Chapter 22
It was the end of September when Bethany returned to the hospital—not to be on bed rest, not to work, but to get the rest of her things, things she’d left behind when she was abruptly told it was time to stop working.
She walked slowly, grateful for the ability to move on her own, and entered the office she’d vacated.
Inside, she found her coworkers—nurses, doctors, and orderlies—waiting for her with cake and flowers. “Surprise!” they cried.
Bethany was touched. More than Rod ever could, these people understood how much her career meant to her, how much she hated stepping away.
But they also understood that she would be back to save more lives, to give as much as she could to improve the human condition.
It was what she’d been put on this earth to do.
Bethany sat, ate a slice of cake, and caught up with the coworkers she hadn’t seen in a while. She felt unbearably pregnant, although she knew she still had about three months left. “I forgot what it’s like,” she said. “And being older certainly doesn’t help things.”
“I think you’re inspiring,” a nurse in her thirties said, blushing. “I still can’t decide if I want kids, and the idea that you can make choices later and later in life is amazing.”
Bethany smiled at the younger woman, who’d just gotten married and had spoken endlessly about wanting to travel.
“There’s no real timeline in life. Society puts all this pressure on you, but you need to ignore it.
” She didn’t add that she’d hated her bed rest, that she’d hated having a higher-risk pregnancy.
She knew that not all forty-five-year-old women had similar experiences.
More than that, she knew she worked too much and added to her own stress.
When she was preparing to go, Gina from the front desk snapped her fingers and said, “I keep forgetting to tell you. An old patient called, looking for you. He’s pretty desperate to talk.”
Gina passed a note to Bethany, which Bethany unfolded to read: "Matteo" plus a phone number. Her heart leaped. Why would Matteo reach out to her?
“Thank you,” she said, slipping the note into her back pocket.
“I hope everything’s okay?” Gina said.
“Me too.”
Bethany didn’t hesitate to call Matteo. As soon as she got into the car, she dialed him, thinking of Helena, whom she hadn’t spoken to in a few weeks.
Things had gotten hectic with the kids’ school, with the pregnancy, with her failing and flailing body.
But recently, Rod had surprised Bethany with a gorgeous painting by Helena herself.
“You talked so much about loving her work, I thought it would be nice to hang something in our bedroom,” Rod had said, kissing her forehead.
And he’d done very well in his selection.
It was of a wild and free-wielding sea, but it was all colors: the sky and the sun and the darkness brewing beneath.
It encapsulated what Bethany so often felt: that she was uninhibited, that being alive meant giving in to your complexities.
Matteo answered immediately. “Dr. Sutton, hi.”
“Hello, Matteo. How are you?”
“I’ll get to it quickly. I know you have a lot on your plate.” Matteo sounded slightly manic, as though he hadn’t been sleeping. “I don’t know if you know this. But Helena finally reached out to me. We started dating.”
Bethany held her breath, waiting. But she had a hunch about where it was going.
“I haven’t felt this way about anyone in a crazy long time,” Matteo said. “I really thought this woman was my future. But recently, I found out about her liver disease. I guess you know about it?”
Bethany remained quiet.
“We haven’t talked since. I don’t know what to think. I think she feels guilty about not telling me, and to be honest, I was angry at first. But now, I mean. I can’t help but think. Is it possible for someone like me to be a donor?”
Bethany’s jaw hung open.
“I mean, is that a viable option for Helena and me?” he asked again, sounding even more frantic.
Bethany splayed her hand over her pregnant belly. She could feel the baby kicking, as though he or she was in on how crazy this was.
“The process isn’t entirely simple,” Bethany said. “Have you spoken to Helena about this?” She already knew the answer as she asked the question.
“Not yet,” he said. “I wanted to run it past you first.”
Bethany considered poor Helena, who’d been in the process of making peace with her own death for many years at this point. She hadn’t wanted to fall in love with Matteo. She hadn’t wanted to open herself up to all this pain. Now, she and Matteo weren’t talking.
“There are tests that would have to be done,” Helena said. “You’d have to make sure that you had the same blood type. You’d…”
“I’m O negative,” Matteo said excitedly. It meant that he could donate blood to whomever.
“That’s a good start. But there are other tests,” Bethany said. She didn’t want to get his hopes up.
She didn’t want to think it, but she considered that Matteo's desire to save Helena might be related to the previous loss of his daughter. His heart had shattered over and over. He wanted to save it. He wanted to see if there was a way through this without everything falling apart.
Bethany realized she needed to see Helena immediately. She needed to be the friend Helena hadn’t allowed herself in years. “I still think you need to talk to her yourself,” Bethany said. “But I’m going to go see her. I need to make sure she’s all right.”
“Thanks for calling me back,” Matteo said. “I probably sound out of my mind.”
“That’s what falling for somebody means,” Bethany said. “You’re out of your mind. And it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?”
Matteo agreed it was, despite everything.
Bethany called Rod to tell him she’d be a little bit later than she’d planned. “I want to check on Helena,” she said. Rod told her to be careful. He told her he loved her.
Once at Helena’s, Bethany walked right up to the door and rang the bell. Helena never went anywhere, so Bethany was pretty sure she was there. But it took another two rings of the bell to get her to the door.
The woman who answered was a meek, gaunt version of the sunny, tanned woman Helena had recently transformed into. It looked as though she’d spent days in bed, not eating or sleeping too much. Without hesitating, Bethany wrapped her arms around her and whispered, “Honey, it’s going to be all right.”
Helena’s voice was meek. “I don’t think it will be this time.”
Bethany and Helena went to the living room, where Helena had made a pillow-and-blanket nest on the sofa. A film was paused, something rom-com-y that Bethany couldn’t remember the name of. Helena collapsed back on her pillow pile and put her face in her hands.
“Matteo and I broke up,” she said into her palms. “Listen to me! I’m going to die, and I’m crying about a boy. This is why I told myself not to date. I knew it would turn into a sob fest. I knew I would spend time obsessing about him rather than making peace with the hereafter.”
Bethany sat beside Helena and rubbed her back. At this moment, she felt more like Helena’s mother than Helena’s friend, which she thought was fine. Helena needed the mothering that her own mother couldn’t do now that she was gone.
Although Bethany already sort of knew what had happened, she asked Helena to explain. Helena launched into it, telling Bethany about the sailing adventures, the picnics, the romantic dinners. She talked about finally getting up the nerve to ask Matteo to sleep over.
“I knew it was wrong,” Helena said. “I knew I needed to tell him. But I was falling in love with him! I couldn’t! I didn’t want him to go!”
Eventually, Helena seemed to get up the nerve to tell Bethany that Rod had been the one to spill the beans. “I’m not angry with him,” Helena assured Bethany. “It had to come out eventually. Honestly, your husband made it easier on me.” She tried to laugh, then burst into tears again.
“Oh, Rod.” Bethany shook her head, as though to say, what are we going to do with men? But she didn’t blame Rod. Rod always wanted to do what was best.
“I remember you told me that I needed to let Matteo make his own decisions about how he wanted to spend his time,” Helena said after a little while. “But I shouldn’t have taken it so far.”
Bethany squeezed Helena’s hand. She thought of the desperation in Matteo’s voice, about how eager he’d sounded to save Helena’s life.
Should I be the one to tell this to Helena?
But she knew that she couldn’t volunteer this information to Helena, not if Matteo decided to take it back. It was his body. It was his romance. All Bethany could do—as a doctor, as their friend—was sit and listen and hope.
And then, Helena’s voice lit up with a call. It was Matteo. It was Matteo with a question.