“Okay.” My body is all over the place. My heart has splintered into a million shards but my mind is so incredibly focused, as if I’m watching this all from an observation tower. It’s not happening to me. It can’t be happening to him.
Yari calls Billie, who meets us at the airport. I swing by our apartment and grab my stuff. A few items of clothing, my lunch box, salt, candles, St. Expedite. I’m fully prepared to make a fool of myself. I’m braced for skepticism and accusations of lunacy, but I refuse to give a fuck.
My friends have never seen this side of me. They watch me carefully as I sit in my seat, clutching the little figure in my hand and reciting Psalm thirty-five until my mouth is dry and cottony. I take up the litany in my head, barely blinking or breathing. I frantically assemble everything MiMi ever told me about life, about death and healing. The afterlife. The diaphanous walls that separate time from eternity—how they fall without notice, and the ones we love can so easily slip from this life into the next.
“Help me, MiMi,” I whisper with my head pressed to the cold window as we fly above the clouds. There’s no sign of pink. No cotton candy in the sky. “You said I have your heart. I truly believe that’s all I need. Don’t let me miss the things our eyes can’t see. I need you.”
Salty tears run hot and fast into my mouth, and I pray around them. I open my little lunch box-cum-sewing-kit and pull out all the notes Kenan sent me. There’s one I need. One I cling to.
“Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.”
– Song of Solomon 8:6
“Love is as strong as death,” I mutter, my eyes wide, not seeing the ocean below. “Love is as strong as death. Love is as strong as death.”
I’ve forgotten my friends, and only realize they’re still there when we land. Worry knits their brows and tightens their expressions. They think I’m losing it.
“Come on,” I say without further explanation. “Let’s go.”
The ride to the hospital is a blur. I don’t look out the window or make conversation or pretend I’m not worried. I don’t have time to accommodate people’s concern, their doubt. In the Uber, I press my forehead to the headrest of the passenger seat and close my eyes, blocking out the sounds of the city and erecting an impenetrable wall around my faith, my beliefs, my wild notions of life and death and what’s possible. I’m prepared for anything. I dive so deep inside myself searching for the heart MiMi left me, that it’s as if she’s in the car with me, not my friends. Her heart is my inheritance. My birthright. I take silent, certain possession of it.
“Um, we’re here,” Billie says.
I open my eyes and nod. A light rain falls as the car pulls up to the hospital’s emergency entrance. The three of us get out, br
inging our suitcases with us. When we reach the waiting room, August and an older woman I don’t recognize are the first ones I see. Mack Decker, the front office executive whom I’ve met at a few functions with August, sits in the corner with a phone pressed to his ear. Iris rises from the boxy waiting room chair. At the sight of my cousin, the fragile hold on my composure slips and a sob flies free from the cage of my chest.
“Bo,” I cry brokenly.
Iris crosses the room immediately and her arms close around me, the comfort we’ve expected and given each other since we were kids flowing between us like a balm. My tears soak her hair, and I let myself go limp. I share my heart’s heavy burden, drawing strength from her she doesn’t even know she has.
After a few seconds, the pattern MiMi braided into my hair so long ago tingles, eyes in the back of my head deciphering the weight of someone’s scrutiny.
I turn from Iris’s embrace to face Bridget. Her cheeks are wet and splotchy, but resentment still burns in the ice-blue flame of her stare. She doesn’t want me here, but she would have to drag me from this hospital to get rid of me, and were she of a mind to listen, I’d advise her not to try.
Movement behind her distracts me from our stare down. The last time I saw Simone, she was unresponsive and EMTs were shoving a tube down her throat, intubating to save her life. Her face is so pinched with worry, she doesn’t look much better now. She slips one thin hand into her mother’s, I suppose an act of solidarity against me, the sworn enemy. I can’t be angry at her—can’t blame or hate her. She’s the most precious thing in Kenan’s world. I long to hold her. His blood runs in her veins. She has his mouth, his cheekbones, his DNA. She’s the closest thing to the man I love in this room, and if she’d let me, I’d give her a bone-cracking hug and lavish her with kisses.
“Hi, Simone,” I say instead. I’m braced for rejection, but will settle for indifference. Before she can mete out either, a white-coated man holding a clipboard strides into the waiting area. He eyes the small group assembled and speaks, sounding weary.
“Kenan Ross’s next of kin?” he asks, inquiring brows lifted.
“Here,” the older woman I don’t know says, standing and stepping forward. “I’m his mother.”
Another person who shares his blood—a woman Kenan wanted me to meet. I never imagined it would be under these circumstances. Not in my wildest dreams or tortured nightmares.
“And I’m his wife . . . ex-wife,” Bridget amends, pushing the hair back from her face, making the wedding ring she insists on wearing glint under the harsh fluorescent light. “This is his daughter. What can you tell us?”
I step closer to hear what he says, because fuck them all if they think they’ll shut me out.
“He came through the surgery well,” Dr. Madison, according to his name badge, says. “He’s strong, that one. He swerved to avoid the pipes and miraculously sustained few injuries when his car collided with the guardrail. The trauma sustained by his torso, though, caused extensive internal bleeding. We have it under control, but it’s tricky and has to be monitored closely. If not stopped, it could cause brain damage, cardiac arrest, and any number of organ dysfunctions.”
“But it’s under control?” I ask, ignoring the three sets of Ross women’s eyes that shift to me at the question. “He’ll be okay?”
I see him making the calculations. If the older woman is Kenan’s mother, and Bridget and Simone are his “wife” and child, then who am I?
Bridget gives me a flinty look. “I really don’t think—”