I feel immense gratitude to those of you who have and still continue to comment - short and long messages. Some of you have told me you don't know what to say, but honestly, just knowing you're around and reading and enjoying this is enough for me.
Elsa rushes down the hall with muted footsteps. She checks her watch again: not a minute has passed since the last time she did. The smell of antiseptic reaches her nostrils, the quiet humming of dispersed voices tickles her ears. There is, momentarily, the sound of softened cries. As she walks, her eyes fall on a doctor speaking in low tones with a nurse. He gives her a nod and a curt smile when he catches her eye. Elsa barely has the time to return it.
Rounding the corner, she spots Gaby first. The nurse is stepping backwards and out of the oncologist's office, pulling Theo's wheelchair from the handles. The elder sits in it while she continues to speak with whomever is still inside. A few seconds later and Elsa will have reached them and found out that it is Anna and Dr. Espinosa.
Elsa fumbles to greet everyone; to briefly touch Gaby's arm, to gently hug Theo's shoulders; to wave at Dr. Espinosa; to give Anna a breathless smile. The five of them stand by the door for a pregnant pause that feels heavy enough to bend the expectations Elsa had of finding good news. Dr. Espinosa focuses on Theo as she discusses their next meeting, as she asks her to call at any time that is necessary. Theo nods with a serene expression on her face, traces of her old self seeping through as she jokes about calling the doctor at one in the morning just to see what she's up to. Amidst their conversation, Elsa meets Anna's gaze. Her eyes, she notices, glint under the light with unshed tears, while the tugging at her lips is nothing but the shadow of a smile.
Dr. Espinosa's voice calls to her as if through a haze. Elsa turns to her. "I'm sorry?"
"Do you have time to talk for a minute?" she says again.
She wills herself to ignore the dread that washes over her. "Of course." Then, turning to Theo and Gaby she says, "I'll be right back."
On her way in Elsa grazes the back of Anna's wrist. I'm here, she tries to convey.
A moment later, Dr. Espinosa quietly shuts the door.
Elsa feels strange and out of place sitting on the side of the patient with her scrubs still on. She moves all the way to the edge of the chair, wrings her hands together on her lap. Dr. Espinosa's brown eyes are calm when she looks at her, but beneath them, there is a common language being shared.
"How are you doing?" she asks with a rather casual tone.
Elsa is surprised by the question until she realizes that she is not, in fact, a patient. Dr. Espinosa may be somewhere close to ten years older than her, but the two of them work at the same hospital. They are colleagues, first and foremost.
"I'm okay," she says. "I've been here since midnight so you can imagine. How are you?"
Dr. Espinosa responds easily, "It's been quite a morning already, but Ms. Jackson somehow still manages to steal the show."
She feels like chuckling but all that leaves her lips is a small gust of air. "She has that effect on people."
A small smile appears on her lips and then, slowly, it disappears. The room grows quiet. From the outside, Anna's voice leaks through. Knowing where they're headed, Elsa decides to take the first leap.
"How did she do in the results?"
Dr. Espinosa pauses and looks her square in the eye, as if she were trying to decipher whether Elsa already knew what was about to be said. "The tumors resisted the chemo," she tells her, not with any ease.
Numb, Elsa nods. Despair coils around her heart. "Are there more?"
"Do you want to look at the scans?"
Elsa gulps. "No," she mutters, then reconsiders, "Should I?"
Dr. Espinosa sighs. "Well, you could, but everything is clear as day. There is nothing in them that could help us improve our chances at this point."
"Do you not have any second-line treatments?"
There is a slow shake of her head. She rests her elbows on her desk and says, "We do, but she doesn't want them. She says she'd rather go for palliative."
"Why?" Elsa asks, even if, beneath her desperation, she knows it is not her she should be asking.
The doctor tilts her head. "You know her much better than I do. But I think we both know why."
Feeling small and helpless in that chair, Elsa wishes she could scream, but her mouth, her throat, have been dried out by the dread overwhelming every inch of her body. She does know why, and that is the thing that pains her the most.
"So that's it then?" she whispers.
Dr. Espinosa lowers her gaze to connect with hers. There is that common language again, the kinship found in those committed to the lives of others.
"There is no 'that's it' until we reach the end."
When Elsa finally exits the office a few minutes later, she does so with a strange mixture of foreboding and resolution. It is almost physical, the way it twists and untwists around her stomach, the way it weights, bitterly, in her tongue. Her heart feels as though it were being tugged in various directions all at once. There is so much in her, she doesn't know how to rid herself of any of it.
Theo is the first one to speak: "Ready?"
Elsa looks down at her—at the headscarf she'd bought for her on the day they found out she had cancer—and for a moment she thinks she could fall to her knees, grab onto Theo's hands and say, No, I'm not ready. But instead, all she can do is nod. Because to speak in that moment simply does not feel like a possibility.
Anna softly asks, "Are you done for the day?"
She nods again, forces herself to say, "I just need to get out of my scrubs." She makes a move to leave but suddenly there is a hand wrapping itself around her wrist. It is Theo's.
"Chin up, baby," she tells her. "'Cause when you come back the four of us are gonna go get milkshakes, talk nonsense and pretend like this ain't happening. What do you say?"
Elsa breathes, "Okay."
Her feet carry her all the way back to the locker room. Her hands get rid of her dirty scrubs, throw them in the laundry, change her into her regular clothes. She moves, without thinking, to the sink and feels the air leave her lungs until they burn from lack of oxygen. She gasps, then chokes out a sob born painfully out of her chest. The coldness of the ceramic grounds her despite her hands recoiling in desperation to hold onto the surface. Her eyes sting as she shuts them close, and she breathes. For seconds on end this is all she does as she fights off all the good memories that threaten to swarm her mind. All the laughs, all the puzzles they completed. All the stories, and all the times she came to her for advice. She breathes, because that is the only thing left for them to do. Until even that becomes no more.
She runs the cold water and splashes her face a handful of times. She does her hair again, pulls it up in a high bun. She blows her nose, takes a large gulp of water. She looks at herself one last time in the mirror, and sighs.
The little things: How many of them must a person do to deceive sorrow?
Elsa meets them all at the exit, and nearly misses a step when she sees Theo begin to stand up from her wheelchair. Instinctively, she rushes towards them. "What are you doing?" she asks.
"I'm standin'."
"It's a hospital chair," Gaby comments.
"You didn't bring your wheelchair?" Elsa nearly squeals.
"No, mamma. I'm fine."
"Don't even try," Anna tells her, "I already asked and I already got the sass."
With widened eyes she turns to Theo, who is already standing up with the help of her cane—the one Anna bedazzled with rhinestones and shiny stickers all those years ago. She says nothing, however, because there is stubborn resolution written all over the elder's face. So she turns to Gaby and Anna instead. "How far are we going?"
"Not far," Anna says, "Two blocks."
"Fine," she mumbles. "As long as Theo feels—"
But Theo is already walking away.
Elsa glances at Anna, who smiles and shrugs as if to say, Let her have it.
On their way to the diner Elsa grows quiet, and so too does Anna; each further away in their minds than their feet can carry them. She wonders if anything she has to say will comfort either one of them, but she is far too preoccupied with these thoughts to muster them into words. She thinks she could reach out to her; that she should, in fact, do so. But by the time Elsa has gathered the courage—has moved to the side her hindering emotions—they have already reached the place.
She opens the door for Theo and receives a loving squeeze on the cheek that makes her scrunch up her nose. They sit on the closest booth available before they order. Two chocolate milkshakes, one strawberry and one vanilla. "Can you add an order of crispy french fries to the order, sugar?" Yes, the server says with a hit of a Southern accent. Sure thing she can.
Theo sits back with a satisfactory sigh. "That was a good walk," she says to no one in particular.
"We're bringing your wheelchair next time," Gaby tells her.
"Hell no, we ain't."
"Yes. We are."
The elder ignores this by closing her eyes. Her thinning frame looks enlarged only by the brown blazer and the sash over her shoulder. Its fabric falls to the side while Gaby reaches out to secure it around her once more, and Elsa realizes that her care for Theo is not just a job at this point.
Her tired brown eyes open up again. They settle directly on Elsa. "I don't want any more medicine treatments," she states. Next to her, Elsa hears Anna sigh through her nose.
"The doctor told me," she responds calmly. "Is that really what you want?"
"Yes."
"Even if there are trials we can look into?"
"At what cost, honey?" She shakes her head. "I want to enjoy the time I have left. Give me the care you think I'll need but that's all. I've had a good life."
"Don't talk like that, Theo..." It is Anna who says this, the sound of her voice soft and despondent as it reverberates inside Elsa's chest with a fresh wave of pain.
Reaching across the table for her hand, Theo says, "I'm sorry, baby."
If sorrow could be pulled at it like a thread, Elsa thinks, she would do so slowly out of Anna and wrap it around herself. She would bear it, if she must, for the two of them. But being faced with the impossibility of it all, she does the only thing she can. She bears it with her; even as the milkshakes and the french fries arrive, and the ease that comes with spending time around good people envelops them all. She places a hand on her leg, and pulls Anna's attention towards herself before the girl rests gently, defeatedly, her head on her shoulder.
Elsa doesn't think twice before brushing her cheek against the crown of Anna's head as she draws comfort from her proximity, closes her tired, reddened eyes, and misses the smile on Theo's lips.
Two weeks later Elsa finds herself making it home from the clinic just in time to shower and get dressed. She feels as though she's been running on autopilot, only now taking a pause to gather the surroundings that are both foreign and familiar at times. She rummages in the kitchen for something to eat, finds it too late to go out and buy something, and opts for a glass of orange juice and a bowl of frozen grapes—all the while wondering why they had to meet at her apartment in the first place. Because, Rapunzel had said the first time she'd asked this out loud, Anna still lives like a bachelor and we live in Brooklyn and Sasha's roommate is weird and Kristoff is gonna be out on a date.
None of what came out of her cousin's mouth made sense lately. The effects of wedding planning, Elsa figured. Even if there was barely any planning to do. Or at least not as much as she thought there would be. But what the hell did she know about weddings anyway? Rapunzel and Eugene wanted to go the small way. Few guests; a cozy, outdoor venue; a small dance floor. Go small on the wedding and go big on the honeymoon. Elsa knew they had a venue already; had probably been the first thing they'd had to book. They had a date, which already felt like it was fast approaching even though it was still nine months away ("The time it takes to prepare a baby," Rapunzel had gushed. Eugene could only stare.) All that was missing was... well, the details.
There is a knock on the door just as she's about to sit on the couch to enjoy her meal. Exasperated, she throws her head back before she checks her watch. It is fifteen past seven. Another knock comes when Elsa is already at the door. Her subconscious recognizes it by the time her hand is turning the knob.
Anna stands on the other side with a hand raised that she then waves. "Hi."
"Hi," Elsa breathes.
Noticing the lack of people inside the apartment, she asks, "Am I early?"
"No, everyone else is late." Suddenly nervous, she steps to the side to let Anna in. This is the first time she visits her apartment, and it's only just sinking in.
In the small, illuminated hallway Anna stops to look at the painting her cousin gifted her while Elsa stands close by, watching her.
"Rapunzel made it," she comments, the words leaving her without much thought.
"Yeah, she showed it to me."
"She did?"
Anna nods, stepping back. "She said she wanted me to see it before giving it to you."
"Why?" she asks, curious while she follows Anna farther into her own apartment. Elsa notices her hesitate; the wheels inside her head turning.
"Uh, she just wanted my opinion. That's all." She distracts herself with looking around the space, and Elsa lets her even though she's not convinced by her answer. She points at the open second level built over the kitchen only guarded by a thin, white railing. "Is that your room?"
"Is it a room if it has no door?"
Anna snorts. She points at the narrow iron staircase that leads up to it. "And that's how you get there?" When no answer comes she turns to Elsa, who is trying not to laugh. "Dumb question, huh?"
She grins and says, "That's how I get there, yeah."
"Nice." She continues to look around the main area, where there is a gray couch and a coffee table, and a TV screen that she rarely ever uses and only kept after the move because Eugene already had a TV set that was obnoxiously big and kind of intimidating. Against the opposite wall is the same bookshelf that used to be in her bedroom. The top half is reserved for medical texts; nonfiction books written by doctors; cardiology and internal medicine books that have helped her navigate the last eight years of her life. The bottom half is reserved for the books of fiction she's enjoyed the most; some bought for a dollar; others bought off the best-seller shelves; others, gifts, from the people that have marked her life in one way or another. She remembers the day she arranged her books, how she thought of setting up an empty space for those Anna would eventually come to write.
She eyes the round dining table that probably belongs in a coffee shop as it occurs to her that she's been looking around her apartment just as much as Anna. Except that the girl now seems to be looking for something in specific.
Bemused, Elsa asks: "What are you doing?"
Anna whips her head around. "Do you exercise?"
"When I have the time, yeah."
She nods. "So... what do you do?"
"I run on the treadmill sometimes, or I use the punching bag. There's a small gym in the basement."
"Ah... that makes sense."
Elsa is still puzzled. "What does?"
"The... punching bag." She waves her hands in Elsa's direction, then waves them over her own body, signaling at her limbs, her chest, something. Elsa has no idea what she's doing. "You just look like you do some exercise."
Elsa remains where she is, staring at her. Is that a compliment? Is she flirting? Does that mean she's been checking her out? "Thank you?"
They stand in the middle of the living room: two idiots blushing.
"So..."
"Do you want something to drink?"
"Yes, that would be nice."
Elsa moves to the kitchen, berating herself as she goes. The back of her neck burns the moment she starts imagining Anna checking her out from behind. She opens the fridge, welcomes the cool air it expels.
"I have juice, water... sparkling water... some wine probably. Coffee to satisfy your needs..."
There is no answer. She turns around to find Anna leaning against the wall, watching her with a serene expression on her face. She feels a drop all the way to the pit of her stomach caused by the intensity of Anna's gaze. She skips a breath, and for a few seconds, she does not blink. Time does not slow down, but her perception of its passing becomes muddy, incomprehensible to her own senses. Elsa glances down at Anna's lips just as she begins to smile. "Sparkling water sounds good," she finally says.
A few moments later, and a knock will come from the door.
Anna goes to open it for her, allowing her the time to calm her thunderous heart with a few deep breaths. She'd recognized the look behind Anna's eyes, but more than that, she'd recognized the sensation within herself. For Elsa knew, with steady and profound certainty, that if Anna had kissed her in that moment she would have let her do anything.
The animated sound of voices bursts into the apartment and manages to pull Elsa out of her own mind. Her cousin is the first one to enter the kitchen and hug her. "Sorry for being late," she says.
"No, you're not."
"I'm not." She pulls away, a question quickly forming. "So?"
"So what?"
"Did something happen?" she whispers.
Elsa narrows her eyes. "Were you guys late on purpose?"
As more voices approach Rapunzel loudly responds, "Of course not!"
Suddenly everyone is in her tiny space of a kitchen and Elsa doesn't know why. Eugene is looking in the freezer for the grapes she has waiting for her on the coffee table. Rapunzel is searching in her cabinets for the bag of Reese's Elsa finished last night and then settles for a bag of veggie chips. Sasha is squeezing Anna's cheeks and saying, "I missed you so much, did you know that?" before he asks Elsa if she has any more of that Colombian coffee that makes him feel like he's popping pills, because he just got back from being at the hospital for twenty-six hours and if he doesn't do something about it soon then he'll end up sleeping in her bed.
Chaos.
Elsa moves the soon-to-be-married couple to the living room while Sasha and Anna (who needed little convincing when Sasha offered her a cup of coffee instead of the sparkling water Elsa never got the chance to serve) wait in the kitchen for the water to brew.
"So nothing happened?" Rapunzel asks again in a whisper.
"Yes, we had sex," she deadpans, ignoring the unexpected effect those words have on her.
Her cousin's mouth goes agape.
"She's kidding, babe," Eugene says. "The day these two start having sex they'll go M.I.A. for a week."
Elsa has to pretend like the thought isn't both mortifying and exciting.
A few minutes later Sasha and Anna return from the kitchen. He sits on the floor by Rapunzel's side, and she, next to Elsa.
"This coffee is really good," she comments.
"Guess I should buy more then," Elsa smiles.
Anna's gaze flickers down to her lips before she mirrors her smile. "Guess you should."
Half of the talk that night is wedding planning and the other half is nonsense. Elsa tries to ignore the warmth radiating off Anna's leg as it brushes every so often against hers, but the impossibility of it is almost intoxicating. It doesn't help either that certain comments have them gravitating towards each other, inciting much lower conversations where only they are participants.
It is during one of these brief exchanges that Anna asks, "Is that Virginia by the window?"
Elsa looks over at the two plants sitting on the windowsill. One of them is a small succulent she'd bought last year on the spur of the moment. The other one...
"No," she laments, "Or... at least not the one you gave me. That's her baby."
Anna gives her that puppy look she hadn't seen in a long time. "Her baby?"
"Yeah. I managed to take care of Virginia long enough that she became a bit of a perennial plant. Then I started working on... propagating it? Not sure that's how you call it."
"How do you do that?"
"You cut an offset," she tells her, "and you just do this whole process to try to get her to grow a root. I felt like a mad scientist. You know like the ones that make clones and stuff."
"Right, so you became a plant lady instead of a cat lady."
"Two plants are hardly enough for a plant lady title."
"And what's her name?"
"... Virginia Junior."
Anna snorts. "That's very original, Elsa."
She leans into her, bumping their shoulders together. "I never said I was good at names."
They share a smile, oblivious to the way they have drawn closer towards each other, before a veggie chip hits Elsa on the chest and falls onto her lap.
She turns to the culprit. Rapunzel says: "Did you two hear any of what I just said?"
Elsa pops the chip into her mouth. She has nothing to say. Of course she wasn't paying attention.
Eugene interrupts with a laugh. He shakes his head before he says, "I'm telling you, man. It's gonna be one full week."
"One full week of what?" asks Anna.
"Nothing," Elsa blurts out, her cheeks reddening. She spends the rest of the night glaring at her cousin's fiancé.
The chilled days of October have crept over the city. On the streets, the fallen leaves rustle across the pavement and are crushed under the weight of people's footsteps, whose pace quickens each and every time the wind picks up. Inside the hospital, little changes. Time becomes indecipherable, the white artificial light of its halls robbing its guests of their sense of day and night.
In the emergency room, Elsa spots the mother first: it is hard to miss her. She leans against the wall, out of people's way, clutching her hands to her chest. She has red lipstick on, thickly and haphazardly applied. Her eyes are swollen, her hair tied up in a bun as if a last minute thought. There are damp tracks trailing down her brown cheeks. The moment she sees Elsa, the tears start up again.
Manish, her twenty-five year old son, is dying. This was a conversation that should have already happened, but whenever Elsa told her that they needed to discuss her son's condition, she'd tell her to speak with her husband. He was a simple man, a salesman, who would often sit quietly by the woman's side, square-jawed even as she cried in grief. Only when he seemed unable to bear it any longer would he put his arm around her. "Come on, woman," he would say, "come on."
Curled up on a stretcher, their son gulps air. That is the reason why he was admitted to the hospital this time around. His heart failure was beginning to take a turn for the worse.
Elsa and his father pull him up as best as they can before she begins putting the stethoscope's rubber buds on. His mother stands not too far from them, wringing her hands. Her eyes, Elsa finds, are the hardest to look into. She places the diaphragm on Manish's back; can feel the bones of his spine as they curl. His lung sounds are crackly, and when she presses the diaphragm on his distended belly, the veins in his neck pop out. Elsa watches him closely, with a soft but impartial gaze. She goes through the typical symptoms of end-stage heart failure in her mind: shortness of breath, fatigue, nausea, mental lassitude. Manish has all of them.
She puts away her stethoscope, helps Manish lie down again and steps away from the stretcher. As if by instinct, his mother goes to rest her hand atop his black, short and unwashed hair. She drops a tender kiss on his forehead, touches his hollowed cheek, brushes her fingertips over his eyebrows. Feeling the weight of this moment, Elsa asks his father to step outside.
In the hallway, they face each other squarely. The father works part-time as a Hindu priest, he'd told her once. Traces of red powder could still be seen on his forehead.
"His heart is getting weaker," Elsa says, unsure of how to begin.
"It gets weaker and weaker until it finally stops?" he asks, and Elsa nods, sensing his desperation.
She remembers the story he'd told her of how Manish got sick. Friedrich's ataxia; a nerve disease that in its final stages destroys the heart, too. "He used to pull his hair, bite his clothes," he'd recounted. "Schoolteacher said something not right with him. We took him to a pediatrician and he did blood test. I don't know where he sent it. Then we went to seven more places with seven more tubes of blood, and then they come up with this. They told us he will end up in a wheelchair but we didn't believe them. Everything what they say, we see today. Only thing they got wrong was they said he would live for fifteen years. He lives for twenty-five."
Now, facing her outside his dying son's room, he finally asks the question Elsa had been dreading. "Can you give him a new heart?"
'No,' it feels like, is one of the hardest things for a doctor to say. Elsa learned this, like most things, the cold, hard way. Not inside a classroom, but under real circumstances; where death was no longer just a concept, but the reality everyone was meant to face one day. She'd also learned that 'No' could not be delivered as such. Because the word 'No' felt like closing a door on the patient and their family's faces. It felt like abandonment of all hope, like a disregard of the fragile concept that was life. It gave no opportunity for her to be with them on the times they needed it most.
It isn't easy telling Manish's father that there is nothing more she can offer, that his son is not eligible for a mechanical or a human heart because neither would change his prognosis. Yet, in his expression there is no more room for any more despair. Elsa believes he already knew.
"The things that are important to my wife are not so important to me," he says.
"What is important to you?" Elsa asks.
"All the pain he going through." His lips quiver before his face tightens up again. "I don't want him to suffer no more. He have suffered enough."
In the hours that follow, and as the afternoon starts to give way to the evening, Manish falls into a deeper well of agony. Elsa has to put him on a morphine drip to keep him sleepy and as comfortable as possible before she continues doing her rounds, the exhaustion stepping to the side as it usually does, waiting like a predator in hiding for her to let her guard down.
She checks on him again somewhere past 8 PM. On morphine, he has gone in and out of consciousness. He dozes off and then open his eyes in a panic, as his father tries to explain, before closing them and going back to sleep. His mother does not leave his side. She clings onto her son's hand, as if by physically holding him there his life could not slip away. Yet, deep down, she must have known. Elsa could see it in the eyes that bore a pain so great and unbearable that one could not speak of it out loud.
"No more," his father tells Elsa in a whisper. "Please, no more."
As a last attempt at comfort, she makes sure Manish's father signs a do-not-resuscitate form. She places a gentle hand on his arm, tells him that she will check on them one last time before leaving. He only nods, covering his dry, tired eyes with the palm of his hand.
Manish dies during this time.
It happens in between the minutes that stretch and weave through space. In the minutes that Elsa does not have a grasp on—does not know how fast or how slow they tick. In the minutes that escape the mother, that don't feel like long enough; scarce, in her hands, slipping away. In the minutes prolonged in the father's mind, slow, marked by every writhing, every gasp for air, every moan of pain that his son elicits. Minutes that scream, and halt, and say, "It's time."
At the bedside, his mother smothers him with kisses, whimpering, whispering words in his ear so low that they could be mistaken for prayers; that if the noise inside her head and heart and lungs escaped her mouth the windows, the walls, could not withstand it.
Without much Elsa can offer at that moment, she says she will come back, and exits. The father follows her out quietly and painfully solemn. In the hallway, he asks her what is next. The body will be taken to the morgue, she explains, while transportation is arranged. He appears calm talking about the arrangements. Then his cell phone rings and he puts in the earpiece.
"Hello... yes... my son no more."
And finally, he breaks down, too.
On the emergency exit stairs, Elsa lets herself fall back against the wall.
She looks up at the ceiling, her chest rising with a deep inhale that falls as she heaves slowly. It's taken her some time to leave; to process the events of the day and decompress. It is not necessary for her to do this every day, but sometimes, on the toughest ones, she gives herself the time. On the days where she can see the expressions of grief behind the lids of her eyes; when the flatline of a monitor still rings in her ears long after she's left the room.
She'd watched Manish's father having to pry his mother away from his body, her face contorted into one of inconsolable pain. She'd had to watch him struggle as he talked through the arrangements. She'd had to pronounce death upon a man four years younger than her. And while it is true that after all these years her heart had hardened in the face of death, some cases still felt more jarring than others. Some of them managed to slip through the cracks, and permeate her insides with grief.
Elsa rubs her face, her tired eyes, and heaves another sigh. You lose some, she tells herself, you save some. Her anatomy professor had said that once. She remembers how heartless it had sounded to her young, inexperienced ears.
Her stomach growls with a hunger she had been ignoring for the past few hours before she pushes herself slowly off the wall and picks up her backpack off the floor. Like an afterthought, she pulls out her phone. There is a message from Anna that she had not opened yet. In it, a picture of a table set up with her laptop, a cup of coffee, Theo's journal, and the caption: I forgot this place closed at 2 am... it's godsend!
Elsa smiles despite herself as she thinks of how strange it is that four months have passed since meeting each other again, and how unbelievable it is that it did not feel that way. Because days at the hospital were long, but the weeks, the months and the years flew right by her as fast as a thought passing through. Because Anna had been working on things she actually enjoyed doing, feeling inspired again, spending her free time writing Theo's story, nonstop, for weeks on end.
Because Elsa had not only missed her as her girlfriend, but as her best friend, and this, amidst the overwhelming days that made up their current lives, felt like enough.
It is perhaps because of this that she doesn't fight the impulse to call her.
Anna picks up just as she begins to make her way down the stairs. "Hey, you."
"Hi," Elsa says softly, "Am I interrupting you?"
"Not at all," Anna responds. "Am I? Wait. No. That doesn't make sense."
She chuckles. "I just finished," she breathes.
"Is everything okay?"
Elsa falters. Was her voice too revealing or did Anna know her too well? "It was a tough one today," she says, allowing her true emotions to come through in her voice.
"Wanna talk about it?" Anna asks her.
"I'm not sure I feel like doing that right now to be honest."
There is a shuffling sound on the other end of the line. "That's okay. Do you want me to distract you until you reach the station?"
The chilly breeze sweeps past her as soon as she pushes the exit door open. It is refreshing; something she didn't know she needed until now. "You could," she says, "But I... was wondering, are you still at Reggio?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"Because I'm hungry," she mutters sheepishly.
By the time she arrives there is a plate of ravioli al pesto waiting for her.
Anna sits on the other side of it, with her head resting on her hand, immersed and oblivious to everyone's presence as she reads by the dim light of her laptop's screen. Elsa approaches from behind, places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes as she goes to sit. She lets her fingertips linger there before she moves them away.
"Hey," Anna says with a blooming smile.
"Hey," she responds, setting her backpack down on the floor and taking her jacket off. "Thank you for ordering for me."
"It's fine," she waves her off. "I didn't think you'd want coffee, so then I thought of ordering tea, but then I thought no, that's gonna come out much faster than the pasta and then it'll get cold, so I ordered water for you instead."
"Thank you for letting me ride your train of thought," Elsa teases.
"Not a problem. You're V.I.P."
She laughs a little before she asks, in a more serious tone, if Anna doesn't mind her eating in front of her. "Oh, please do. I'm sure you're starving," she says. Seconds later and Elsa begins devouring the pasta.
"Did you eat anything at all today?"
Elsa nods. "I had a chicken salad for lunch," she mumbles. "A Gatorade from the machine and a chocolate bar. Energy bar. You know the one."
"Not really," Anna says, fighting a smile. "You need to eat better, Elsa."
"I have no time." As she reaches for her water she catches a flash of concern in the girl's eyes. "I really don't," she says with more seriousness. She wishes she did, but there are priorities. There always will be.
"How are you gonna take care of patients when you're a stick and can't hold yourself up?"
Elsa stares at her. "That's far-fetched."
Anna closes her laptop. "It is not."
"But... it is."
She stacks the journal and a book on top of it. "I'm sure there are scientific papers that can prove the detrimental effects on your health."
"I'm sure there are."
She hums, packs up her belongings.
"Are you leaving?"
Teal eyes fix themselves on her. "No, I want to talk. This just gets in my way."
"Oh." Elsa stabs a ravioli with her fork, embarrassed by the desperate tone in her voice.
"Seriously, though. Don't make me start flexing my cooking skills by making you breakfast, lunch and dinner every day."
"You would have to move in with me for that to happen," she says without thinking. They stare at each other as the statement sinks in and thickens the air with awkward tension. Elsa clears her throat. Anna averts her eyes.
"Right. Well, I guess that won't... happen... for the time being."
"Right," she mumbles before stuffing her mouth with ravioli.
Over their pregnant pause the sounds filling the room suddenly grow and shift in focus. It is crowded tonight. All the tables are occupied by people having dinner, sharing dessert, drinking Italian coffee and French wine. The lonely ones read, write. The ones with company talk of meaningful things brought by the night.
"How can you focus in here?" Elsa asks Anna.
The girl looks around, as if to confirm what 'here' meant. "It's good background noise once you get into it."
"It's going well then?"
"Oh yeah," Anna says. "There are so many details in her journal it's amazing. Did you know she used to get in fights all the time when she was a kid?"
"No. But it doesn't surprise me."
She leans over the table. "There was this bullying girl in her neighborhood that wouldn't leave her brother alone, right? So one day she waited outside of her house and confronted her. She was all like, 'If you don't leave my brother alone I'll beat you up,' and the girl just laughed in her face and pushed her. So then you had these two girls fighting on the side of the street, their dresses all covered in dirt and stuff. They had to be pulled apart by the girl's dad."
Elsa is already laughing by the time she's done recounting the story. "Yeah, this doesn't surprise me. Did Theo get in trouble?"
"With her mom yeah. But her dad was very lenient, so he'd usually just wink at her from behind her mom's shoulder."
Chuckling, Elsa pushes herself away from the now empty plate. She is the good kind of stuffed, the kind that feels necessary after a long, draining day. "I'm sure you'll have a lot to write about," she tells her.
"Yeah," she draws out. "I've been filling in on the blanks with her the past few weeks, but she's been more and more tired and I don't want to exhaust her."
"I know," Elsa murmurs, understanding. Her visits, too, have become shorter.
Anna begins shaking her head. "I just... I'm trying to write this as fast as possible you know? For her. Because I want her to have this before it's too late. But even then, editing and publishing a book takes months." Looking away, she nibbles at her lower lip. "And I feel like we're running out of time."
Elsa clutches her hands together. She chooses to say nothing about this. Because the truth—for it is the only option when it comes to Anna—is one she knows neither of them are willing to accept just yet.
Before she has the time to say anything at all, Anna is lifting up her shoulders, huffing out a well-tempered sigh. Her optimism is beginning to take over, like the sun peeking through the clouds. "We shouldn't be thinking about that yet, though, right?"
"No," Elsa says, attempting a smile. "We should probably be doing less thinking and more..."
"Doing?"
She chuckles weakly. "Maybe, yes. I'm not exactly sure where I was going with that."
"I think I understand," she replies, and in her eyes Elsa can tell that she does.
Dinner, turns out, has been paid by Anna. It is such a simple gesture that Elsa doesn't know how to repay in that moment. "It's nothing," Anna tells her, but the fluttering in her chest tells her that it isn't.
It is well past midnight, but on a Friday night in the city, this barely means a thing. Anna offers to walk her to the train station, which, she says, is coincidentally a block away from her apartment. "I know where you live," Elsa teases despite catching the flirtatious albeit playful tone of her words. "Well, you never know," Anna retorts. She makes her laugh more than Elsa thought she was capable of. And as they tread under the streetlamps, dodging strangers and smiling down at the ground, Elsa can't help but allow herself this sliver of soothing contentment.
"Are you feeling better?" Anna asks when they're closer to the station.
"Better, yeah." She looks down at her feet in motion, realizes that she wants to tell Anna about it all but has no idea how to explain. "One of my patients died today," she simply says.
"I'm sorry, Elsa," Anna murmurs. "What happened?"
"Heart failure was the primary cause. And I know it was inevitable at that point, but..."
"It's still hard."
"Yeah..."
They approach the entrance to the underground station with reluctant steps before moving to the side, not quite ready to let each other go.
"You know," Anna tells her, "it's okay if you want to talk about these things. If you wanna tell me everything from start to finish, even the things I'll probably not understand... just know you can."
Elsa rubs her arm up and down, glancing at a stone on the ground that she kicks with the tip of her shoe. "I know," she says. "I think it just takes some time getting used to the idea. I'd usually just let it sit quietly before my mind becomes preoccupied with the events of the following day."
She nods. "Just know I'm here..."
The moment their eyes meet, Anna takes a step forward and moves her hand slowly. The tips of her fingers graze Elsa's palm, searching, asking a wordless question before they envelop her in a gesture so tender and unexpected that it steals Elsa's breath away. A smile tugs at the corners of her lips. She squeezes, letting her know that she means it; that she is here, and will be here, for as long as Elsa needs her.
Looking down at their hands, Elsa is overwhelmed. The sensation had drifted away from her mind: she had forgotten what it felt like to have Anna's hand in hers. She moves her fingers slowly, brushing over Anna's pulse point as she goes, grazing her palm just like she's done. She watches as their hands intertwine, and suddenly Elsa feels herself draw closer, her heart beating wildly inside her chest, her free hand twitching at her side as she registers the beginnings of an impulse course through her veins.
She is raising her hand to cup Anna's cheek when the ringing of her phone startles them both.
Elsa curses under her breath. "I'm so sorry," she mutters, reluctantly pulling out her phone. An unknown number appears on its screen. She frowns.
"Hello?"
"Elsa? It's Gaby."
She blinks, recognizing her voice the second after. "Gaby? Is everything okay?"
"I'm so sorry for calling you at this time but you told me to call you if there was anything—"
"Gaby, what happened?"
"Theo's been hospitalized."
Elsa doesn't quite process the rest. In the distant consciousness of her mind, she realizes that she hasn't let go of Anna's hand.