2012
Bea dreams of him.
She dreams the kind of dreams you shouldn’t have about a man so close to God, or at least that’s how it feels when she wakes up in the morning with her skin taut around her body and her pulse racing. He phones her at night when she’s most alone, lying in her bedroom, in her empty house—phones, but never ever texts—to check on her. Her broken heart called to him in the hospital and it calls to him now but she needn’t despair; God is holding a place for her.
It’s all she thinks about and it terrifies her nearly out of her mind, but she cannot deny her part in God’s plan and if it seems too soon to be imagining a new future this close to the ruins of her past, what else should she do? Bury herself with her parents?
They would want her to live.
* * *
She’s been asking for you for the last hour, Patty says.
The hospital is decorated for Valentine’s Day, crude red and pink construction paper hearts taped to the wall connected by paper chains. Bea hates it, but not as much as she hated the hospital in December with its garish, tinseled-out trees and candy-cane lights signifying their first Christmas without their parents.
She’s always asking for me, Bea snaps. She doesn’t know what it is about Patty that brings it out in her. Patty doesn’t have to be here, but chooses to be here, helping Bea navigate the overwhelming amount of decision-making and paperwork that accompanies devastation like this. Patty is elderly, dignified, stoic and sharp. When Bea asked her why they’d never met, Patty had replied, Your mother and I had different lives. It was enough for me to know you were living yours. Patty’s generation is duty-bound, answers to need. Now there is a need.
You have to be here more, she says to Bea. Where on earth do you go?
Nothing prepared Bea for the brutality of Lo’s recovery or the space it allowed her to count her own losses. They’re cast in sharp relief in the hospital where the air is so thin and hard to breathe. Sometimes she walks Morel alone for hours and sometimes she goes to the cemetery to weep over her parents’ grave until the aftermath finally calls her back. She’s grateful for those brief moments of reprieve she finds in Casey, who seems to appear out of nowhere, offering her coffee and a shoulder to cry on. Grateful for those nights her phone rings and it’s him.
Nowhere, she tells Patty.
* * *
When Bea steps inside Lo’s room, Lo is pretending to sleep. The knot in her forehead gives her away. When Lo is really asleep, the drugs smooth her face but for the hot pink scar torn through the landscape of her left cheek.
Lo can’t seem to let herself go anymore, often has panic attacks when night falls and closing her eyes is the expected thing to do. Her time in the ICU, on the ventilator, muddled her reality in ways Bea didn’t know were possible. Lo had hallucinations. Now she has nightmares about the hallucinations. Sometimes she gropes, blindly, for whatever hand there is to hold, sweaty and feverish, and tells Bea there’s a man at the end of her bed, reaching for her face—or was. She’s afraid of all the things she’s not sure really happened to her.
Bea feels untethered to her body when she’s around Lo, who is so trapped within her own, imprisoned by its pain. Her fractured collarbone and kneecaps and left elbow. Her broken left hand. They opened Lo up immediately after the road and ripped out her spleen, then sewed the infection in, the infection that nearly killed her and left her kitten weak, among myriad other things. And then there’s the person the loss and trauma turned Lo into.
Bea doesn’t yet understand the girl who survived the car accident, but quickly came to the heart-shattering conclusion that the sister she knew died with their mom and dad. The first month after Lo came back to herself, Bea tried to wrap her in the comforts of the past, would whisper memories of the two of them in her ear, tell her of her birth, of the very first time Lo said her name and Lo would listen to these stories and more, expressionless, and at the end of every one tell Bea she didn’t remember, she didn’t know what Bea was talking about. This resulted in scary neurological tests to make sure the accident hadn’t robbed even more from Lo than they could see. But it turned out Lo could remember. She just didn’t want to.
Bea sits in the chair next to Lo’s bed and reaches out, wrapping her hand around Lo’s bony wrist. Lo has always been small, but not like this. She’s lost so much muscle and fat, she looks like death. Bea would never admit it to anyone, but it repulses her.
Lo lets the charade go on briefly before wrenching her hand from Bea’s and turning her face away. She must be having a migraine, because in the wake of the movement, she chokes on the air, then whimpers, then starts to cry. Lo is supposed to tell the doctors when she feels one coming on and Bea suspects Lo let this one happen just to punish her for her absence.
Bea reaches for Lo again.
I know, honey, I know …
No, Lo whispers, you don’t.
Bea thought Lo would be relieved to have one person left in the way that she was so relieved to have one person left but Lo is so, so angry. She woke up and her parents were dead, had been dead. She woke up in a body so frail and weak and on fire. She looks at Bea and Bea can see the question in her eyes: Why? And Bea knows no answer would be good enough for Lo.
Not even if it came from God himself.
* * *
Lev is patient.
When Bea asked him if he would wait for her until Lo was better, he told her he wouldn’t have expected her sooner.
Every day, she wishes it was sooner.
Bea is tired of the hospital, where Lo is angry and in pain and there is nothing she can do and she makes no difference. She’s tired of Patty’s reproach, the expectation that Bea’s sense of duty be greater than her own need. And then there’s Lev on the phone, nearly every night, reminding her of the work ahead and how incomplete it would be without her, how essential she is to the fight. They need her ferocity, her impulsiveness and her beautiful, unselfish heart. It makes Bea feel like she can breathe to hear that, and she makes him say it to her over and over again. Patty and Lo, they both look at Bea like she’s selfish.
God wouldn’t choose someone selfish. God is infallible, he tells her. The first time Bea put her heart into the universe, it was for the sake of saving someone else.
That isn’t selfish. It’s pure.
God has given me revelation, Lev says, and then he tells Bea something she has yet to hear from the doctors herself: Lo will be discharged by the end of the month. It’s sooner than Bea thought. There was supposed to be one more calendar picture to go.
But it comes to pass, as all his revelations do.
* * *
Lo’s recovery will continue at home. Patty will assume Lo’s care at her house in Ossining. Patty tells Bea Lo needs more than Bea can give her. Lo needs someone to make sure she’s eating and taking her meds, needs someone to address the various indignities of her injuries with the businesslike affect Patty is so goddamn good at. Lo needs someone to speak for her pain when she can’t or refuses to do it for herself. Patty has the time. Patty has the money. Patty has the space. Patty lives near a better hospital.
Lo will go with Patty.
You’re welcome to stay with us, Patty tells her, but I don’t expect you will.