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 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 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.”