Lola has gone away again. She says it won’t be long.
He knows so little, poor beautiful Noah. Wants me to have professional people here instead of my friends. Doesn’t want to know from death. How it can be part of a well-lived life. He sits on my bed next to Patrick and plays the guitar, his hair falling over his gorgeous face, but I don’t really hear the music as much as feel it. It’s as though my bones are making the noise. Plink, plink, plink.
I feel myself say, “Houndy.”
And Noah laughs and says, “Houndy?” so I know I must have said it aloud. Funny how some sounds exist but don’t come into your ears.
I love to hear him say that name.
Lobsters, I think.
“Yes, I remember. Houndy brought us all lobsters that time I was here.” He sings that to the tune of something I almost remember.
Patrick says that Houndy was a good man. He wants to know if I can see Houndy right now, and Noah says death doesn’t work that way.
The light circles around me, and I am outside the old elementary school in my own hometown, and a girl named Barbara Anne is offering me a chocolate, and I smile at her and reach over to take it, and my arm hits something. A person. Houndy? No, Patrick.
“I’m here,” he says.
Solid, warm. And I’m walking on the cliff looking at the stars. I might be a star. I used to think we became stars when we died. From stardust to stardust, someone told me.
When I told Houndy that, he said, “Nope. Not stars. I want to become a potato chip.”
His eyes fill up my whole head. His laughing eyes. Are you coming, my love? Do I have to keep waiting for you?
All is love. Just love.
Don’t be scared. Don’t clutch. It’s like yoga, those hard poses, where if you resist, it hurts.
It doesn’t hurt just to let go. That’s Houndy talking now in my head.
I can’t think of how. What do you drop, what makes letting go happen? The blackness comes over me, but still I don’t let go. There’s something else I have to do.
“What do I do . . . after?” Noah says.
You call the coroner, bunion head. This guy really knows nothing, does he? Houndy again. What does he think you’re supposed to do?
Patrick says he knows what to do.
“I called my mother,” Noah says close to my ear. How much later is it? His voice is too close; it tickles me. “She says I have to call the doctor for you. She insists on it. You need medical care fast.”
No. No. NO.
Patrick, tell him.
Patrick says no.
Oh God. Is this going to be my last thought? My last thought on earth is going to be NO? I want to think of something peaceful, not how Wendy is directing me from Virginia, how my family thinks my death should go. Why can’t they let me die the way I want to die? I need to go NOW. How do I make myself die?
Patrick and Noah are arguing. Noah says maybe there’s something else they can do. To buy more time. I can’t hear what Patrick is saying, but I hear his tone of voice—low, loving, gentle.
Patrick knows I don’t want more time. Not unless I can have eons of it.
Marnie. That’s it, that’s what I will think about. I wrap her in love and light. I send her a message: Love is the only thing that matters. I want to stop the men from talking; I want to tell Patrick about her, but something says not to, that Noah would hear. What a funny business love is, and these two men sitting here, one the past and one the possible future.
There was so much I still wanted to do.
And then I’m up on the ceiling, looking down at myself, a perfect little wrecked body there in the bed, beautiful and strange. That body of mine, so useful and brave, wrapped now in a white gown. The gown I’d picked out and made Noah help me get into. Patrick is there on the bed, too, looking down at me. I feel it when he notices that I’m not there anymore. He reaches over and touches my hand, curls my fingers in his own large hand, the hand that was burned.
Thank you, I say. And now it’s time. So much left undone. So much I still want to feel and know.
But I’ve already let go.
EIGHTEEN
MARNIE
I wake up in the middle of the night, startled into sitting upright in bed, noticing my heart hurts.
The air feels sharp in the room, as though it has an unfamiliar smell. Like a candle has burned down somewhere. I want to awaken Jeremy, just for company. It’s so nice turning over at night to find somebody next to me in the bed again.
Yet I don’t wake him up. I lie there, longing for something I can’t quite name.
What woke me up?
Happiness. Happiness woke me up, but there’s something else. Something about life feeling so fragile. Something about love being the only thing that matters.
I go to the window and look out at the blackness of the night. There’s a shooting star and I watch it, unsure whether it’s really the trail of an airplane. But no, it’s a star. Blazing out, probably from millions of years ago. Isn’t that what they say? That when we look at the stars, we are seeing the past.
NINETEEN
MARNIE
The envelope is from the law firm of Brockman, Wyatt, and Sanford, and by the time it arrives at my parents’ house, it looks like it has been through the worst that the postal system has to offer.
I pick it up by its halfway torn and blackened corner and take it inside with the rest of the mail. It’s about a million degrees outside, and I’m excited because tonight Jeremy and I are going to talk about taking a vacation together, just the two of us. He says we should rent a red convertible and drive up the coast through Georgia, go to Savannah and up to Charleston.
And—well, there is some indication that Jeremy might propose. That’s what Natalie thinks, and just talking about it makes her so happy that I go along with it, even though I told her that it seems crazy somehow, even trashy, to have two marriage proposals in one year from two different men.
She said, “It’s not trashy if it means you’re getting your life on the right track. And anyway, it’s a great story you can tell the grandchildren when you and Jeremy are celebrating your golden wedding anniversary. The year you married two men. I think that’ll be a wonderful story.”
I walk into the kitchen, ripping open the envelope as I go, and then I hold the letter in one hand while I open the refrigerator to get the pitcher of iced tea and then get a glass out of the cupboard. The birds are chirping madly at the feeder—probably complaining about the heat—and I stop to watch them while I’m sipping my tea.
When I look down, Blix’s name jumps out at me.
“Dear Ms. MacGraw . . . I am writing to you because our law firm is representing the estate of Blix Marlene Holliday . . .”
Estate?
Blix is dead?
Oh my God. Blix is dead.
I sink down onto one of my mother’s kitchen chairs. I put the letter on the table and close my eyes for a moment, remembering the night of the wedding when she said that she was at the end of life, and I didn’t make her tell me what she meant. So long ago.
I have meant to keep in touch with her—honestly I have meant to—to tell her about Jeremy and that I’m living in Jacksonville now and that I’m going to be okay and to thank her for all the good wishes about the big life and all that . . . but, well, I’ve been terrible. So much has happened to me in such a short time, and I didn’t keep her filled in about any of it. But, really, why would I? She was Noah’s great-aunt, and yes, she was kind to me, but she belonged to him. And even as I’m saying this to myself, I know it’s just an excuse I’m making up because I feel so guilty. All this new life in Florida: Had she somehow known this would be where I would end up? And damn it, I never even knew that she was sick.
And now she is dead.
Shit.
I pick up the letter again and scan it quickly.
“Our client, Blix Holliday, recently deceased, has named you in her last will and testament as the owner of a property belonging to her, a house on Berkeley Place in Brooklyn, New York . . .”