May. Emmy. Randa. Nick. Logan. Cecily. Stacey. My father. Sometimes, even my mother.

They all speak to me.

When they talk all at once, I feel like I am about to split apart, like one of those stars that fold inside of itself before exploding, creating a huge dark hole where light once was. Their need, their love, it yanks me from place to place, and it's hard to be with one and not hear another.

It's why I stay away. It's why I stayed away from May from so long, her heartache pulling me into orbit around her, making my knees buckle with how much I missed her. Don't tell Amelia—May is my very best friend. But I bet Amelia knows. She used to watch me a lot at first; she handled it all so much better, coming here to the after. But that was why she was the strong one, the smart one, the dependable one.

I was always just Barbara, Celia's sister. Barbara, Amelia's best friend. It wasn't until I met Mary Anne that I began to bloom. Like flowers in a memory garden. When I saw Amelia again, the third thing I said to her was, Thank you for bringing me Mary Anne.

I have not sent her someone yet. There are so many people in the world, getting them to line up just right is so hard. That tap on the shoulder of someone's heart is a hard thing to do—and I am not around enough. I will find someone, I promise you. Still—I knew, I knew I could make it so May wasn't alone when she fell. And I could make it happen—all I had to do was bother Mariah. And then make sure that Mallory Pike left in her red hair dye for a bit too long by blowing the windows in her dorm room open, scattering all of her papers with the wind that I urged into her room.

As she gathered the sheets in her arms, her hair went from chestnut to auburn to a carrot color that made her stare in surprise. Hair the same color as mine.

That would make May stay, I figured, if she thought I was there.

But I never got it right, not in school. I could make a body move, linking arms and legs and hips together in a fluid, explosive way. I could assemble a weapon and fire a wink of a shot far on the horizon. Mechanics, making the best way that things work. But people…people never do what you want to.

May thought she was supposed to follow. I didn't know that I had taken the lead. Neither of us was supposed to get ahead of the other: we were equal, balanced. No wonder she got lost. No wonder she did what she did.

Leave. Come with me.

Her hand slipped in with mine as we stood on the shore of my favorite beach. The warm water of Italy, the stone faces of the cliffs in Positano, the sand from Tel Aviv. Amelia was in the distance, and May's people were there. Tim. Her mother. Her grandparents. Her baby.

I wasn't going to let her leave my side, to go to them, to slip into that warm circle like a favorite shirt, nuzzling against the softness of it all. No. I had to push her back to the place that you wait, not the place behind the door. Where you come to end it all.

She had been here once: to say goodbye to her son. And I saw the temptation in her eyes when she saw the sea—and it wasn't her time. She couldn't be here, I had to get her away.

"Close your eyes," I told her.

May looked so lovely, just the normal girl I once knew, her body small but strong. Full where it was now empty, flat where it was now inflating. And her hair, her hair—it was coming out of her hair like threads on an unraveling hem as she was loaded into the ambulance. Oh, looking at May was so hard when she was sick, the broken down house of herself where she lived. I knew what a body looked like when it was destroyed.

I saw my own. At least I didn't have to live in it.

When she opened her eyes, we were in the midst of a whirlwind, so much noise and movement. A man in a purple shirt ran by, shouting, "I need the Dodgers infield stats now, Becky!"

Across the large newsroom, a girl jumped up from her desk and scurried over to the man—and she passed Emily who was bent over a copy machine and giving it a kick before punching a few buttons. The machine rumbled to life, scanning her document and making her face burst in its green light.

She came walking back to us, meeting Becky as they went to a cubicle in the far side of the room. "Honestly," Becky muttered. "You think it's the start of World War III and not a freakin' trade for some pitcher."

"Oh, but it's the trade of the century!" Emily snorted. "Whatever. I'm going to go drown in the sea of hyperbole."

Becky reached over a boy for a soda when the phone rang. She put it next to her ear, saying, "This is Rebecca Browne?...Just a sec." She handed it to Emily. "Logan?"

May grabbed my arm. "Why are we here? What's going on?"

"Listen," I urged, pointing at Emily as she frowned, taking the phone from Becky.

Emily leaned against the corner of her cubicle and snapped a can of soda open. "Hey, what's up?" And the soda slipped through her hand; it crashed on the floor and belched out its contents over her shoes as she slid down into a crouch. She sat there, holding her knees as the other interns stared at her, sopping up the spilled soda with napkins.

Emily began slamming her hand on the desk until she found a pen. On her hand, she wrote, Amniotic fluid embolism. "How fatal?" she pressed. She listened for a moment, and then squealed, "Why didn't you ask? Logan, come on, you can't trust doctors like that!"

"Stop yelling at him," May snapped, but Emily was standing back up, her whole body shaking, as she said, "I'm on my way to Stoneybrook. I'll call you once I get a flight. And hey—she's going to be okay, ignore everybody. If someone tells you that she's not going to make it, tell them to fuck the hell off, understand?"

After another moment of silence, she added, "Okay. Bye, Lee." The trembling heap of Emily went over to one of the computers and typed in that phrase, but her fingers hit so many letters, there was only a jumble in the search engine.

So she put her head in her hands and sobbed as the interns stared, as the people in the cubicles near her stood and watched, as everyone caught in the middle of the Trade of the Century, of recording it and reporting it and making meaning of it, slowed as if tarred and stared at Emily.

May turned and looked at me. "Miranda would be next. Please, please, don't let her be Randa to him, please, Babsie."

In the instant she blinked, we were on a wooden porch in the middle of the woods. Randa flipped a page in her magazine as she pushed herself back and forth on a rocking chair. "She looks so bored, don't you think?" I giggled.

"She hates Vermont," May said, her eyes so sad, so full of Emmy. "She was so pissed that Ry got to skip out because of summer school and all. At least Micah's here."

"Yeah, but she has to share Micah with his fiancé, and you know how Randa feels about sharing her brother," I noted, and she smiled at me, actually smiled. I took her hand again while Mrs. Schillabar made her way onto the porch with a cordless phone in her hands.

"It's Logan—he sounds strange," her mother said, passing her the phone.

"It's Logan, he's always strange," Randa snorted. I saw her eyebrows raise—Randa was so transparent, you could see her thinking, But Logan's better than sitting on a fucking porch in fucking Vermont staring at fucking trees. "Hey, Lee, where's Ms. May?"

"I can't watch," May breathed, spinning around and pressing her hands over her eyes. "Please, I can't watch."

We stood and breathed for a moment in the quiet and then in the siren of Randa's scream before stepping into a house behind Logan, his arms full of the Sisterhood books. On the back cover of the top book, his thumb was brushing over the name Lena. May was our Lena. This was how he kept himself together, holding on tight to something so Mary Anne.

May turned to me as he mumbled something to his family. "He looks so tired," she trembled, leaning her head on my shoulder. "This has got to be killing him, to be here when I'm there. Or my body—you know what I mean," she mumbled, her cheekbones streaking with blush. "It's his worst nightmare, that…that something happens to me when he's not there. He—"

A crash made us jump, a casserole flung to the ground, Logan standing in the middle of jagged pieces of a dish, food splattered all over the room. He shouted, ""She's not dead! Stop acting like she is!" In a blur of red, he ran back past us. Through us, our bodies dissolving like smoke.

"Am I dead?" May breathed as the lines of her came back in to focus, giving Mary Anne shape again.

"No," I told her. "But I won't let you go to that beach. I won't let you. Because you won't come back. That water has a song, May, it wants you to come home."

She licked her lips, staring behind her where Logan had been. "Last time, I was in my bedroom with my mother. Why is it different? And where is she?"

"With your baby," I sighed, holding her closer. "Her and your grandparents, they never leave his side."

Her hair fell in front of her face, the long brown hair that I remember from middle school. I brushed it back from her eyes. "Good," she whispered. "I love him so much, I want Mom to be with him."

My fingers roped up in my hair, and I began tugging on the curls, that soothing feel of my hair bouncing against my skin. "May, I adore you, but if you see that baby, I am so scared that you won't go back."

May looked behind her, at the house teeming with people, all speaking in a blue hush of voices, "I…where is he?"

"Who he?" I asked. And May's eyes met mine before she closed them.

It was dark and blue-green, a shadowed, cold place, here under the water. Logan was curled up in a ball, his face tipped up to the surface of the lake, a broken spring of a boy. There was no jump in him, hiding here, far away from anyone who would tell him that his wife would die.

I bit my lip and thought of Nick—no, no. No. Think about Mary Anne, not myself. Focus. Help.

May was a fog, drifting to him like a blotch of sunlight. "Logan," she whispered, pressing against him. His skin began to lighten, a gold outline over his shoulders, where her head was resting. "Angel." His face turned to where her was, and she drifted a hand over his cheek. "Don't be scared."

I was just like my dad. And her dad. I got angry, and then I ran away, a voice said, echoing like the bass bells they strike to mourn the dead in Tel Aviv. Dead like me. She picked me, and I failed her.

"You didn't fail me," May insisted, her features blurring as she pressed closer to him, losing herself in his skin. "You fail me if you don't get out of this water as the Logan I know. You've been scared before: remember the day with the problem in your head? You were scared, but you came back. Everybody's allowed to have moments that don't go right. No one is perfect. Do you hear me? I love you, do you hear me?"

He kept looking up at the water's surface until a shine on his hand lit up like a candle—the ring on his left hand that Mary Anne was twisting around. A flash of fingers, a wave of a face: he saw it all. I do. In a hail of bubbles, he pushed off the floor of the lake and popped back up to the surface, stroking back to the edge.

"Do you want to stay with him?" I asked, watching his body haul out of the lake, the watery reflecting of him racing around the pool and out of sight. He would be fine, he would treat this like a game, maneuvering everyone around him to make the best patterns, the best fits. To achieve the result that he wanted: to win.

To keep Mary Anne alive.

"I trust him—even if I hadn't come, Logan would have talked himself back strong," May stated, her eyes following where he was. "I want to be with him, but I don't need to watch him." She pressed her lips together, flattening the rose of it into a thin line. "I have somewhere else to go."

So we stood in front of her body, her body naked from the waist up, skin covered in blood as they inserted a tube down the center of her chest. To match the one in he rmouth that was breathing for her. May grabbed my arm, crumbling down on her feet as the doctors stared at machines, at her body, as someone inserted a needle in her stomach.

May jumped up and put her hands on her body. "My baby, me…am I okay? I want to go back, Babs, let me go back."

"You know how. I'll be waiting for you," I promised, watching her run her hands down her body, enjoying the feel of it. I could see the guilt in her fingers as she touched her chest, the way that they explored the terrain of her breasts. I had wondered—what if I had lived? Without my arm? Or blind, I went blind before I died from the heat that hit my eyes. What if I had to carry that with me.

I would want to die. The day of May's mastectomy, she told us not to come, but Randa and Emmy and I had sat together that morning at the Waffle Hut, and we played a game—what would we be able to lose and keep going? Breasts. Legs. Sight, hearing. What was the line? What would break us?

"Breasts," Randa whispered. She hid her face in her hands. "I…I don't think I could take it if I lost my breasts, not at seventeen, no way. I'd rather die of cancer, I really think so."

"May sounded so shocked," Emmy sighed, cutting into her pancakes, smearing the smiling face of whipped cream. "I'm scared she might be lying a bit about just wanting to do whatever saves her."

"No," I assured her. "She wants this—well, not this, but anything to save her. Her mom didn't do treatment and died. No matter what, May wants to fight this."

Battles have costs. Battles leave scars. If they don't kill. I glanced at my hands, and for a moment, the skin shredded away, leaving burn and bone behind. When I looked back, she was sliding back into her skin. For now, she was home. For now, she was back. I turned around and walked through the doctors, the wall, stepping off of the ground and lifting up, over Sharon Spier sobbing while talking on the phone, Jeff and some other girl leaving with car keys in her hand as they walked out of the door.

There comes a point where you can stop pretending—stop walking and respecting space, stop being a body that behaves like all of the other bodies.

If I could, I would go back. If I could, I would be alive. But this isn't so bad, being here, being this Barbara who can make a night sky light up with memories of Nick, make the stars slide around in loops and comets and spell his name. A Barbara who can make clouds curl into Felicity hair, May's hair, and make grass ripple with the sound of Miranda's laugh. Arrange stones into essays as strong as Emily's, and turn flower gardens into poems for my sister.

Magic and mystery are your skin now. And everything, everything you want is just a breath away. Unless those things are alive.

I escaped up into the sky and ran my hands over the air to make Nick's face erupt for a moment, the way he looked when he first kissed me and then sank back into a room with a bed and two shut doors.

Amelia was sitting on the desk chair, making it spin as she pushed on the carpet. Her light brown hair swung around her face, the face of a girl shedding her childhood but not yet. Not ever. I always thought that I had died young, but I had six more years than she did. Her green eyes flickered on the bed and then me. "You still cool with me being here?"

"You and me, we're a team," I grinned.

"She won't mind, right?" Amelia replied. "I mean, you and her are you and her."

"And you and me are you and me. May gets it," I declared.

I glanced behind me at the bed, and May appeared, clutching her hands together as she looked around her old bedroom in Stoneybrook. In the rebuilt house from where one was burned to the ground. Her face crimsoned, her eyes bright with tears. "I'm back here? I thought I would just wake up."

"Your body is tired, Mary An—May," Amelia explained, spinning again. "It's not that easy. But you know how this is. You know how to get back. We'll stay with you."

May looked down at her belly, rubbing over the lack of rise there with her left hand. "I have my rings," she murmured. "I have my rings. It really hurt before, to get my whole body back, to be complete, but not really complete because I didn't have them." She blinked, still touching her abdomen. "I want my baby to be here, too."

Amelia glanced at me, and I shrugged, sitting down next to May and rubbing her shoulders. "Let's take a nap, okay? When you wake up, maybe you'll be well enough to go."

May bit her lip. "Is Dawn okay? Stacey? Where is my dad?" She knocked on her skull and moaned, "Why didn't I go and see them, too? I mean—"

"Mary Anne Baker Spier," I declared. "You do what you have to do to get back. If you said to Dawn or Stacey, would you have preferred me visiting you or fighting my way back to life, what do they pick?"

I avoided her father. I couldn't hurt her now, no, I couldn't. I loved her too much to break her heart. Break her already crackled heart.

Her face relaxed, but her eyes edged over at the bathroom door, the gold glow of it, gold like summer sand. "You promise I'll get to leave, right?" May whispered.

"Yes." I urged her down to the bed, holding her in my arms like a lover, like her lover, stroking her hair back as she shuddered each breath until falling into sleep. Oh, my May, I will stand guard over you until I send you someone. Your mother holds your son, and she and I watch over you, but I—I will protect you.

But I cannot protect you from what is coming. There is only so much time we all have, put in our bodies, stuffed in like sand, and it runs down out of our blood and into the world. It expires. It ends.

When I was alive, there were days when I felt so bouyant, a dizziness would sweep over me like a hand. Was it because I was lighter than those around me, empty of time? Amelia spoke of a certainty that she was full of air. Maybe that is the padding where our time should be. We only get so much.

And my May, I cannot give her more time. November is coming, November is coming, and it is waiting to drain her of her last days.

"I love you," I told her. From the sounds of her honey-smooth breath, I could tell she was asleep. I looped a strand of her long, straight hair around my finger and added, "And I'm so sorry I can't save you."

But I will orbit you. I will listen to no voice but yours. I will watch and see what I can save and do and create so I can give you more time.