Between Two Worlds

Just a month

She moved toward the bed.

"Do it again." Serena was right beside Daniel, right at his shoulder, close enough to see the wet on his cheeks. "Kiss me again. Please. Just once more, just try again."

He stared at her face on the pillow and could not hear a single word.

"Daniel." She cupped her hands around his face and felt nothing, her palms passing through the warmth of him like he was made of smoke. "Look at me. I am right here. I am standing right here and I need you to kiss me again, please, please just do it one more time."

He reached out and took her hand where it lay on the bed. The hand in the bed. Not the hands she was reaching toward him with. Her real hands. Her living hands. He held them and bowed his head over them and his shoulders shook.

Serena stepped back.

She looked at her hands. The ones she could see, the ones that belonged to this version of her, this in between version, pale and weightless and completely useless. Then she looked at the hands Daniel was holding, warm and still against the white sheet.

She did not understand.

She had felt something when he kissed her. She was certain of it. Some kind of pull, some shift, like a door moving on its hinges. It had to mean something. It had to have been close. Maybe she had done something wrong. Maybe she had not moved toward herself quickly enough or maybe there was something she was supposed to do from her side that Riley had not told her about.

She turned around.

"What did I do wrong," she said. "Tell me what I did wrong and I will do it differently."

Riley stood in the corner of the room with her arms at her sides and her face was doing something it had not done before. Something that looked almost like it hurt her to be standing there.

"You did nothing wrong," she said.

"Then why didn't it work." Serena's voice was very careful. The way a voice gets when it is holding something large and breakable. "You said a kiss from someone who loves me. He kissed me. He is my husband. He has loved me for six years. I felt something, Riley, I felt it move, so tell me what went wrong because something went wrong and I need to understand what it was."

Riley said nothing.

"Tell me." The careful voice cracked down the middle. "Please just tell me."

"Serena —"

"Is it me." She pressed her hands to her chest and they went through her and she pulled them back. "Is there something wrong with me, is it because I couldn't hold still, is it because I am too far gone already, because if that is why then tell me and I will find a way to fix it, I will figure out whatever I need to "

"It is not you," Riley said.

"Then what is it."

Riley was quiet for a moment that stretched and stretched.

"The kiss must come from a place of truth," she finally said. "Real love. Not love that has conditions on it. Not love that is tangled up in other things. It has to be clean and it has to be true and it has to come from someone whose heart is completely open to you." She paused. "That is all I can tell you."

Serena stared at her.

She wanted to argue. She wanted to say that Daniel's love was true, that she knew it, that she had lived inside it for six years and she knew what it felt like and it was real. She wanted to say all of that.

She looked at her husband bent over her hand. At the tears on his face. At the way he held her like he was afraid of losing her.

She sat on the floor.

Not because she was tired. She didn't get tired anymore. She sat because standing felt like too much of a claim on a room that no longer knew she was in it.

She sat on the hospital floor and watched her mother talk to her face on the pillow and watched her husband hold her hand and she felt the loneliness of it settle into her like cold water filling a glass, slow and thorough and complete.

"I don't know what to do," she said. It was the quietest she had spoken since the road. "I genuinely do not know what to do."

Riley looked down at her on the floor and something in her face shifted. Something that had been held at a careful distance moved closer. She stood there for a long moment looking at this woman sitting on a hospital floor, transparent and lost, watching the people she loved most tend to a body she couldn't get back into.

She sat down beside her.

Serena looked at her, surprised.

Riley looked straight ahead at the bed. At Daniel. At all of it.

The door opened.

Not a nurse. Not a doctor.

Eleanor Briggs came through that door like she had walked the whole way from her house, coat half buttoned, hair not done, and she stopped when she saw the bed and the sound she made was not a word, it was not anything that had ever been a word, it was just a mother seeing her child like that for the first time.

She crossed the room with her hand over her mouth and she took Serena's face in both hands the way she had done since Serena was small, cupping her cheeks, and she bent down until her forehead was almost touching her daughter's and she said baby, in a voice so low it was barely sound at all, just breath shaped like a word.

Serena stood two feet away and watched her mother fall apart and felt it move through her like a current.

"Mom." The word came out of her with nothing attached to it. Just the word. Just that. "Oh, Mom."

She moved toward her without thinking and her hand passed through her mother's shoulder and she pulled back and stood there with her arm still raised, reaching for something she couldn't reach, and her mother went on holding her face and saying things too quiet to hear and Serena could not touch her and could not answer her and could not tell her she was right here, right here, two feet away, she had not gone anywhere.

She turned to Riley.

"Please." Every hard edge had left her voice. There was nothing left in it but the asking. "Please make me wake up. I cannot stand here and watch my mother like this. I cannot do it. Whatever I have to do, whatever you need from me, please just tell me how to fix this and let me wake up."

Riley looked at her for a long moment. When she spoke her voice was the gentlest it had been since the road

"I have done this a long time," she said quietly. "I have sat with a great many souls in a great many rooms like this one. I have delivered the news and I have waited for the acceptance and I have walked people through to the other side."

Serena said nothing.

"You have one month," Riley said.

Serena turned to look at her.

"One month. I am granting you one month in this in between before I come back for you." Riley kept her eyes on the bed. "In that time the right person may find their way to you. The right kiss may find its way to your lips. If it does, you go back." She finally turned and looked at Serena directly. "If it does not, you come with me. And there is no third option and there is no extension ."

Serena held her gaze.

"Why are you giving me this."

Riley looked at her for a long moment.

"Because your mother," she said, "is still saying your name."

They both looked at Eleanor. Still bent over the bed. Still saying it, soft and steady, like a woman who had decided she would not stop until she got an answer.

Serena felt something move through her that she had no word for. Something that was grief and gratitude and love all pressed together into a single unbearable feeling.

"One month," she said.

"One month," Riley said. "Use it well."

She stood up from the floor, straightened her coat, and looked down at Serena one last time.

"I hope," she said carefully, "that I do not see you again."

Then she was gone.

Serena sat alone on the hospital floor with her family on the other side of a distance she couldn't measure and one month to find her way back to them.

She looked at Daniel.

She looked at her mother.

She looked at her own still face on the pillow, waiting.

One month.