Chapter 24
Sloane
“Less sad,” Bob tells me as he passes by, his first critical input in weeks. “It’s icy, whimsical holiday not…despair?”
I step back and see it: the frosty window panes, with the sheer silver gauzy curtains, give off a stormier vibe than I’d hoped.
Rummaging through the boxes of curtains, I find pure white ones and hand them off to the tech’s manning the stage cranes.
When they’ve been affixed to the top of the backdrop, the hopefulness in their brightness is assaulting.
“This better?” I shout into the auditorium, only for Bob to muster a brief, distracted thumbs up.
My neck, stiff as it is, cracks when I roll it, as I march down the center aisle and out into the lobby.
The space teems with conservatory volunteers, rushing about with dustpans and jackets, tablets and ticket rolls, parking lot signage—all the things that should’ve been set up at least a day ago for tonight’s opening performance.
The company did a final full run last night, has been sipping teas and meditating, but Gen more than the others.
When she isn’t dancing, she’s lost in thought.
When she is, I’m scared she’s going to throw a limb out.
The intensity she usually embodies has been sharpened since she fell out with my brother, like all that love’s got no where to go, is just coursing through her like a rabid thing that might take aim at any moment.
I disappear down the corridor that leads to the restrooms, dimply lit with brass sconces, and notice, for the first time, the bulletin board tacked full of announcements. What draws my attention most is the art competition, slated for this coming spring.
Open to painters of all mediums.
Nothing, lately, has felt divine. Or cosmic.
Everything’s felt like sleet, pummeling me from the sky, indifferent to me standing here just trying to do the next best thing.
I’m not even sure if I could paint something of substance in time, given my slow to return ability, but I rip the notice down anyway.
Fold it up and tuck it into my back pocket, just as my phone rings with a call from the hospital.
I pick it up, my heart suddenly balled high in my throat.
“Ms. Fielder? I’m sorry, but your mother’s had a cardiac event. We’re currently—”
“I’m on my way,” I say in a jumble, my vision blurring as I run out of the hallway and through the theater to grab my keys.
Everything around me whirs, spins ferociously and I can’t stop moving because of it, afraid of the force when I finally stop.
I cut into traffic, ignoring the righteous blare of a horn, and taking deep breaths to staunch the bile threatening to spill.
And then my breath turns jagged, the reality of what I might walk into at the hospital snowballing into a panic that seizes all rationality.
I park in a fire lane, I speed past security, I take the elevator to oncology only for them to tell me she’s been transferred to the PICU.
And all the while, I wish, more than anything, that I wasn’t doing this alone.
I can just hear Clementine, reminding me that I don’t have to, as I pull my phone out and dial my brother. By the time he picks up, my voice has warbled into one continuous sob.
“Grant…Grant, I’m so sorry—” I choke on the tears, pressing the floor number over and over like it’ll make this thing move faster. “Can you come to the hospital?”
The sound of tires burning against icy asphalt plays over the phone. “I’m on my way.”
And then, even though I know how important this night is to her, I call Gen.
By the time I get to Connie’s room, she’s sitting up awake.
Alive, and smiling.
“Oh, you didn’t need to come all this way just to—”
I cut her off with the wrapping of my limbs around her warm body, shutting my eyes so I can feel her existence right up against mine.
I breathe her in, the sick and medicine and her powdery laundry detergent, and her vanilla body spray, and the clean stench of medical tubing attached to her crepey skin.
All of it, I inhale so I can commit it to memory.
“Sweetheart,” my mom says, her voice breaking, and when I look into her eyes she’s crying.
“I thought you died.” The muscles around my eyes strain from all the tears, but still they come, salty and hot, down my cheeks.
“Between you and I,” she says, leaning even closer and lowering her voice, “I could’ve swore I did. Turns out one of the nurses just looks like Jesus.” She cackles, wheezing at her joke, and my watery laugh vibrates through me, helps the panic recede.
“Don’t do that to me again.”
“Have a heart attack? Well darlin’, it wasn’t the plan, but—”
“Ms. Tucker? We’ve gotta wheel you back for the angiogram.”
“He’s not the Jesus one,” Mom whispers, eyes haggard but sparking with amusement.
The nurse gives me a sympathetic smile before wheeling my mom’s bed through the door. “She’ll be back soon enough. There’s coffee by the nurses station.”
In the silence of the room, I let myself shiver until the dread and horror leaves me. Until I’m still in my own body and it’s safe to use my limbs again. When they are, I find that coffee at the nurses station and let the caffeinated bitterness cleanse the rest of the panic away.
Grant’s broad shoulders are suddenly in the doorway of Connie’s room and hastily drop my coffee, the brown liquid splashing over the edges, and wrap my arms around my brother, tears springing anew.
“Grant!”
“What happened?” he demands to know, studying my face with an eerie calm that tells me he knows this is about Connie. That he’s pieced together more than I’ve told him.
“Grant, I wanted to tell you, I swear, I just, I don’t know. I thought it would be better coming from her.” I swipe at the tears collecting on the apples of my cheeks.
“What? What would’ve been better coming from her?”
My face crumbles, the words hardly piercing the veil I’ve tried so hard to maintain. But this is one of those signs, isn’t it? Connie’s falling apart, and I’ve been in denial. “She’s dying, Grant. Mom’s dying.”
Grant looks frozen in time, suspended, his gaze suddenly unfocused. “No…Sloane. No, she’s not—” His words fail him, just drop off the imaginary edge as he finds the edge of the second hospital cot and sits.
“She is Grant. It’s why I came here. Why I left California.”
Without Connie’s reemergence in my life, I might’ve found myself somewhere else after the abortion.
After Elliot. Somewhere with a beach, a warm one.
Somewhere no one would've known me. Instead, I came here, for her, to save her. I failed, though—am failing. My breath shudders with realization just as my brother’s arms find me and pull me close, steadying me.
“I’m sorry I made you deal with this alone, I’m—I’m sorry for everything,” he tells me, and I nod, let myself lean on him, the way I imagine maybe we did in the womb.
The way we would on a long car ride to somewhere strange and new.
The way we did before he boarded his flight to Boston, to his new life without me. The way we do.
The door sounds with the gentle tapping of Genevieve, and when she cracks open the door, replete in her pink tutu and crystal encrusted leotard, my only grin today cracks across my battered face.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I admit, feeling the depth of her love for not just my brother but for me in the harshly lit hell of this hospital room.
“I’ll always be here,” she soothes, the balm neither my brother nor I were entirely sure we needed just a few months ago. “You know that.”
I nod with fervor, turning to my brother who’s fixated on Gen, whose attention is firmly stuck on the best thing he ever dared mess up. “Go, talk to her. She came this far.” I nudge him by the shoulder, watching as he and Gen disappear.
It’s only then, once all the angst feels well out of site, that I notice a puzzle peeking out of my mom’s bag. It’s got kittens on it, on a beach, and I take solace that on her worst day, it was a piece of me that she tucked tightly away, close to her.