21. Louise
21
LOUISE
Louise would always remember the sky on her grandmother’s last day, pale blue and strewed with clouds and a gentle sun. She would remember Jim’s face, etched with grief, when he brought her grandmother back to the house. They had met at dawn, and Louise knew that her grandmother had used a few of her last, precious hours to say goodbye.
She would remember the smell of coffee in the kitchen, her grandmother’s slippers shuffling on the floor as she made them eggs and toast, the sunlight as it gleamed through the window above the sink.
When Bobbie sat down at the breakfast table, she looked up at Louise with panic in her eyes. “You’re leaving tomorrow,” she said. She was pale and her eyes were bloodshot. Louise wondered if she had slept at all. “We’re supposed to catch a train to New York at seven in the morning.” She reached for her phone. “I’m going to have to reschedule, something next week maybe. And email the program director.”
Louise reached across the table and placed her hand on top of her mother’s. She felt oddly at peace, relieved that for the first time in her life she had made a decision completely for herself. “I’m not going to New York, Mom.”
Bobbie was momentarily taken aback, but then she nodded. “Of course, there’s so much going on right now. And your grandmother… Of course you don’t want to leave home right now… I’m sure they’ll understand. I’ll call them, and then you can have the summer to get ready.”
Louise took a deep breath. She heard Peter’s voice in her ear. Tell her.
“I’m not going to NYU in the fall either.”
At that, Bobbie fell silent. Louise could hear Camille’s footsteps come to a stop behind them.
Louise felt a small trace of the old fear: that the world might stop entirely if she didn’t do everything possible to make her mom happy. But she wasn’t a little girl. And she couldn’t waste another day of her one brief, fragile life. She thought she could be safe, smart enough to never experience pain, but all she had really done was hide from life, too afraid of the hurt to open herself up to joy.
“I’m so sorry, Mom. I know how much you wanted this for me. But it’s not what I want.”
Bobbie gripped Louise’s hand. “You were going to go to NYU for me, because I wanted it?”
“I thought I wanted it too.”
Guilt washed over Bobbie’s features. “I’m so sorry, for making you feel that way, Louise.”
“It’s okay,” Louise said quickly, tightening her grasp on her mother, willing her to understand. “I loved sharing that dream with you. I loved that it made you happy.”
“But it’s not what’s going to make you happy,” Bobbie said, not a question but a statement.
“I don’t think so. I’d like to take some time, to think about it. But I think…” It felt like one last hurdle, and the hardest one, to admit to her mother what she had realized about herself, about the kind of life she wanted. Because it was the life her mother once had.
“You think maybe you’d like to go into a career where you can use it?” Bobbie said, holding up her hands. “This.”
“How did you…?”
“Louise, I know you better than I know myself.” She glanced at Camille, who had joined them at the table.
“You know there are options. She could be a massage therapist,” Camille said thoughtfully. “On my hardest days as a nurse, I sometimes fantasized about that, how lovely it would be to just give people the world’s most incredible massages. You’d get the best tips.”
Louise tried to smile at her grandmother’s attempts to lighten the situation. Even ahead of her own death, she was still trying to take care of them.
“Or a doctor,” Camille continued. “Go to med school.” She rolled her eyes. “Although let’s be honest. That’s a lot of debt. And you’ll be so busy charting and fighting with insurance companies you won’t have time to actually put your hands on a patient.”
“Or a nurse,” Bobbie said firmly. “She could be a nurse, if she wants to.”
Louise felt a stirring inside of her at her mother’s words. “But you—”
“I know what I’ve said,” Bobbie interrupted. “I just thought… I thought maybe I could protect you from it.” She squeezed Louise’s hand tighter. “Because it will hurt you, honey. I loved it. Before everything happened. But it was so hard. Every day it was hard.”
“I know,” Louise said as the image of Sarah flashed in her mind. She knew what her life would be like as a nurse, as a healer. But she also couldn’t imagine it any other way. “You don’t have to protect me, Mom.”
Bobbie took a shaky breath. “No, but see, I’m your mom. I have to try.”
“You could go back,” Louise said, even though she knew it was a childish hope, that life wasn’t so easily fixed. “Be a nurse again. Be a healer.”
Bobbie’s eyes shone. “Maybe,” she said, in a way that told Louise she didn’t really believe her own words. “Maybe one day.”
Camille draped an arm around Louise. “You should have seen her with Sarah, Bobbie. She’s a natural.”
Louise turned her face up toward her grandmother. “You really think that?”
“You didn’t look away, Louise. And that’s all it really means. To be a nurse. To be a healer. It’s standing in a room with someone in pain, and not looking away.”
Camille reached for the small leather notebook, which was still on the table from where Louise had returned it. She picked it up and fingered the cover before handing it to Louise.
“I asked your mother if she wanted it.” She turned to Bobbie, who gave a small shake of her head. “But she wanted you to have it. It’s yours now, honey. All of the things you won’t learn in nursing school, if you do go one day.”
Louise didn’t want the notebook. She only wanted her grandmother.
Camille placed it into her hands. “It’s going to be okay. Life goes on. The same way it went on for them, through wars and great hardship. It must have seemed impossible, at times, but my mother and grandmother kept going. And so will you. Keep it safe.”
They were all quiet after that, holding onto one another at the table, until the sound of a screen door broke them apart.
“That’s Peter,” Louise said as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I told him I’d meet him after breakfast.” Louise thought of their conversation under the magnolia tree, the words that had spilled out of her, about healing, about college, about everything but the one truth that scared her the most. She was still so terrified to lose him.
But as she looked at her grandmother, she realized it was useless to pretend that she had any control at all. Life was messy. She could lose him no matter what she did. She almost had. And if she hadn’t brought him back, she would never have had the chance to fix it, to go back to the moment he told her he loved her, and say what was terrifying but also deeply, profoundly true.
Bobbie pushed back from her chair and walked toward the coffeepot. “I think that boy has spent his whole life waiting for you.”