EPILOGUE

First the water sloshes down the corridors of the hospital. Roaring past the blood lab and the nurse’s station and the Alzheimer’s Research Center and the staff lounge where a med student tries to take the bra off another med student, and you feel it rip through the cancer ward and the hospital cafeteria. You hear it beat and rush like a heart, around the corner and down the tile hall, and you hear the door strike open as it pounds into the room. The doctors and nurses are carried off in a rush. The walls fall and float away. You are on the bed and rolling with the waves.

You are flooding the hospital, you are flooding up the street. You see the flower-heads of strangers bobbing down the current, off to work, off to drop their noses in a tonic, off to indulge or trade or slack, to city-live, completely unaware they are underwater, strewn like kelp. The sudden spray of ocean on your skin. You’re riding toward it, into it low and hard. You leave them all behind. This is all you need: the cloud shadows cast on water. Weird light falling on your eyes. Light dripping and bouncing, as if the sun had nothing better to do than show you beauty. Beside you, the painting is bobbing like a life raft. You see the clouds span the new gulf and seagulls mouth off at the wind and the underbelly of bridges.

Above is a bridge: it is your whole life. You could, if you felt like it, with just a short leap from your floating bed, climb on at any point. You could jump onto the bridge when your father is alive and smell the collar of his flannel coat, the one that is later eaten through by moths because you steal the mothballs to play with as a child. You can live before the diagnosis, before you pulled your sister’s hair, before you hurt her again. You can fling yourself to where your mother is healthy, or when you carry that slap in your hand, or when Mary is near, or the day you first met Nicolette. Moments shift and shimmer like flecks of light on water.

You are alone now, under the bridge, in the middle of nothing and the water’s warm. You are in the water and you are the water. And the hospital bed bobs up and down on the waves, catching and tossing fingers of light. What a thrill, what a thrill to be suspended in time like this. What a way to finally see the ocean, the terrible, indifferent, beautiful ocean you were once so afraid of. You stand up, body acting as it did before it was sick. But it is the memory of a body, standing on the edge of the memory of a bed, toes tucked around the lip, feeling the starchy sheet fold under them. As the wave swells, you grab hold of the underside of the bridge. You climb onto it.

There is someone waiting, always waiting for you. A woman with cropped dark hair and welling eyes. She is waving you onward.

Here, the sky is forever in front of you. Away and away it goes, the dim firmament splashed with gulls, and crows like paint splotches on the horizon. Here you are so alive. You are alive, you are alive, you are ready.

Dive in.