“No,” Mom says. “Your father and I—we need to see her this afternoon. We need to talk to the doctor, and we also have to start making a list of things we need to get for her new … for her new room.”
Dad puts his coffee cup down and gets up from the table then, goes and looks out the kitchen window. His shoulders are slumped, defeated-looking. Sad.
“She could stil wake up,” I say, not because I feel like I have to, but because I stil think she could.
I just don’t know if she wil .
“Yes,” my mother says, her voice tight and as sad as the slump of my father’s shoulders, but Dad turns around and gives me a smal half smile.
Not of thanks, but of shared hope.
I smile back.
“Last night, you went out,” he says. “Your mother and I assumed—”
“Claire,” I say, and he nods. “Is she … how is she?”
I look at my parents. What do I say? That Tess real y hurt her, broke her in ways even they don’t know about? That she saw Tess’s need to be who everyone wanted her to be more clearly than me, and I thought I’d seen her true self—the way she was capable of being cruel, the way she could be understanding without having to say a word—but that I had no idea who Tess real y was? That I’m not sure even Tess did?
“She’s busy,” I say. “Working a lot.”
“And what happened with Tess?”
“She said—” I pause, looking closely at my parents, and realize that it’s not that they couldn’t handle me tel ing them what Tess did. It’s that they don’t need to know. They are carrying so much now, paying for a life for Tess that none of us could have ever seen, and then having to watch her live it. Watch her live life stil , and silent.
“It was a long time ago,” I say. “Claire’s—she’s got Cole now. She says … she says that and work are her life.”
Mom looks at me, and I can tel she knows there are things I’m not saying. I can also tel she won’t ask what they are. That she understands that sometimes you can’t fix things.
“I should go get ready,” I say. “To go to the hospital, I mean.”
“You want a ride to the ferry?” Dad says, smiling at me. His smile looks so much like Tess’s, and I don’t know if I’l ever see Tess smile again.
None of us do.
soon after the accident, when everything was stil a crazy blur, and when I get to the hospital, I’m surprised by how things in her ward are exactly the same as they are in the afternoon and at night.
I thought maybe the nurses would be less tired-looking or—I don’t know. I guess I thought the morning might be more hopeful somehow. Riding across the river with the sun shining on my face, and thinking about what Claire said about belief, made me wonder if things could be different for me. Better.
And so I thought maybe I’d only been seeing the hospital for what it had carved out of me, what it had put in my heart, al the fears about the future, al my worry for Tess. Al my anger at her. And I’d thought that trying to move past that would make it different.
But it doesn’t. It’s stil sad to see al the patients lying motionless, to hear nothing as I walk by their rooms except the sound of machines.
It’s how Tess’s room sounds. For so long I’ve been focused on wanting her to wake up, on wil ing it, that I don’t think I’ve ever—I thought about the machines, about her hooked up to them, but I don’t know if I’ve ever real y seen it.
If I’ve let myself.
I can see why Claire comes here and thinks
Or, lately, on Eli.
But now I see that Tess, beautiful Tess with her long, gorgeous hair and stil , stunning face, is gone. Maybe not forever—I don’t want to believe she’s never coming back, I want to believe that one day she’l open her eyes—but right now, she isn’t here. Not the Tess I knew. Not the Tess I don’t know.
I sit down next to her.
“I—we need to talk,” I say, and realize this is the first time since the accident I’ve said this to her. Before I have said her name, pleading, or gone straight into saying things I thought would bring her back. Make her open her eyes.
But now I just want to talk to her.
“I saw Claire last night,” I tel her. “I—there was a lot about you I didn’t know, Tess. About you and Claire. You and Beth too. Even you and Mom and Dad. I always … you always seemed so perfect to me. So sure of who you were, and so quick to judge anyone who didn’t live up to your standards. That’s why I thought you stopped talking to Claire, you know. Because she did something you wouldn’t, and I thought—I thought you’d decided she wasn’t worth your time.”
I touch her hand, not because I’m expecting or even hoping for it to move. I touch it because she is my sister. If she was awake, I don’t know if she’d let me. I don’t even know if she’d stil be listening.
There is so much I don’t know about her, and I touch her hand because I wish I had the chance to know the real her, even if what I’ve learned has made me see that Tess wasn’t perfect.
Tess is human, just like me.
“I guess you did decide that,” I say. “Just not … not like how I thought. How could you do it? I can understand
