“Really?”

“Yeah, you’re so easy together. And he’s funny and he’s cute, and you seem really, really healthy and happy. Best I’ve seen you in years.”

“I am. I mean, I think he’s great. The only thing is, I just—well, I’m not nervous and scared around him. You know what I mean? I don’t feel . . . all fluttery. It’s just comfortable. So is that what love is?”

She looks at me like she knows something very wise that I haven’t figured out yet. “Of course it is. It’s such a relief to be with a guy who loves you more than you love him, isn’t it?”

And oh my God, I think, she’s exactly spot-on. That’s what this is: he does love me more than I love him. In fact, he’s kind of like a little puppy dog around me, always wanting to please me. So that’s what my teeny tiny little sense of hesitation is: he adores me, and although I can make a list of all his wonderful qualities and I know that he’s perfect for me, I am not suffering the way I usually do when I’m in love.

She’s talking away. “That’s the way it is with mature love, you goose. And it’s wonderful! You’ll see. It’s one less thing you have to worry about. He’s not thinking about somebody else or about to realize he doesn’t really love you after all.” She picks up Amelia, who kicks her fat little legs and flaps her arms. She’s so adorable that it’s all I can do to keep myself from going over and whisking her right out of Natalie’s arms.

“Wow,” I say. “You’re right.”

“Just one thing: How’s the sex? That tells you what you need to know, I always say.”

“Wellllll, his mother—”

“Oh, right. You’ve got that prim mom of his in the next room, don’t you? Okay, so he’s got to get his own place. And then everything will be perfect. And to tell you the truth, sex falls off as the most important thing in the whole world. You’ll see.”

I look over at my sister, who is possibly the luckiest person in the whole world, managing to celebrate the daily mundanity of marriage without having one iota of regret. She’s shown me the texts she and Brian send back and forth, and they’re all about who’ll pick up the milk and should they have tacos for dinner, and did she take the car in. Not even one pronouncement about undying love.

When we go into the living room, she puts Amelia in her windup swing and we sit on the couch and drink Diet Cokes while the baby falls asleep to the soft whirring of the swing. The air conditioner is a soft hum in the distance, and the refrigerator motor comes on. Adult life seems to be full of the sounds of motors. Even lawn mowers. Outside there is the glistening blue jewel that is their swimming pool; inside, I watch as a shaft of sunlight flickers across Natalie’s thick beige carpet.

“Look at her,” Natalie whispers, and I turn to the baby, slumped over in the swing, looking like a sack of rice. We both laugh softly, and then I say, “I want one of those. I want to do this, too.”

“You know what would be like the greatest thing in the whole world? If you had a baby, too, and we could raise them together and it would be just like when we were little girls playing house, only now there are real guys here, too. Husbands.”

“That would be the coolest thing,” I say.

We both start talking about how Jeremy and I could buy a house in this neighborhood once we’re married—it’s totally not too soon, Natalie says—and then when it feels right, we could start having kids, and blah blah blah, something about the guys playing tennis and Natalie and I being together all the time, having barbecue nights, and growing old, and I can barely hear her because my blood is pounding in my ears and maybe I am so excited at belonging somewhere. And soon I get up and go take a dip in her pool, and I lie on my back in the crisp, cool water gazing up at the blue, blue sky with little white clouds that look just like a child painted them.

And this, I think—no, I know—is exactly what happiness feels like.

SEVENTEEN

BLIX

I am still me. I am still me. I am dying, but I am still who I am.

I think I see my mother, feel her hand on my forehead. But then it’s not my mother at all; it’s Lola here with me.

And so is Patrick. I feel his hand holding mine.

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens,” I say to him. “Rumi said that.”

Houndy, from somewhere, tells me that Patrick’s heart has already broken more than any heart can stand.

“Sssh,” I say. “So much light is left for you, Patrick.”

I hear him say, “Blix, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you want some more ice chips?” and I do not.

“Love,” I say to him. “That is what I’m talking about.”

Ah! The moon is here again. And the sea. Our blood and the sea have the same pH.

Does Noah know that? I’ll bet Patrick knows.

Lola has gone away again. She says it won’t be long.

He knows so little, poor beautiful Noah. Wants me to have professional people here instead of my friends. Doesn’t want to know from death. How it can be part of a well-lived life. He sits on my bed next to Patrick and plays the guitar, his hair falling over his gorgeous face, but I don’t really hear the music as much as feel it. It’s as though my bones are making the noise. Plink, plink, plink.

I feel myself say, “Houndy.”

And Noah laughs and says, “Houndy?” so I know I must have said it aloud. Funny how some sounds exist but don’t come into your ears.

I love to hear him say that name.

Lobsters, I think.

“Yes, I remember. Houndy brought us all lobsters that time I was here.” He sings that to the tune of something I almost remember.

Patrick says that Houndy was a good man. He wants to know if I can see Houndy right now, and Noah says death doesn’t work that way.

The light circles around me, and I am outside the old elementary school in my own hometown, and a girl named Barbara Anne is offering me a chocolate, and I smile at her and reach over to take it, and my arm hits something. A person. Houndy? No, Patrick.

“I’m here,” he says.

Solid, warm. And I’m walking on the cliff looking at the stars. I might be a star. I used to think we became stars when we died. From stardust to stardust, someone told me.

When I told Houndy that, he said, “Nope. Not stars. I want to become a potato chip.”

His eyes fill up my whole head. His laughing eyes. Are you coming, my love? Do I have to keep waiting for you?

All is love. Just love.

Don’t be scared. Don’t clutch. It’s like yoga, those hard poses, where if you resist, it hurts.

It doesn’t hurt just to let go. That’s Houndy talking now in my head.

I can’t think of how. What do you drop, what makes letting go happen? The blackness comes over me, but still I don’t let go. There’s something else I have to do.

“What do I do . . . after?” Noah says.

You call the coroner, bunion head. This guy really knows nothing, does he? Houndy again. What does he think you’re supposed to do?

Patrick says he knows what to do.

“I called my mother,” Noah says close to my ear. How much later is it? His voice is too close; it tickles me. “She says I have to call the doctor for you. She insists on it. You need medical care fast.”

No. No. NO.

Patrick, tell him.

Patrick says no.

Oh God. Is this going to be my last thought? My last thought on earth is going to be NO? I want to think of something peaceful, not how Wendy is directing me from Virginia, how my family thinks my death should go. Why can’t they let me die the way I want to die? I need to go NOW. How do I make myself die?

Patrick and Noah are arguing. Noah says maybe there’s something else they can do. To buy more time. I can’t hear what Patrick is saying, but I hear his tone of voice—low, loving, gentle.

Patrick knows I don’t want more time. Not unless I can have eons of it.

Marnie. That’s it, that’s what I will think about. I wrap her in love and light. I send her a message: Love is the only thing that matters. I want to stop the men from talking; I want to tell Patrick about her, but something says not to, that Noah would hear. What a funny business love is, and these two men sitting here, one the past and one the possible future.

There was so much I still wanted to do.

And then I’m up on the ceiling, looking down at myself, a perfect little wrecked body there in the bed, beautiful and strange. That body of mine, so useful and brave, wrapped now in a white gown. The gown I’d picked out and made Noah help me get into. Patrick is there on the bed, too, looking down at me. I feel it when he notices that I’m not there anymore. He reaches over and touches my hand, curls my fingers in his own large hand, the hand that was burned.

Thank you, I say. And now it’s time. So much left undone. So much I still want to feel and know.

But I’ve already let go.

EIGHTEEN

MARNIE