Chapter 27 Diane
Diane
"Hey, Diane." His voice fills the room, a jagged shard of morning. "I know it's early… I just thought we could talk." There's a pause, and I can almost hear him second-guessing his every word. "Please call me back when you can."
The machine beeps off, and I sit there, staring at the flashing light of a saved message. I swing my feet to the floor and get out of bed, disturbing the quiet morning with my sudden movement.
The world is still dark. Dew beads on the windowsill.
The air has that pre-dawn hush, the oxygen damp and slightly metallic, a taste that coats the back of my tongue.
I wait for the panic to hit, but there’s nothing left this morning except a low, vibrating numbness, like I’ve been wrapped in a hundred layers of saran wrap and can’t quite breathe right.
From down the hall comes a single cough, then the heavy sigh of an old house resettling around the ache of its inhabitants.
I slide out of bed and stretch, the muscles in my neck popping in protest, and walk barefoot into the kitchen.
The house smells of last night’s tea and stale bread, a comforting scent that makes my stomach growl in response.
I put water on the stove, counting the seconds until it boils, and let my mind drift to yesterday afternoon’s tryst with Nathan, his touch, the letters, and the horrible emptiness that came after.
I shake my head and check on Cassie. She’s still asleep, curled up on the couch so tightly she’s nearly a fossil, the blanket bunched around her.
Rolo, ever faithful, is wedged behind her knees, his ears twitching in some canine dream.
I don’t want to wake her. I just stand there, watching the soft pulse of her breath, and think of all the ways I’ve failed her, starting with uprooting her from the only life she knew and ending, most recently, with last night’s silent, shattered drive back from the boardwalk.
When the kettle screams, I jump, nearly spilling water down the front of my terrycloth robe. The noise wakes Cassie, too. She shuffles into the kitchen, hair a feral tumble.
“Morning,” she says, voice small.
“Hey, bug,” I manage, pouring orange juice with hands that shake a little more than I’d like, and nudge the cup her way. She stares at it, then at me, her gaze too direct for comfort.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine.” I try to sound normal, but the words come out flat, the vowels bent at odd angles. I busy myself with the toaster, loading two slices of bread with the kind of mechanical precision that would have delighted Kyle and now only makes me feel vaguely ill.
Cassie sits at the table, Rolo stationed at her feet, and watches me. There’s an old clock on the wall, the kind that ticks with a wet, almost living sound. The three of us form a triangle of worry, each pretending not to notice the others’ discomfort.
After a few minutes, Cassie says, “What did you do yesterday?”
I flinch so hard I nearly drop the butter knife. “Not much. Just...got a coffee, sat on the beach, walked along the boardwalk for a while.”
“Did you see Nathan?”
I open my mouth to lie, but I can’t do it. “Yes, I ran into him at the coffee shop.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“No, Cass. Not specifically.”
She accepts it, or pretends to, and smears grape jelly across her toast. “I finished my drawing last night,” she says. “The one of the ocean. When is Nathan coming over again? I can’t wait for him to see it.”
“I’m not sure, honey,” I say, careful to keep my eyes on the butter, the toast, anything but that face full of hope. “He’s got a lot going on right now.”
Cassie chews slowly, and when she finally swallows, she says, “But you still like him, right?”
She’s staring at me in a way that’s all child and not child at all, some hybrid of the little girl who names her stuffed animals and the new, wary adolescent taking shape under my nose.
My instinct is to insist on a version of the truth so gently it’s nearly fiction, but Cassie’s not buying any of it.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, sets the toast down, and folds her arms, an uncanny mirror of the posture I used to take with my own mother when I wanted to pick a fight but hadn’t found the words yet.
“Did something happen?” she asks, her voice careful, as if trying to tiptoe around a tripwire.
“Nothing happened, bug,” I lie. “It’s just…Nathan and I are… It’s complicated.”
“Are you mad at him?”
The truth is a mess I can’t parse. “I don’t know,” I say, which is the closest I can get to honesty this morning. “Maybe. Maybe just sad.”
She accepts it, but there’s a new wariness in her face. She takes another bite of her toast, then asks, “Are we still staying here?”
“No,” I say. “Not anymore. I think it’s best if we return to the cottage.”
She chews, thoughtful. “Good. I like it there. Feels like home.” She glances toward the closed door of Sara’s bedroom, where the faint hum of the oxygen machine has been running since before sunrise. “She’s not going to get better, is she?”
“No, bug,” I say, and at first I think my voice has disappeared into the hush, but she’s listening intently. “She won’t. But we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be with her as much as we can.”
Cassie’s silent for a while, picking at her toast. “Why does everyone we love go away?”
I have no answer. None that I’d want to give her, anyway. The universe just doesn’t know what to do with people who love too openly, so it whittles them down, one by one, until you’re left with an empty kitchen and a child who understands the math of loss better than she should.
The phone rings again, insistent. Cassie watches, waiting to see if I’ll answer.
I let it ring out.
When the silence returns, thicker and more final than before, she looks at me with a kind of gentle resignation. “Done,” she says and stands to take her plate to the sink.
Rolo follows, tail low.
I sip my coffee and stare at the wall, the seconds scraping by in slow, deliberate ticks.
I imagine Nathan sitting in his studio, phone in hand, voice raw from repeating my name into the ether.
I imagine his disappointment, his own coil of guilt and longing, and for a moment I almost give in, almost reach for the phone and let the words tumble out, broken and graceless and true.
But I don’t.
Instead, I rinse the dishes, wipe down the counter, and reset the kitchen for the day ahead. Cassie disappears into the den, probably to call Amaya or play a game or just retreat into a world less complicated than mine.
It’s not even 7:30 a.m., and already I’m exhausted.
When I finally summon the nerve to check on Sara, I find Judy already at her post, bent over the edge of the old cherrywood bed like a priestess at an altar.
She’s got a little ritual: check the lines of the oxygen mask, smooth the tangled hair back from Sara’s forehead, measure out the blue pills and the pink ones into a plastic cup.
Her hands are astonishingly steady, but I can see the worry lines deepening at the corners of her mouth every time Sara’s breath rattles too long before the next inhale.
I stand in the doorway, arms cinched tight across my ribs. Sara appears smaller in sleep, the bones in her wrists sharp and moon-pale against the quilt. Her mouth moves, sometimes, as if tasting words she never got around to saying.
Judy looks up and gives me a small smile. “She’s resting. Vitals are low but stable. The morphine helps.”
I nod, like that means something to me.
Judy gestures at the cup in her hand. “She’ll probably drift for a while. You should get outside, Diane. Take a walk.”
I stay where I am, legs rooted to the floorboards, unwilling to leave. “I’m fine,” I say. “Do you need anything?”
She studies me a moment, the way a doctor might assess a patient with a wound they refuse to show. “No, we’re good here. But you should let yourself breathe, too.” Her gaze flicks toward the window, where the morning is sharpening into brightness. “It’s not selfish.”
I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there, half in and half out of the room, counting the rasp of Sara’s breath.
The air is thick with the plasticky smell of hospital supplies and the sour-sweetness of whatever disinfectant Judy uses to wipe the IV pole and the bedside table. It’s a smell I know too well, one that’s always made my skin crawl, ever since the long winter of my mother’s decline.
The house is quiet, except for the rhythmic whirr of the oxygen compressor and the distant drone of a lawnmower, somewhere down the beach. It’s a silence that feels engineered, like a white-walled gallery designed to keep real noise at bay.
Cassie appears behind me, silent as a shadow. She hesitates in the hallway, then threads her way past me and into the bedroom. I watch her go, the set of her shoulders telegraphing a braveness she’s faking for everyone’s benefit. Rolo follows, his nails ticking gently against the wood.
Judy straightens, checks Sara’s pulse with a quick, practiced touch, then gestures for Cassie to sit on the bed. “She’ll like the company,” Judy says, voice softer now.
Cassie perches at the edge, careful not to disturb the tubes or the blankets. She takes Sara’s hand, her own so small and vital next to the translucent, trembling fingers of the woman who taught her to bake, to garden, to build the world out of words and story.
Sara’s eyelids flutter. She struggles up from whatever dream she was caught in and focuses on Cassie, a slow smile carving across her face. “My sweet Cass,” she whispers, the words thin as spiderweb. “You’re such a good girl.”
Cassie leans in, her hair falling forward, and whispers something I can’t hear. Sara nods, then closes her eyes, lips parting in a sigh that barely shifts the air.
Judy kneels beside the bed, her touch so light it’s almost a blessing. She looks over at me, and there’s a question in her eyes—whether I want to come in, to join this tender moment, or whether I’m content to keep myself stitched together on the threshold.
I’m not sure which would hurt less.
So, I stay in the doorway, watching the tableau: Sara, her chest rising and falling like the tide’s last attempt at persistence; Judy, sentinel and witness; Cassie, hand in hand with the woman who has already begun her slow departure from this world.
And in the quiet, I listen for the sound of my own heart, waiting for it to break.