Between Two Worlds

All alone

Riley stood in the doorway for a moment before she left.

"If you need me," she said, "call my name twice. I will hear you."

Then she was gone, the way she always seemed to be gone, not walking away but simply ceasing to be in the space she had occupied, and Serena was alone in a room full of people who could neither see her nor hear her nor know that she was standing among them at all.

She looked around the room as if it might have changed. It hadn't. Her mother was still bent over the bed, still murmuring, still holding her daughter's face like letting go of it might mean letting go of something else entirely. Daniel sat in the chair on the other side, his head down, his hand resting on the blanket near her body's hip.

The machines kept their rhythm. The night kept being night.

A month.

She said the word out loud, just to hear it, just to see what it felt like in her own mouth.

"One month."

No one turned. Of course no one turned.

She walked to the window and looked out at the car park, at the wet tarmac shining under the lights, at the row of parked cars she could no longer tell apart from anything else in this world that no longer needed her to exist in order to keep going.

A month to find someone whose love for her was real enough to bring her back.

She started, almost without meaning to, making a list. The kind of list you make in your head when you cannot write anything down, when the only paper you have is your own memory and the only pen is fear.

Her mother. Obviously her mother. But Riley had said love, and her mother's love was the realest thing Serena had ever known, and the kiss required was not the kind a mother gave a daughter. She understood that without being told. It had to be a different shape of love. A particular shape.

Daniel. She had already tried Daniel.

She thought about that for a long moment, standing at the window, and made herself not think about it further because there was nothing further to think. It hadn't worked. She didn't know why. She wasn't ready to know why.

Who else.

Jade. Jade loved her, surely. Fifteen years of friendship had to count for something, had to be real in whatever way Riley meant by real, and Jade would come, Jade always came, Jade had probably been called the moment Daniel —

She stopped that thought too.

She thought about old friends from university, people she hadn't spoken to in years, people whose numbers she still had but whose voices she could barely remember. She thought about colleagues, about her boss who had once told her she had more talent than she gave herself credit for, about the woman two doors down from her childhood home who used to give her sweets and called her sweetheart every single time she saw her for thirty years.

None of it felt like enough. None of it felt like the thing Riley meant.

A month suddenly felt like nothing at all. A month felt like the time it took to plan a holiday, to finish a small project, to forget what you had eaten for dinner three Tuesdays ago. A month was nothing. A month was the blink of an eye dressed up to look like time.

"How am I supposed to figure this out in a month," she said.

She said it to the window. To the car park. To no one.

She turned back to the room and looked at her mother and tried, for just a moment, to call out to her. Not loudly. Just quietly, the way you call to someone in another room when you don't want to wake the rest of the house.

"Mom."

Eleanor didn't move.

"Mom, can you hear me. It's me. I'm right here."

Nothing. Not even a flicker. Eleanor kept stroking her daughter's hair with the particular repetitive tenderness of someone who has run out of words and is using touch instead.

Serena tried Daniel next, though she didn't entirely know why. Some last reflex of hope, maybe, or some need to test the boundaries of this new existence against the person she had built her whole life around.

"Daniel."

He didn't move either.

She stood between them, invisible, and felt something settle over her that was heavier than fear and quieter than grief. A kind of stillness. The stillness of someone who has shouted into a canyon and heard nothing come back and has finally accepted that the canyon was never going to answer.

She sat down on the floor in the corner of the room, the way she had before, and this time she didn't get up right away.

She watched.

There was nothing else to do, so she watched, and after a while watching became its own strange occupation. She noticed the way the night nurse checked the machines every forty minutes, exactly forty, never more or less. She noticed the small sounds the hospital made when it thought no one was paying attention, pipes and vents and the distant rhythm of someone's footsteps on a floor below.

She noticed Daniel's phone.

It buzzed once, quietly, against his leg, and he looked at it the way a man looks at something he has been waiting for. Not the way a man looks at a message from a colleague or a reminder about a meeting.

He glanced at Eleanor. Eleanor didn't look up.

He stood, slowly, careful not to disturb the quiet of the room, and said something about getting coffee, his voice low and unremarkable, and Eleanor nodded without really hearing him, the way people nod at things they aren't listening to.

He walked out into the corridor.

Serena was on her feet before she knew she had moved.

She followed him.

The corridor was empty this late, lit in that flat hospital way that made everything look slightly unreal, and Daniel walked a short distance from the ward doors and stopped near the window at the end, where the car park lights bled orange through the glass, and he took out his phone.

He looked at the screen for a moment.

Then he answered it and lifted it to his ear and Serena came to stand beside him, close enough to hear, close enough to see his face change in a way she had never seen it change before, not once, not in six years.

"Hey," he said quietly.

A pause.

"I know. I know, I'm sorry, I couldn't call earlier, it's been —" He glanced back toward the ward doors. Lowered his voice further. "It's been a lot."

Serena stood very still.

"No, don't — don't say that. Don't say that, not here." His voice had dropped to something just above a whisper, something careful and low and completely unlike the voice he used in that room with her mother and her body and the machines. "I'll call you properly tomorrow. I promise. I just needed to hear your voice."

He turned slightly, toward the window, toward the dark glass that showed his own reflection and, just behind it, faint and unnoticed, the outline of his wife.

"I miss you too," he said.