Between Two Worlds

The kiss

The doors burst open and Serena forgot everything else.

Her body came through on a bed surrounded by people, wired and pale and breathing through a mask, machines rolling alongside it like a procession, and Serena moved without thinking, pulled toward herself the way metal moves toward a magnet, instinct overriding everything she had just learned about what she could and couldn't do in this state.

She walked into a nurse and through her and kept going.

She reached for the bed rail and her hand passed through cold metal and she reached again and again, grabbing at nothing, at air shaped like the things she needed, and someone called out a number and someone else responded and a set of double doors ahead swallowed her body whole and swung shut behind it and Serena hit them at full pace and came out the other side into a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and low light and she spun around and the doors were closed and her body was gone behind them and she had no way through, no way to follow, no way to do anything at all.

She stood in the corridor with her transparent hands held out in front of her and she could not speak and could not cry and could not do the one thing every cell in her was screaming at her to do which was to get back into that room and back into that body and wake up.

"Serena."

She did not turn around.

"Serena, stop."

"I can't get through." Her voice came out strange and flat. "I keep trying and I can't get through to anything."

"I know."

"I can't touch anything. I can't move anything. I can't —" She pressed her palm to the closed door and felt nothing and pulled it back. "I am completely useless. I am standing right here and I am completely useless to myself."

Riley stepped around in front of her. She didn't touch her. She just stood there in the way, solid in her own strange way, patient as stone.

"Listen to me," she said.

"I don't want to listen, I want to —"

"I know what you want. And there is a way to get it. But you need to be still for one minute and listen to me."

Something in Riley's voice cut through the noise in Serena's head. Not warmth exactly. Authority. The kind that comes not from rank but from having stood in this corridor, or one like it, more times than could be counted.

Serena stopped.

She looked at Riley.

"One minute," she said.

"That is all I need."

Riley folded her hands in front of her and looked at Serena the way you look at someone when you are about to say something they should already know but don't.

"There is a way back into your body," she said. "One way. It is not complicated. It is not a ritual or a condition or a test." She paused. "Someone who loves you needs to kiss you."

Serena stared at her.

"That is it?"

"That is it."

"A kiss."

"From someone who genuinely loves you, yes. True love. Not habit, not performance, not guilt. Genuine love. One kiss from that person and your soul returns." Riley said it the way someone gives directions to a place they have been a thousand times. Left at the lights, straight on, you cannot miss it.

Serena stood there for a moment processing it and then something broke open in her chest, something that had been locked tight since she first woke up standing on that road in the rain, and she almost laughed.

"That's it?" she said again. "That is truly all?"

"That is all."

"Riley." Serena was already turning toward the corridor, already moving. "I am married. My husband is in this building right now. That is —" She shook her head and she was smiling, the first time her face had done anything like smiling since any of this began. "That is the easiest thing I have ever heard."

She was already walking.

Riley watched her go.

She did not say anything. She did not call after her or qualify what she had said or add the thing that might have made Serena slow down and think. She simply watched her go with an expression that was very still and very careful and said nothing at all.

Serena moved through the hospital the way she was beginning to understand she moved through everything now, frictionless, the building parting around her without noticing. She found the main corridor and she found the ward and she found Daniel at the nurses station before she saw the ward at all.

He had his hand on the counter and he was leaning slightly toward the nurse on the other side of it, a young man with tired eyes, and he was speaking in a low voice.

"How serious is it," Daniel said. "Honestly. I need to know what I'm walking into."

The nurse measured his words the way nurses do. "She's stable for now. The next few hours will tell us more about the extent of the —"

"Is she going to make it."

A pause. "We are doing everything we can, Mr Calloway."

Daniel nodded slowly. He straightened up and looked at the door to the ward and something moved across his face and Serena, watching him, felt her heart clench with love for him. He was terrified. She could see it. The questions, the steadiness of his voice, that was just Daniel being Daniel, holding himself together the way he always held himself together because falling apart in public was not something he knew how to do.

She knew him. She knew exactly how he worked.

She wanted to go to him and put her arms around him and tell him she was right here, she was fine, she was going to be fine.

He pushed the ward door open and walked in.

Serena followed him through the wall.

The room was dim and quiet. Just the machines now, steady and rhythmic, doing their patient work. Her body lay in the bed at the centre of it all, small somehow, smaller than she felt herself to be, the way you always look smaller when you are horizontal and still. The machines mapped her heartbeat across a screen in a slow green line. She was here. She was still here.

Daniel stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her.

And then he broke.

It happened the way things break in people who have held on too long, all at once and without warning. His hand went to his mouth and his shoulders dropped and a sound came out of him that had no shape to it, just grief, just raw undirected grief, and he crossed the room in two steps and pulled the chair close and sat and took her hand in both of his and bent over it and wept.

Serena stood against the wall and watched her husband cry over her body and felt the love she had for him move through her like light through water.

She had been wrong on that corridor. She had been letting fear make her see things that weren't there. This man loved her. She could see it in every line of him, in the way he held her hand like he was trying to hold her here by force of grip alone.

Daniel lifted his head after a long moment. He looked at her face on the pillow, pale and still, and he reached out and pushed her hair back from her forehead with a gentleness that made Serena's throat tighten.

"Come on, Rena," he said quietly. "Come on."

He leaned forward.

He pressed his lips to hers, soft and slow, and stayed there for a moment with his eyes closed and her name on his breath like a prayer.

Serena felt it like a starting gun.

She ran at herself. There was no other word for it, she ran at her own body with everything she had, arms forward, certain, the way you run toward something you have been waiting for, the way you run when the waiting is finally over. She felt the pull of herself, the familiar gravity of her own skin and bones and the life inside them, and she closed her eyes and she waited for the flood of warmth, for the weight of a body settling back around her soul like a coat.

She waited.

The green line on the monitor moved in its slow steady rhythm.

The machines breathed.

Daniel sat back in his chair and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

Serena opened her eyes.

She was standing in the corner of the room.

She looked down at her hands. Still transparent. Still nothing. Still here in the in-between and not there in the bed where she was supposed to be.

She looked at Daniel. At his bent head, at her hand still held in both of his.

She looked at the bed. At herself in it, unchanged, unmoved, undisturbed.

The kiss had done nothing.

Nothing at all.

The room was very quiet. The monitor kept its rhythm. And from the doorway behind her, Riley's voice came low and even, the way it always came, like something that had been waiting a long time to be heard.

"Not every tear," she said carefully, "is proof of love."