I stare at her. This isn’t just a lifeline, it’s an entire rescue operation.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”
“This isn’t some Disney happy ending,” she warns. “You’re gonna be working your ass off to get your shit together.”
“I’m ready.” I hold the little pamphlet to my chest. “Thank you.”
“Thank yourself.” Jo grins, then stands and crosses to the doorway. She pulls open the door, then turns around and holds up a finger. “Day one.”
I nod. “Day one.”
I finally understand the ending of The Little Prince. All my life I thought he had to die so that he could leave his body, which he said was too heavy to take with him the distance he needed to go. He couldn’t leave Earth and get back to his asteroid otherwise. I thought it was like going to Heaven. But now I realize what he was trying to tell the pilot: Sometimes to find your way back home, you need to surrender the person you no longer are so that you can step into the person you’re supposed to become.
I shall look as if I were dead, he said, and that will not be true.
That will not be true.
* * *
Drew is curled up on a couch in the waiting room, sleeping.
The TV mounted to the wall across from him is playing a rerun of Golden Girls on mute. (Life goals.)
It’s three in the morning, and the room is empty.
I cross to him, kneel down.
I have brushed my teeth and washed my face and changed into the clean clothes Aunt Nora brought for me. I am wearing Mom’s rose perfume. I don’t want him to remember me covered in vomit, topless because another guy took off my shirt, surrounded by paramedics.
I watch Drew sleep for a little bit. Those dark lashes against pale skin. His hair longer than usual, messy. Raven’s wings.
He’s kicked off his shoes and there’s a little hole in his sock and I decide that if the stars are aligned for us, and even if they aren’t, I am going to buy him socks. He deserves some taking care of. This boy who has been so abandoned, orphaned not by a wave, but by his parents’ addiction and indifference. Mae’s the numbers nerd, but I know this much: When love is one-sided, the math doesn’t check out. I don’t want to only take. I want to start giving, too. Micah said he couldn’t carry me. Drew said he could. Whether it’s Drew I spend my life with, or someone I haven’t met yet, I know this: I want to be in the kind of relationship where we carry each other.
I reach out, but before I even touch him, he takes a deep breath, my wrist so close to his nose, drenched in my rose scent.
“Hannah,” he murmurs, still asleep.
For a minute, just a minute, I see him as an old man, with thick gray hair and a sweater and glasses slipping down his nose. My heart gets ten sizes bigger. Then it breaks into dozens or maybe hundreds of pieces. Because I know what’s going to happen when he wakes up, what I’m going to say, and I hate it. I wonder if you can do kintsukuroi with hearts, too. Fill all the cracks in with gold.
Drew opens his eyes. Blinks.
He sits up and we look at each other for the longest time, all these months apart somehow having made the current between us stronger, and I throw my arms around him, hug him so, so tight. Drew presses his hand against the back of my head, wraps his other arm around my waist, and lets out a long, slow breath. Being in his arms is like lying on the beach, soaking up all that warm sand after a cold swim.
Maybe I don’t have to do what I came here to do. Maybe I can stay on this beach a little longer. Forever, even.
When I let go, he pulls me close to him on the hard, dirty hospital couch, and I tell him about what I learned under the wave, about Mom and her boat pose, about being enough. He listens, those gray-and-gold eyes of his never leaving mine. They are almost the same color as the Japanese pottery Jo gave me.
“I love you,” I say, when I’m finished. “Not just because you helped save my life tonight, but because you help save my life every night—you make me want to do right by the miracle.”
I pause.
“But?” The light in his eyes dims a little.
Why do I have to keep hurting the people who care about me the most?
“I can’t be with you.”
Drew looks away, and I’m not sure what kind of calculus he’s doing, but the way he bites his lip reminds me of Mae, working her problems. After a minute, he turns back to me. Nods once.
“I get it,” he says. “You’ve got a lot to figure out. Right now. But when you’re ready, in the future, you and I—”
“I don’t know, Drew. I can’t promise you anything. I have so much work to do. Jo’s not kidding. This was my last chance. I know it. I can’t screw up again. I have to be like Mae—I have to be focused on the mission.”
There will be other waves. Different waves. I have to be ready. To not reach for a bottle of pills when they come.
“I know you’re scared,” he says. “I am, too. You died tonight. For a minute. I could feel you go. And I…” His voice shakes. “I understood the wave a lot better.” He rests his cheek against mine. “Please don’t go away again.”
I run my hand through his hair. “I heard you tell me to come back. That’s part of why I’m here right now.”
“Then I don’t understand why you think I’m not good for you.” He leans back, his face a misery of confusion. “I can help. On this … this mission. I want to be here for you, to be with you, through whatever shit comes our way.”
I want to give in, so bad, but somewhere Dad says: We can do impossible things.
I’m still mad at you, I remind him. But he’s right.
“I want to be with you so much, God, so much,” I say, “but I don’t think I can become the person I need to be—or get back to who I maybe always was—if I’m all tangled up in you. I’ve been basing my future around other people—working with Mom at the yoga studio, moving in with Micah. I need to see what it feels like to base my future around me. And I don’t know who I’ll be at the end of that.”
“You’ll be you. And I’ll be me.”
I knew this would be hard. But it’s so much worse than hard.
“This feeling—of us. Of this being it. I had that with Micah, too.” I grip Drew’s hand. “It was different—not like this, not so … certain feeling. But I really thought he and I would be together for good, you know? And now he’s gone.” The tears come, and I just let them run down my face. “Anything can happen. We might change—get older and not fit anymore. Or you might meet someone not all fucked-up—”
“I want you, Hannah,” Drew says.
I look down at our hands, and I can almost see what they will look like with paper-thin old-person skin, age spots, gnarled knuckles.
“You get to be happy,” he says. “You don’t have to punish yourself.”
I trace the lines of this face that is so special to me. “I’m not—I promise. I want the love. Big, big love. Family. All of it. When the time is right. I don’t want to be alone forever—but I need to be right now.”
I can’t tell him how much I want that big love with him. Or that I want to do right by the miracle together. It wouldn’t be fair to make him wait. Or to make a promise I don’t know if I can keep.