Page 43 of What You left in Me
“I hope so,” I say, then because honesty is punching holes in my politesse. “I’ve never felt more useless. I don’t know what to do with my hands if they can’t bring him back to us.”
“Hold mine,” he says.
He is, truly, the perfect fiancé. He is checking every box and then drawing new boxes just to be thorough. And yet there’s that itch again, like I’m wearing something beautiful in a size a half too small.
I make myself release Richard’s fingers (God, I hate it) and let Julian’s palm anchor me. He rubs slow circles on my wrist in the exact tempo my anxiety would like to be and for a whole sixty seconds my head is quiet enough to hear the monitors.
Later, when Mom corrals the doctor and we gather in the small consultation room with the about-to-ruin-your-day chairs, Julian sits close, knee warm against mine. The doctor talks in calm, even sentences: the hemorrhage, the careful waiting, the ifs-and-buts andWe hope’s andI’m sorry’s he’s clearly delivered a thousand times.
I stare at the doctor’s tie, a navy field with tiny white dots, and think stupidly about star charts we made in eighth grade science.
Afterwards, when the doctor disappears to go be both human and machine for someone else, Mom returns to work.
“We will manage visitors,” she says into her phone. “No unvetted cousins. No casseroles. Someone tell Mrs. Harrow I will not be photographed in a hallway, there isn’t a soul in the world who could look remotely flattering in this damned lighting.”
She isn’t heartless. She is clinging to the one thing she knows how to do: orchestrate chaos until it curtsies. I leave her to it. If she stops moving, she’ll shatter. I know that kind of woman. She raised me. Well, not exactly. I remember once there being a time she was warm and gentle…
No. I’m not going there. Not today.
I return to Richard’s bedside. The room is smaller without everyone else in it. It’s just him and me and the kind of silence that’s full of content. I curl into the chair by the bed, tuck my feet up like I’m sixteen again and hiding in the library’s sunny window with a book I pretended not to like because the boy I liked thought poetry was for girls. I take his hand. The machine whirls. The world outside this room makes no sense. Here, at least, the rules are clear: breathe, don’t stop.
Julian, bless his heart, only stops by to bring me coffee—not from the machine, but from the café down the street. He doesn’t intrude, letting me have time with my stepfather. He just kisses my hair and says he’ll check on my mother.
“I’ll keep her from murdering a journalist,” he adds, and I smile because I can picture it.
“Thank you.”
He leans his forehead to mine for half a second. “You don’t have to thank me,” he says.
He exits, efficient and purposeful.
My eyes sting because in any other story this would be the story: girl with complicated mother and good man finds safety and earns a quiet life. Roll credits. Happy sighs.
I am, apparently, a sequel no one asked for.
I rest my cheek on the bedrail and let my brain do the thing I hate: it wanders where I’ve asked it not to.
Finn.
I haven’t seen him since the hospital yesterday. When the doctor told us Richard may not wake up and Finn stood like a statue then, silent, jaw carved, eyes doing the math nobody elsewanted to see. He didn’t say a word when the doctor said the hardest ones. He just absorbed it like iron absorbs heat.
Then he vanished, which is a talent he’s always had: making himself absence-shaped so you don’t notice you’ve rearranged around him.
Your step-brother, Ari. He’s your step-brother!I tell myself for the fiftieth time.
Yet, it doesn’t seem to register.
My chest does that stupid tight thing. It’s not even a full emotion; it’s more like a pressure change before weather. I shouldn’t be thinking about him. I should be thinking of Richard’s laugh at the wisteria, of Julian’s eggs, of Mom’s brittle mercy. I should be grateful and focused and tidy. Instead, I’m a mess of want and fear and love and something darker that I don’t know how to name without getting myself grounded until I’m forty.
“You’d hate this,” I tell Richard. “All this drama. You’d tell me to go for a run and take Penny for tacos and stop trying to control people who won’t be controlled. You’d say, ‘What’s the poem say about love, Ari?’ and I’d roll my eyes and quote Neruda at you until you threw me a dish towel and told me to stir the sauce.”
The ventilator answers with a hush. A nurse passes the door and gives me a sympathetic smile that doesn’t condescend. I love her for it.
Mom pops her head in.
“The Chronicle is running the statement we wrote,” she reports, in a tone that makes it clear that this is a victory in her mind. She takes in the sight of me with my feet tucked up, sweater sleeves yanked over my hands like I’m trying to hide in my own clothes. For a second her face softens like sheremembers being twenty-five and tired. And then, like it never happened, she’s back to work. “Julian has gone to fetch us something to eat. The machine here is an insult.”
“Be nice to the machine,” I say. “It’s doing its best.”