A car passed them in the parking lot, its headlights illuminating 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 cheating 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, 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 question is how much room, how many mistakes? When is a mistake 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 reconsidered. 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.
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 concerns, 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.”
“Okay,” Maya said.
“They did an MRI and an EEG. There’s almost no brain activity at all anymore.” The words rubbed at her throat. She saw a jagged sadness in the eyes of her friends, reflecting her own. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she said suddenly. “I need water.”
She stumbled over to a water fountain in this strange body of hers. Cried as she drank. Tears mixed with the splash. She wiped her mouth, her eyes. Turned to her friends behind her, looking for hope, finding only more sorrow.
“I just need a minute,” she said. She had to pull it together before she saw Henry. She was so afraid that he would sense her fear, that she would cause him distress. The doctors would say this was impossible. It worried her anyway.
“Do you want to maybe go to the chapel?” Renee said. “It’s quiet. Might be a good place to think.”
Hannah nodded, wiped new tears at the fleeting, absurd hope that she could pray this away with magic words. That if God existed, he might somehow...
They located the chapel behind a simple white door, a small wooden sign above it. Hannah hesitated. “I don’t believe,” she said. “In God. I used to...”
“You don’t have to,” Renee said. “It can be whatever you need.” She opened the door and Hannah entered.
The room was small and dim, quiet as a cave. Rows of benches lined up in strict formation, electric candles cast their muted glow on the walls.
Hannah slid in beside Blue, Maya beside her, Renee on the end. A bubble of silence surrounded them, the room a held breath. The profound stillness evoked in Hannah a primal sense of being supported, if not by a deity, then by a humankind that understood the need for places like this. Places to contain anguish. Built across thousands of years to carry people through.
Hannah closed her eyes, falling into the deep quiet, letting herself be held by it, tender and raw. She became aware of a dense grief in the room, the reverberation of all the desperate prayers that had been issued from these benches. She listened, tuned to the frequency of universal despair. To her surprise, it felt like love and her chest filled with it. She felt love for all the hurting strangers who had preceded her here, for the humanity that had brought them to their knees. And somehow their love echoed back.
She leaned into the love and the grief. Got down on her own knees, called to do so by her need to surrender to her helplessness—to send an SOS into the void and hope that it would land in the right hands. Her friends kneeled beside her. Their eyes met. They bowed their heads. Maya’s shoulder brushed against hers and Hannah edged away to give her space; but a moment later she felt Maya lean into her again and she realized it wasn’t a mistake. She leaned back.
Hannah paused, trying to find the words for her prayer. To find an answer to her question. How could she be asked to give up hope? How could anyone know when it was time to do that? To pull the plug on a person? On a life?
She took a breath and in her head she began. I’m not perfect, but I’m trying. I know I don’t deserve any better than anyone else. And I know you have other things, other people, to worry about. Bigger problems. But... She paused, the thought unbearable. Please don’t take anything more. Please don’t ask me to do this. I can’t. I can’t.