Chapter 6
Six months after her mother’s death, Helena was practically skin and bones.
The nurses at the memory clinic tried to ply her with brownies and salty snacks, anything they had lying around, but Helena had very little appetite and very little will to get better.
The nurses knew that she’d lost everything—that her father couldn’t remember her name, nor his wife’s name, nor that he’d ever had a wife and a daughter.
He seemed happy enough, although his mood remained unpredictable, and he sometimes shouted at Helena if he couldn’t watch his favorite shows.
Helena continued living at her parents’ place without them.
She felt as though she were living in a kind of above-ground cemetery, surrounded by their possessions and their photographs.
Sometimes, when she was particularly delirious and exhausted, she dreamed that someone came knocking on the door to tell her that she couldn’t live here by herself; she wasn’t old enough; she didn’t have a legal guardian.
These were strange dreams. Helena researched online for a kind of sleep medication that wouldn’t allow her to have them. But she knew better than to order anything that would help her sleep more. It was like her body couldn’t get enough.
One afternoon, she was sitting in her father’s memory care room, watching television and trying to eat the snacks the nurses had given her.
Her father needed his pillow adjusted, and she got up to do it.
All at once, she fell on the floor and blacked out.
She came to in the hospital, incredibly, where she found herself hooked up to a variety of IVs.
She wore a hospital gown. Before she could call for a nurse or a doctor or someone to explain what was going on, she fell back asleep—and didn’t wake up for another eight hours.
That week, the diagnosis came.
“You have advanced liver disease,” the doctor explained, his voice flat yet sure.
He waited for Helena to say something. But what could she say? Yet another diagnosis seemed not to matter to her, not now that she’d heard so many for her mother and father. The fact that the diagnosis pertained to her own body didn’t matter. Everything was one big, awful slog.
When she didn’t respond, the doctor went on to say that this sort of liver disease was genetic, that she couldn’t have changed her chances of getting it through different lifestyle choices, and that—if she didn’t get a new liver within the next few years—she would die.
“We’ll put you on the list for organ donation,” the doctor said. “But there’s no way of saying how long you’ll have to wait. These things take time, unfortunately. Many, many people need new livers.”
Helena didn’t have the will to say anything else.
Two days later, Helena was out of the hospital, and two days after that, the bill arrived from said hospital.
It was an astronomical amount. Helena dry-heaved in the bathroom, then called her health insurance to learn that she was no longer covered.
Her head rang with how stupid she was. She’d forgotten that, after the divorce, Elliott’s work no longer covered her.
She had no idea how she was going to pay that hospital bill, let alone pay for a liver transplant down the line. It was almost laughable.
She thanked her lucky stars that her mother and father had insurance enough for both of them. Her mother had had the best possible, comfortable hospice experience. And her father’s memory clinic was the best in the area.
The day before her father died, Helena was in his room, looking at herself in the mirror.
She no longer recognized the woman before her.
She felt such a disconnect that she might have forgotten her own name, just as her father had forgotten both hers and his own.
When her father looked at her that evening, before she returned home, he frowned, then turned away.
Helena told herself not to remember these moments with her father.
She told herself to remember the good times, when he was really himself.
But she felt cursed with a brain that retained only bad information, only bad news.
Helena buried her father next to her mother and found solace in the fact that they were in heaven together.
They’d been devout Christians who’d prayed together before going to bed at night and when they woke up in the morning.
The funeral was packed with Orangeburg residents eager to tell Helena powerful stories about her father before his diagnosis, before she was born, before his marriage.
Their eyes echoed how worried they were about how Helena looked—but nobody asked what was wrong, because it seemed obvious. She’d lost everything.
When she had enough strength, she went up to the cemetery to talk to her parents. Often, she spoke about Elliott, about how she’d thought she had a love like her parents’ love. “I was wrong about that,” she said, laughing. The wind rustled the flowers she’d planted in front of their graves.
Helena hadn’t managed to make or sell any art since before her divorce.
She hadn’t made anything since before COVID, if she was honest about it.
She’d hardly brought in any money in years, and the hospital was still chasing her for the bills she’d racked up when she’d learned about her liver disease.
Terrified, she sold her parents’ house and most of their possessions, then rented a one-bedroom house for herself not far from downtown. There, in the bed that she’d moved over from the old place, she slept for nearly twenty-four hours.
She’d been here ever since.
It was wild to Helena that she’d been living without her parents for so many years now.
But now that Elliott had told her about his affair with Meg, now that she understood how alone she’d really been in her marriage, Helena was coming to terms with the fact that she had no remaining connection to Orangeburg.
She’d hated the way Meg had looked at her at the grocery store.
She’d hated the way Elliott had spoken to her on the phone.
She hadn’t been to the doctor in ages, as she was still chipping away at the hospital bill from years ago and didn’t want to rack up any additional bills. But she guessed she didn’t have much time left.
It begged the question: did she really want to remain at this rental in Orangeburg, ordering groceries, watching television, and waiting to die?
Maybe she could go somewhere beautiful. Maybe she could open her heart to a final season of change.
Helena opened her old laptop and typed, "Beautiful places?" Funnily enough, the first location that popped up was Florida, a place that had to be even more humid and hot than here. That was out of the question. Helena wanted the peace that came with fresh breezes and cold waters.
But that was definite: she wanted the ocean. She wanted to look out at the waves.
It was then that Helena remembered that her father wasn’t from Orangeburg, that he’d been born and, for the first ten years of his life, raised on an island called Nantucket.
It was in Massachusetts, a place that existed only in Helena’s imagination.
Although her father had never taken her there, he’d regaled her with stories of fishing and swimming and eating picnics on the beach.
It had seemed like a dream—a fantasy land.
He’d moved to Orangeburg and set down roots in Orangeburg, but otherwise, she felt sure, he would have returned to Nantucket and built a life there.
She wondered if it was too late for her to go.
For the next few hours, Helena researched rental properties on Nantucket Island.
The prices were steeper than in Orangeburg (obviously), but she could manage a few.
She emailed a few property managers, then went to bed, her eyes closing before she fell on the mattress.
When she woke up the following morning, she had one response to the cheapest possible house on the island.
She called them right away and said, “I’ll take it. ”
The manager laughed. “You haven’t even seen it yet.”
“I want to move in immediately,” Helena said. She was suddenly free from Orangeburg. She wanted to leap out of there and never look back.
The manager asked if she had any questions.
“Not really,” Helena said.
“You aren’t scamming me, somehow, are you?” the manager asked.
“Not that I know of,” Helena said.
Via email, the manager sent her a lease.
She printed it, signed it, and sent him a photo.
It felt like a long and arduous process.
But by the end of that afternoon, she was all set with a lease of her own on Nantucket Island.
Was living as she wanted to live really that easy?
Why hadn’t she been doing it all this time?
Although she was exhausted, she pushed herself to call her landlord and get out of her lease. Like almost everyone else in town, her landlord was an old friend of her father, and he took pity on her and didn’t require her to pay the next three months of rent, as he might have with anyone else.
“I was hoping you’d get out of here one of these days,” he told her. “I know it’s been a difficult few years for you. But we’re all pulling for you! You can run off and have a big, beautiful life somewhere else. You’re in your forties, aren’t you? Your forties are just getting started.”
Helena laughed at that. But how could he know that she was at the end of her life?
Helena had very few possessions. But over the next two days, she packed everything up in suitcases, carried them out to her Chevy, cleaned what she could of the house, and prepared for her last night in Orangeburg.
She had no food in the house, so she decided to take herself out to eat at a little diner in downtown Orangeburg.
It was a five-minute walk from her house—a longer walk than she’d dared herself to take in years.
Slightly frightened, with her phone gripped in her hand, she walked down the road, taking numerous breaks, then grabbed a seat in the window.
“What can I get for you?” the server asked, a high schooler with a large piece of blue bubblegum between her teeth.
Helena remembered coming here with her mother and father. Always, her father had ordered a double cheeseburger with bacon and a side of baked beans. Her mother had always gotten a patty melt. Helena went for a grilled cheese with fried onions and onion rings.
“You really love onions, I guess?” the server asked, raising her eyebrows.
Helena hadn’t tried to eat such a greasy meal in many years.
She took three bites of everything, then packed it all up to take home.
For the next hour, she sat in her booth, digesting and watching as a few people walked around downtown in the evening.
Was this the last time she’d ever be in Orangeburg?
Was this the last time she’d see these sorts of people?
She half expected to see Elliott and Meg walking hand in hand, talking excitedly about the baby and their future together.
They had no need for the outside world. They had no need for anyone but one another.
And now that Elliott had “cleared his conscience” and told Helena the truth about his affair, they could move forward, just Elliott and Meg against the world.
But Helena found that, now that she had her Nantucket plan, Elliott was fuzzy in her mind’s eye. There was a sense of unreality to thinking about her past. Nantucket was the only real thing.