We’re not telling her today. We can’t. It’s not time. Not today. Soon. When we know more. Not today. Please. Not now.
Mariana would do anything for her sister when Nora’s eyes looked like that.
God, please don’t let her cry again.
She punched a pillow and turned it over. She lifted her hair so the coolness of the pillow soothed her neck, which felt rigid with knots.
Sick.
Sick.
Sick.
It was the only word Mariana would let rattle around in her brain. The other words—words that were too big, too hard—she let go of with tight breaths, breaths that should move more easily, if she could figure out how to breathe ever again.
Open hands cling to nothing.
They were words she’d said on the meditation podcasts how many times? Hundreds, at least. It was BreathingRoom’s catchphrase. Two weeks ago, a blogger had quoted her on HuffPo, and their Web site hits had tripled. Open hands cling to nothing.
She couldn’t help it. She was clinging.
She slid farther under the bedding. One breath in, one breath out, dropping the words death, alone, gone, memory, light, Nora.
Nora.
Another breath. Luke, if he were here, would lie in front of her. He would scoop both sides of her face in his big hands and put his mouth next to her ear. Breathe, love. She would take his breath, eating it right in front of him, accepting what he offered. She was supposed to be the Zen one, but he was the one who calmed her.
He wasn’t here, though. He would have been, had she asked him. But they were on such uneasy footing since she’d said no to his proposal. He said he was okay whenever she asked him, but he barely met her eyes when he smiled. She worried she was losing him.
Or she had worried about that until she suddenly had to worry about losing the most important one of all.
Mariana put her nose under the top sheet and breathed.
Usually these sheets against her skin—the smell of them—filled her with a contentment she didn’t find anywhere but retreat centers. Yoga was the closest she came to it in everyday life—the tired, heavy warmth of her limbs as she got into the car Luke had bought her for her birthday and used the seat warmer on the way home. Or postorgasm, when there was nothing to do but breathe and feel Luke’s chest behind her, rising and falling. That’s how good the smell of Nora’s sheets was. Once, years before, Mariana had tried talking Nora into doing her laundry for her. She’d actually thought for a moment that Nora would do it. Of course, Mariana might have had a bit too much to drink, which had been the reason she’d stayed over that night. She was embarrassed now to think of it, the recollection a sharp poke in her mind. This was before BreathingRoom, before Mariana had to be better. “Please?” she’d said to Nora. “I need this. To smell this every night. Oh, the heaven of it. Please?”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Nora had looked at her with wide eyes. “Are you asking me to be your maid?”
“No!” She didn’t have the money, anyway. “It’s just . . .” Mariana had clutched the sheets with both hands, pulling them to her nose again. “Maybe I am. I just want your sheets. Come on.”
Nora’s gaze had been amused. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to change your bed linens.”
She called them linens! No one was as Martha Stewart as her sister, not even goddamn Martha herself. “Please? It won’t take you more than an hour to get over the Golden Gate if you come midday. You come into the city once a week to go to the office anyway, right?”
Nora’s chin moved from amused to cold. “Won’t you be back here soon enough, anyway?” Ice rattled her syllables, the sign to back off.
It had rankled, that assumption her sister held that Mariana would fuck up again and have to move back in. Although, with the sun-scented sheets . . .
“I have a life,” Nora continued, the implication that Mariana didn’t have one. “A job. Your sheets can smell exactly the same as mine. Just get a clothesline. Amazon. Twenty bucks.”
They wouldn’t smell the same, though. Sheets line dried in San Francisco would smell of burritos and diesel, not ocean and blue skies. Nora’s sheets smelled of Tiburon and morning hikes and afternoon picnics on sunshiny Mount Tam.
Now, her phone in her hand, the sheets over her nose, Mariana brought up a search window before she caught herself.
No.
She would not google early-onset Alzheimer’s. She would not. Her fingers felt an ache at the tips, adrenaline surging in painful spikes. Before she could punch the letters into the search box, she threw the phone away from her so that it landed on top of the blanket at her feet.
Mariana pulled the sheets up higher, now to just below her eyes. One breath in, one breath out. She taught users of the BreathingRoom app to imagine their breath as the ocean, their thoughts as the waves. You didn’t need to follow waves to shore to make sure of the sea. The water was always there, no matter what.
What if, one day, the ocean were drained bone-dry?
There was a knock at the door, and then Ellie stuck her golden head around. “Can I come in?”
Mariana threw off the covers and opened her arms. “Get in with me, you gorgeous chipmunk of an Ellie-bean.”