“Exactly,” she said.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Lyra came forward and put her arms around Gemma’s shoulders, and squeezed. They had never hugged before. Gemma blinked away tears. She could feel Lyra’s ribs through her back. She thought of a bird; she thought of the dream of being carried to safety on a pair of wings.
“Thank you,” Lyra said, twice. Then she pulled away, almost as if she was embarrassed. Without another word, she turned for the door.
Caelum lifted a hand, and quirked his mouth into a smile, and waved. Then they were gone.
Not a minute after they left, Kristina was back and fussing over Gemma. “She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” Gemma asked, after Lyra had slipped out, promising to lie down. She was consumed by a strange anxiety, a premonition that she wouldn’t see Lyra again—or that she wouldn’t see her for a long time.
Kristina sighed. She looked down at her hands. “Lyra’s very sick, Gemma.”
“I know that,” Gemma said. “That isn’t what I meant.” But she wasn’t sure what she did mean. She was scared all over again, scared and full of love: she knew she couldn’t save Lyra, and that was the scariest thing of all.
“I wish I had the answers,” Kristina said. That was one of the things Gemma loved about her mom: she wasn’t a liar.
Kristina moved to the window and drew the curtains to let in the sun. Gemma blinked. Outside her window, a spider was weaving in one corner, putting the finishing touches on a web that looked like a blown-up snowflake.
“Your father called,” she said at last, almost casually. “He wants to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to see him,” Gemma said. “I don’t want to see him ever again.”
“Well.” Kristina turned away from the window again. She had no makeup on. Gemma couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mom with no makeup. She looked gorgeous, Gemma thought. “You can’t avoid him forever.”
“Why not?” Gemma asked.
Kristina bit her lip. For a second, Gemma was sure—sure—she had been about to smile. But she sighed instead, and came toward the bed.
“Listen, Gem.” This time, when she brushed the hair out of Gemma’s eyes, Gemma nearly cried. She’d missed her mom so badly. She’d been so afraid they’d never see each other again. “I think . . . I want you to know—and I know this will be hard for you—that I don’t think I’m going to go home. To your father, I mean. I think I’d like to get my own place. A place for just you and me.” Her throat was moving up and down, up and down, as if it was doing double duty just to get the words out. “What do you say? I know things will be different. . . .”
But she didn’t finish. Because Gemma started to laugh, and cry, both, imagining a little house where she and her mother would live together, she and her mother and their animals, all covered in pet hair, and nothing white at all.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 28 of Lyra’s story.
TWENTY-NINE
DEEP DOWN, GEMMA HAD KNOWN that when Lyra hugged her—their first hug ever—she had meant it as a good-bye. She was right. By the next morning, Lyra and Caelum had vanished.
According to the nursing staff, they must have slipped out around dawn, unseen even by the stubbornest bloggers and tragedy tourists, through a little-used stairwell right by the ladies’ room that led down into the parking lot.
They had practice, Gemma knew, in turning invisible.
She couldn’t say she blamed Lyra and Caelum. They’d spent so much of their lives in closed rooms, surrounded by charts and IVs and sharp-edged equipment made for cutting. Gemma didn’t blame them for not wanting to waste another minute.
“They’ll be back,” Gemma said to her mother. “They’ll find us again, when they’re ready. That’s what friends do.” She was sure, absolutely sure, that it was true. They just needed to find their own way back.
She was both desperate to see Pete and dreading it, but she couldn’t delay it any longer; he was asking for her. Pete had gone into shock soon after being picked up by the police, and for nearly twenty-four hours he’d been in critical condition, floating in and out of consciousness, while they tried to regulate his organ functions and his temperature. His parents had flown up from Chapel Hill, and they told Gemma only after she’d been admitted did he stabilize. Even though he was unconscious, by then, kept under by a course of anesthesia, it was like he knew.
He’d been moved only that morning from the ICU to a recovery floor. Still, the room they had him in was dark, all the blinds sewn up against the light—“so he doesn’t get overwhelmed,” his mom said, and gave Gemma a hug, before slipping outside with her husband to give Gemma and Pete privacy.
He was propped up on several pillows, but his eyes were closed. She inched toward the bed, scared of waking him, and scared, too, that he wouldn’t wake up. He was so pale, even in the dark she could see veins in his forearms and his chest. He was hooked up to an IV, and an EKG, and the sound brought Gemma back to her childhood, and terrified her: What if Pete was sicker than anyone thought?
But he opened his eyes when she kneed the bed accidentally, and smiled.
“Gemma,” he said. His voice sounded raw. Just hearing him say her name like that, like it was the name he’d been waiting to say his whole life, made her lose it.
“Oh my God.” She started to cry. She couldn’t help it. She loved him so badly; she wanted him to know that. It didn’t even matter whether he felt the same way. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks,” he said. He cracked the smallest, faintest smile. “I forgot my mascara at home.”
It was the second time in a day she’d laughed and cried at the same time. She managed to adjust the hospital bed, so she could climb in next to him, and he laid his head against her chest.
“I thought I would never see you again,” he whispered.
“Shhh.” She put her hands through his hair. “I’m right here.”
“I was so scared.” His voice broke. In the dark, their bodies lost form: they could have been a single person, a single body entangled together in the sheets. “What’s going to happen, Gemma? What’s going to happen to us?”
Gemma leaned back and closed her eyes. She imagined, somewhere in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania, a spider weaving a web in a well. After rain or wind came to destroy it, it wove. It wove with thread so fine it was almost invisible, and she wondered if the spider was ever afraid, that its life was bound up in something that could be blown away with a breath. It wove anyway, either way.