CHAPTER 23

A LOVE SONG FOR RICKI WILDE

February 28–29, 2024

Leap Day

It was time.

The hours leading up to leap day were warm, in that weird, climate-changey way. To Ricki, the world was off-balance. Everything felt disjointed, surreal, and hazy—especially the energy between Ricki and Ezra. Time seemed to hiccup, jumping from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., then to 4:30. Lost in sorrow, the two of them barely spoke for most of the day. The level of helplessness Ezra felt had ratcheted from cruel to torturous. There was no way to save Ricki. He’d tried to preemptively check her in to the ER, but as it turned out, there was no way to hospitalize and prevent a totally healthy woman’s alleged future death due to circumstances unknown.

Ricki stopped by Tuesday’s condo for a final farewell, but her best friend refused to entertain her dark fate. Instead of saying goodbye, she gave Ricki an aromatherapeutic facial and a glass of chardonnay. Ms. Della wouldn’t say goodbye, either. When Ricki knocked on her door—face dour, shoulders slumped—the elder woman shook her finger in her face, handed her a Lorna Doone, and sent her on her way.

A world without Ricki was too outrageous for her people to accept.

She didn’t contact her family. Saying goodbye to them would involve explaining why, which was impossible. Fading away felt cleaner, somehow. Kinder. Deep down, she prayed that her sisters had told her parents that she was doing well, even if it was a long shot, considering she’d unceremoniously booted them from her abode. She hoped they’d told them about Ezra, his delicious meal, her gorgeous shop, and maybe they would even share the article about her viral flowers. She hoped her dad knew she’d found success, that she’d built all of this herself.

Ricki bargained with every god she could think of for more time, a few extra weeks, even. Days. Hours. But she knew it was futile. Her story was over. Their story was over. The time for deluding themselves into a false sense of security or safety had passed.

As the afternoon drifted into early evening, the two looked at each other across Ricki’s tidy foldout dining table. They’d been silent for ages, picking at their take-out pad thai and avoiding each other’s eyes. Finally, Ricki broke their solemn trance.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I always thought I’d die an old lady in my sleep. Remember the gray-haired couple who died together in their bed at the end of Titanic? When I was a kid, I thought it was the most devastatingly romantic thing.”

“That was horrible. They drowned,” Ezra said with a sigh, his eyes pools of sadness.

“They drowned old, after a life fully lived. And they were with each other at the end. Sleeping peacefully.”

Letting out a heavy exhale, Ezra shut his eyes and rubbed his brows. This conversation, their reality—pure hell. And there was no way to escape it.

An idea surfaced in his brain, as if literally rising from the murky depths of a dark sea.

“Maybe that’s how we square it, then. We’ll do like that couple.”

Ricki lowered her fork and looked at him quizzically. “What, sleep through it?”

“Of all the choices, it seems like the softest landing.” Ezra reached across the tiny table, taking her hand in his. Dr. Arroyo-Abril had lectured him often about the perils of using avoidance as a coping mechanism. Respectfully, he didn’t give a fuck about her warning tonight.

So they bought an over-the-counter sleeping aid and a bottle of obnoxiously expensive white wine—Le Montrachet Grand Cru 2015—and Ricki whipped up a tray of weed brownies. No doubt, the combination would knock them out before midnight, as the twenty-eighth bled into the twenty-ninth. It was a solid plan. If she had to go, at least she wouldn’t feel it. She just… wouldn’t wake up. And Ezra would be spared the agony of watching his love fade away.

At 6:00 p.m., as Ricki pulled the brownies out of the oven, Ezra and Ricki eyed each other, their expressions twisted with sadness. Her emotions mirrored his; they knew without words that they both felt the same thing. Solemnly, they gathered a blanket, pillows, and a duvet, along with the wine; and as inevitably as they were drawn to each other and to Harlem, an invisible force led Ricki and Ezra upstairs. As if pulled by an invisible string, they were compelled to return to the roof, the scene of the crime. They headed up there in silence and laid out the bedding. For hours, they held each other, cloaked in the darkness of this strangely balmy evening. Ezra sat up, holding Ricki close, her back resting against his chest. His arms were tight around her, clasping her hands. They couldn’t bear to not touch each other. Especially now.

This is it, thought Ricki, gazing up into the endless sky. The end.

And Ricki had dressed for The End. She was wearing a sweeping, low-cut tangerine velvet gown from 1961 (per ReclaimedVintageGowns.com), topped with a faux-fur ivory duster. The velvet was bare in some places, and the lining was torn, but the dress held a sense of grandeur. She wasn’t about to face the afterlife not draped in something epic. After all, it was the last thing she’d ever wear.

“I don’t regret any of it,” she said with bleary finality. Holding the wine bottle by the neck, she took a long, hearty sip and passed it over her shoulder to Ezra.

“What don’t you regret?”

“Us. I wouldn’t take back a second I’ve spent with you.”

Ezra clenched his eyes shut, trying to hold on to her words. He didn’t deserve her forgiveness, and he certainly didn’t deserve her love.

“I’m so sorry, Ricki.”

“Please don’t be sorry. No more apologizing, okay? It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have stopped this.”

“You’ve never done anything to harm anyone in your life. You shouldn’t have to pay for my mistakes. Why you?”

“Why me, why you, why Felice?” she asked softly. “We could go around in circles forever. And we don’t have that time.”

She squeezed his hands tighter. Her words hung in the air, dismantling them both. Cutting through their false sense of calm.

“What will you do?” she asked. “You know. After.”

“I don’t know.” His voice was deep, raspy, pain etched in every syllable. “There is no after. I just see everything going blank.” He dropped his head into the hollow of her shoulder, breathing in her skin, her hair. “I won’t feel anything real ever again. Nothing will matter.”

Moments passed, and together they gazed up into the sky. The moon was so red. It looked disproportionately big and low. A blood moon. From their vantage point on the roof, it was a mesmerizing, surreal sight.

In her short time in Harlem, Ricki had come very close to living the life she’d always dreamed of and becoming who she’d always hoped to be. So many of her dreams had been realized, and she’d finally started to see the power in what she could create. It was heart filling. And the only thing better? The idea of her and Ezra together. Till they were old and gray, full on a satisfying life.

“I thought I’d live well into my nineties,” whispered Ricki. “Achieving the wisdom that’s supposed to come with old age. Does it ever happen?”

“Still waiting,” said Ezra, his voice sounding thin. “You know, you might not get to experience being old, but look at all you’ve done.” He gestured at the neighborhood below them, where people were cozy in their apartments, going about their evening, living their normal, lucky lives. “You’ll live on in all the plants and flowers around Harlem. Your art is woven into the fabric of this place now. And everyone who knows you will carry it with them,” he said, his breath hitching. “I’ll carry you with me forever.”

Overwhelmed, Ricki nodded and burrowed deeper against his chest. After a long time, she spoke.

“You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“The song you played for me. The one I keep hearing in my dreams. Our song. God, it’s perfect. It’s like the blood in my veins put to music. I’m taking it with me.”

Ricki gripped his right hand in both of hers and held it against her heart. A small sigh escaped her lips. Ezra stored the sound of it away in his brain, for safekeeping.

“Where did the melody come from?” she asked. “Tell me the story behind it.”

“You,” he murmured, his mouth against the top of her head. “You’re the story. I’ve been composing it for you for one hundred twenty-four years.”

“Oh,” she said, pushing down her swelling emotions. She didn’t want to fall to pieces. Ricki had hoped to face the end with grace, with some semblance of calm. “What is it called?” was all she managed to say.

A title had never occurred to him. It would’ve made sense to name it, but the song lived in his soul, not his brain; it lived somewhere beyond sense and reason. He took a deep breath, tightened his strong arms around her, and named it.

“A Love Song for Ricki Wilde.”

As the hour drew closer to midnight, the air grew cooler. Their breath went smoky. Their words ran out. The wine and brownies were gone. Now they lay in their makeshift bed, curled on their sides, facing each other: nose to nose, knees to knees, hand in hand. By 11:00 p.m., the contours of the world started to blur. The city sounds of Harlem started to silence. Soon, that ostentatious, oversized moon barely even registered. The boundlessness of their sorrow humbled even the blood moon.

At 11:10, Ricki and Ezra decided it was time and swallowed a sleeping pill each. Soon, the only thing that registered was the heat generated by their bodies. The beating of their hearts. Their soft, steady breath. Eventually, they fell into a meditative lull. There was no turning back.

The last time Ricki checked her phone, it was 11:25. As Ricki started to slip into sleep, she saw sense-memory snapshots, long forgotten and utterly random, from her twenty-eight years of living. Watching Rashida win Miss Georgia Teen on TV, her earliest memory. Feeling the rough crinoline under her kindergarten graduation dress scratch her thighs. Tasting mussels for the first time at her cousin’s Vineyard house. Panicking as her car spun out of control on an icy rural road four winters ago. Brushing her lips against the skin below Ezra’s ear, a spot she’d never even noticed on another man.

They were disparate, microscopic memories. But they added up to a rich life.

Ezra last checked his at 11:40. Before the clock struck midnight, sleep overtook them both. It was exactly as they’d planned. As the twenty-eighth dissolved into the twenty-ninth, they weren’t awake to witness it.

Thank God for small blessings. For the first time since they met each other, time was on Ezra and Ricki’s side.

Ezra seized awake at 8:00 a.m., bolting upright in a jerky, abrupt motion. The sun was high and unbearably bright, streaming down on him, slicing through the cold. It was freezing, actually. Finally, appropriate February-in-New-York weather.

February. It was February. It was February 29.

His heart pounded in his ears. Fire rushed through his veins. Jaw clenched, he looked down. Ricki was lying peacefully at his side, curled into herself. She was so still. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was just sleeping soundly.

His Ricki. Here she was, the end of everything for him. It was an unbearable loss he’d never return from. How could he?

Ezra clenched his eyes shut, willing this to be one long nightmare. In one shaky gust, he exhaled all the breath in his body. It took all the courage he had to reach out and touch her shoulder. He needed to feel her skin, to feel her pulse. Carefully, he reached around to place two fingers on the inside of her wrist, the way he’d seen it done in movies. It felt so clinical doing this, surreal. He stopped. He couldn’t.

With a low groan of misery, Ezra stared out into the white New York City sky, beyond the skyline, skyscrapers, and mile-high housing developments. He peered off into nothing, his mind flooded with grief, and he realized he was crying only when the hot tears dampened his skin. Ezra hadn’t cried in at least fifty years, maybe more.

He wept and wept, his shoulders shaking and his eyes clenching shut. He wept loudly till his throat was raw and his eye sockets felt bruised. Great, racking sobs of the utterly hopeless.

“Jesus, baby. What’s wrong?”

Ezra’s eyes flew open. He whipped his head to the right. Ricki had rolled over onto her back and was staring up at him with bleary, barely lucid concern. Her coils were sleep rumpled, and her eyelids were at half-mast.

“What? What? WHAT?”

“Why’re you so worked up?” Drowsily, she sat up next to him.

She yawned.

She froze.

And then she screamed, her hands flying up to her cheeks. Frantically, she began patting herself up and down, all over.

“EZRA, I’M HERE! AM I ALIVE?”

“YOU ARE! YOU’RE ALIVE!”

And then the moment erupted into pure chaos. Powered by a bounding surge of pure joy and unfiltered shock, Ricki pressed her fingers under her jaw, feeling for a pulse and sob-shouting with glee as she felt her blood pumping in her veins. Simultaneously, Ezra’s hands roamed her body with a frantic, mad intensity, squeezing and clutching every piece of her skin he came across. He smothered her everywhere with kisses, from her face to her feet. He plunged his hands into her hair, tangling them into her coils. He couldn’t stop touching her. She was alive!

Ezra shot up to his feet and pulled Ricki with him, lifting her up in an exuberant embrace. Now that they were brimming with energy and feeling—their skin tingling, nerve endings awakening, minds sharpening—they realized how utterly flattened they’d been by grief this past week. Overcome, Ezra made a choked sound and chanted her name—“Ricki, Ricki, Ricki, Ricki”—over and over, praying a silent thank-you to a god he suspected was listening.

The roof seemed to quake beneath them. Maybe it was from Ezra and Ricki, shaking from their tremors of euphoria.

Finally, after they released each other from an endless hug, Ezra lowered Ricki back to the ground. He palmed her cheek, beaming ecstatically, eyes still wet. Ricki’s face was lit with joy. He bent down to kiss her, but before his lips met hers, she pushed him away.

“Ezra,” she gasped out. “Wait, why did I beat the curse? Who did you sacrifice? Did you kill someone while I was sleeping?”

He laughed in giddy relief. “Yeah, I snuck downstairs and…” Then he froze.

“What?”

“You’re alive! Which means that the curse is broken.”

“I know, I know!”

“So I must be… mortal?”

Clarity flooded Ricki’s face. She stood there in front of him, paralyzed.

I must be mortal.

“Where’s the wine bottle?” he blurted out. It can’t be.

Without understanding, she reached for the empty bottle to her right and quickly handed it to him.

“Stand back,” he demanded. And then he smashed the bottle against the roof, the glass shattering. Swiftly, he grabbed a shard and, before Ricki could protest, drove it into his palm. Blood instantly spouted from the wound. And it fucking hurt. It hurt the way he remembered feeling pain a hundred years ago. It wasn’t the vague, quick-to-disappear itch that a Perennial feels. It hurt with an alarming, piercing clarity. The hope he hadn’t dared to hold on to started to grow.

With an agonized grimace, he held his palm in front of his face, blinking mutely in shock. The blood didn’t magically stop flowing as soon as it started. And the wound didn’t instantly close back up, healing itself. Very un-Perennial-like.

Ezra bled and felt the pain, just like an ordinary person would. Like a mortal would.

Ricki wasn’t sure what was happening, but she definitely wasn’t going to stand by while Ezra bled out in front of her. Thinking quickly, she ripped a pillowcase off a pillow and wrapped it tightly around his wrist, creating a tourniquet. She ripped off another one and bandaged his palm. This was insane. He felt things he hadn’t experienced in a century. Out of nowhere, his wrists ached from the tendonitis he’d suffered pre-curse, thanks to years of holding his hands the wrong way at the piano as an untrained kid in Fallon County. His lower right wisdom tooth smarted. Abruptly, he sneezed.

Dear God, he forgot he had allergies!

He erupted in unbridled, delighted laughter.

“Ezra, are you okay? What’s happening…”

“I’m not a Perennial anymore. I’m me, before the curse. I think?” He pressed the wound on his palm and flinched, sucking in air through his teeth. Then he sneezed again. “I haven’t felt like this since 1928!”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“I swear, Ricki,” he rasped, his voice tremulous with awe and wild surprise. “I’m a normal twenty-eight-year-old. Jesus fuck. Pardon.”

“Well. A normal, modern twenty-eight-year-old wouldn’t apologize,” she pointed out, grinning madly.

His face broke into a radiant smile. “Then I’m not fucking sorry.”

And then they crashed back into each other’s arms, melting into a raw, endless kiss. Drunk on their good fortune.

They were too impassioned to wonder where their good fortune had come from. They were too euphoric to care.

The two luckiest lovers in the world rushed downstairs to share their news. Ms. Della would be beside herself to see that they’d made it. Or maybe she wouldn’t be surprised at all, considering that she, like Tuesday, had utterly rejected the idea of the curse killing Ricki.

Ricki knocked on the grandiose oak door and waited. She rang the doorbell, and nothing. Did Ms. Della have her walking club that morning? She was definitely too ill to keep up with her walks. In her living room the other day, she’d looked horribly frail. Even her voice had faded, like she’d dissolve to dust from the effort of raising it a single note.

She wasn’t well, and it couldn’t be denied.

Ricki and Ezra looked at each other, unspoken worry passing between them. She raised her fist to knock again, when Naaz opened the door.

Her golden-amber complexion was sallow and drained of all radiance. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she was sniffling. The nurse, usually so bright and cheery, looked like she’d been awake all night.

Ricki’s stomach dropped. “Naaz…”

“She’s gone,” she whispered. “Ms. Della… she passed. I’m so deeply sorry. I know how much you loved her, Ricki.”

Instinctively, Ezra slipped his arm around Ricki’s waist. She slumped against his side, the wind punched out of her.

“But… it happened so fast,” whispered Ricki. “I wasn’t ready yet; I didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t want to say goodbye…”

Naaz shook her head. “The cancer would’ve taken her soon. But Ms. Della did it herself.”

Ezra flinched. “Herself?”

“W-we don’t understand. What do you mean?” Ricki’s voice was rising as panic and grief swirled inside her.

“Morphine. She knew where I kept it. And she took half the bottle.” The kind nurse reached out to pat Ricki’s arm, with a faint smile. “Ricki, this isn’t my first time experiencing this with very elderly, terminal patients. If it’s any consolation, exercising some semblance of control over the way they leave this world is often the most comforting thing for them. You know what she was like—Ms. Della was a force to be reckoned with. She died on her own terms. I don’t think it sat well with her, being at the mercy of an illness she couldn’t fight.”

All Ricki could do was nod, her arm wrapped around Ezra’s lower back, grabbing fistfuls of his hoodie, and his arms around her shoulders, helping to keep her standing.

Ezra nodded with absolute understanding. “When did she pass?”

“Just before midnight.”

Ricki’s heart plummeted. She pulled away from Ezra, the two exchanging a fraught glance.

Naaz reached into the pocket of her scrubs and pulled out a small note card. It was one from the batch of Ricki’s homemade paper. “She left you a note. Actually, it’s for both of you.”

She handed it to Ricki. Their names were written on the envelope in Ms. Della’s spidery cursive handwriting.

“Want to come in? Grab a bite, have some coffee? I’m just filling out some paperwork. Della’s great-nephew on her husband’s side, her next of kin, flew up from Atlanta and is with her now. At the funeral home.”

“No,” said Ricki. “No, we’re fine. Thank you for telling us. And for taking such good care of Ms. Della.” She was too dazed to speak eloquently, to cry, to wail, to yell. Instead, she drew Naaz into a brief embrace. She couldn’t go into the apartment, not yet. Ms. Della’s death would feel too real.

“You take care, okay?” Naaz offered a thin, sad smile before shutting the door.

Dumbfounded, Ricki and Ezra sat on the top step of the stoop. She opened the note. In a voice that didn’t sound like her own, she read it out loud.

Dear Ricki and Ezra,

Now, stop it. Ricki, don’t be sad. I was ready to go. I’ve lived a beautiful life. I’ve experienced great love. The one thing my grandmother and mother wanted, but never had. I’ve felt guilty about that. For being the lucky one.

I can’t think of a nobler cause than to die for love. You see, love should never hurt. Rejection, abandonment, cruelty, so forth, those things hurt. But love, itself? No.

Ricki and Ezra, I couldn’t stand by and watch you hurt, when I could sacrifice myself to save you.

Promise me that you’ll choose to love each other hard. Every day. And that you’ll pass it on. This will be my legacy.

I always wondered what my purpose was, and you gave it to me, Ricki. Being your grandmother has been one of my greatest joys. Thank you.

That’s all, for now. Off to see my sweet doctor, again.

Always,

Ms. Della, your new angel

Ricki and Ezra were here. Ms. Della was gone. And she was, henceforth and forevermore, their hero.