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.”