I waited in the now-empty nursery for something to happen, but nobody came for me. Eventually I returned to my own room. I sat on the pink bed and wondered if it had been real. Not even a year had passed since that other night in another room when I had pulled wire from my own body. It did not seem strictly possible, but it was the truth. I put my face into my hands, held myself. Somewhere Marisol was holding my baby in the back of a car, getting used to her weight, crossing the glowing line on the ground. Her body was becoming my daughter’s comfort. I was left with nothing but my own body, the pain spilling like the milk beading my skin when my arms accidentally brushed against my nipples.
I never saw Doctor A again. In the morning an emissary knocked on my door. She was solemn, respectful. I had passed. Or I was no longer a person of interest. I found that I no longer cared at all. She gave me a change of clothes, a rucksack. In the bathroom I showered and changed and examined what had been given to me. The rucksack did not contain a tent or a map or weapons, only a small soap, a towel, a cereal bar and a bottle of water, and some money in a simple black canvas purse. Outside there was a coach waiting for me, striped with pastel colours along the side. The doors opened with a low hiss. I was alone; I sat at the back, folded up my knees against the seat in front of me, wrote the word Nova with my finger on the window, so that when condensation flushed the glass her name would be there, waiting. Someone else would sit in this seat and they would see her name and they would know it. I bit my nails down to the skin, wishing my teeth were sharper.
The coach drove down through the country I had crossed so slowly. We stopped periodically for other women to board, women who had the same rucksack as me. We did not speak. We lay our heads against the windows and watched the road move underneath us. No music from the speakers. Rain came in from the slice of open window near the roof.
A few hours passed and we pulled into a service station. The driver took a count as we got off the coach, but nobody was really watching us. We were allowed to go and use the bathroom and buy things. I got myself fries and a pink milkshake and left them untouched on a table, the ice cream congealing at the top.
In the gift shop I bought cigarettes, my old brand, comforting shape in the hand. I went outside to smoke them. Beyond the car park there was a little patch of not-quite woodland, scrubby trees polluted by so many cars, so many coaches, people moving onwards and backwards. I felt all the threads of these lives tangling in mine. I watched a woman with red lips and a red car close her door behind her, near me. She glanced at me and looked away. The early-evening light looked fluorescent behind the service station, radiating gently outwards. The slick of petrol on the tarmac didn’t trigger anything in me any more, my senses no longer heightened, no more arcane cravings, no radar. My rucksack was on my back. Nobody was getting back on to the coach yet. I tried the door of the red car, but it didn’t open. I turned and walked away from the car park, a little way into the trees. The ground was strewn with cans, scraps of bright plastic, cigarette butts. Beyond the trees there was road. Beyond that road there was green.
I’m coming, I said to nobody. The cars closer, the road leading elsewhere. The glowing filled me still, reminding me of where I had to go, however long it would take. My body still a reminder. It would never stop reminding me. I’ll see you soon, I said.