a sense that I’m coasting along in this calm new landscape, closing my eyes as the wind hits my face, blind to the dangers around me.

  It’s a relief after facing off with a man who turned every edge into a blade.

  Bea faced a severe anxiety attack in order to be by my side, and even though I would have told her not to come, I’m touched. In contrast Christopher Bardot cannot even be moved to answer his phone. Sorry about missing the Death Plan, he could have sent in a text message, like a sad RSVP to a party he wouldn’t be attending.