Between Two Worlds

Alone with myself

Serena followed Daniel back into the ward, the call still sitting in her chest like a stone she couldn't put down.

I miss you too.

She turned the words over and over, looking for an explanation that fit, a version of them that made sense. A sister he never mentioned. An old friend going through something hard. There were a hundred ordinary reasons a person might say those words to someone late at night in a hospital corridor.

She just couldn't find one that fit the way he had said them.

Daniel walked to where Eleanor sat and crouched beside her chair, his voice low and gentle, the voice he used for everyone but Serena lately, though she pushed that thought away as soon as it came.

"Eleanor." He touched her arm. "You haven't eaten anything since "

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. None of us are fine." He said it kindly, and Eleanor looked up at him with the particular exhaustion of someone who has been awake far too long and has nothing left to argue with. "Let me take you down to the cafeteria. Just for twenty minutes. She's not going anywhere, and the nurses are right outside if anything changes."

Eleanor looked at the bed. At her daughter's still face.

"Twenty minutes," she said.

"Twenty minutes."

She stood slowly, her joints stiff from the chair, and leaned down to press a kiss to Serena's forehead. "I'll be right back, baby," she murmured. "I'm not going far."

Serena watched her mother's lips against her own forehead and felt nothing, the way she had felt nothing every time anyone touched her since the crash, and she watched Daniel guide Eleanor gently toward the door with a hand at her back, patient, attentive, the perfect son-in-law.

The door closed behind them.

The room went quiet.

Serena stood in the middle of it, and for the first time since she had woken up on that road in the rain, there was no one else in the room with her. No Riley. No mother. No Daniel. Just the machines, doing their slow steady work, and the body in the bed, doing nothing at all.

She walked toward it.

She stood at the foot of the bed and looked at herself the way you might look at a photograph of someone you used to know. The face was hers, unmistakably hers, the small scar above her eyebrow from when she was seven, the shape of her own mouth slightly open around the tube taped at the corner of it. Her hair had been pushed back from her face by someone, maybe a nurse, maybe her mother, and it lay flat and dull against the pillow in a way it never lay when she was the one brushing it.

The monitor beeped. Steady. Even.

She looked at her hands, the ones she had now, pale and see through, and then at the hands lying on top of the blanket, still and real and exactly where someone had placed them.

Is this it, she thought.

Is this what the rest of this is going to be. Standing in rooms. Watching people leave. Listening to machines breathe for me while the people I love walk down a corridor to eat lunch and I stay here with myself, because I am the only company I have left.

She had spent her whole life surrounded by people. A husband. A mother who called every day. A best friend who knew everything about her. A job that filled rooms with colleagues and clients and conversations about benches and tree lines and quality of light.

And now there was this. A bed. A body. A silence with her name on it.

She sat down in the chair Eleanor had just left, the one still warm in whatever way warmth meant to her now, and she looked at her own face on the pillow and felt something close over her chest like a hand.

Sitting there in that quiet room, with no one to call out to and no one to watch and nothing to do but exist beside herself, a month felt less like a chance and more like a sentence. Something to be served. Something to be endured.

She reached out, the way she always did now even though it never worked, and laid her hand over the hand on the blanket.

It passed through.

The monitor kept its steady rhythm, even and slow, indifferent to all of it.

Serena sat there in the chair, beside the body that used to be hers, in a room that no longer needed her, and for the first time since the crash she let herself simply sit with it. The fear. The smallness of it. The fact that somewhere down the hall her mother was eating something she wouldn't taste and her husband was sitting beside her saying things Serena couldn't hear, and none of it required her at all.

Sitting there in the quiet, watching the green line move across the screen in its endless even pace, a month felt like the loneliest unit of time she had ever known.