PART TWO: LIMBO

Heights marked in pencil, kitchen utensils. The books don't say sorry, they don't crowd and touch. They're just observers collecting their dust. They know that nothing they say is enough. – "Headstones and Landmines" by Lizzy McAlpine

Claire

At first, when I walk through the door after the SAT, I think I've gotten it wrong.

My parents are dancing in our living room. "Islands in the Stream" filters through the Bluetooth speaker, the way it has a hundred times before—maybe even a thousand. Mom's head is tucked under Dad's chin, and things are good and right.

They're happy and in love, and she isn't sick.

I misunderstood this morning.

Until Dad looks up at Quil and me, and I see the redness in his eyes. Until Mom lifts her head, and I see the wetness on the cotton of my father's shirt.

Until Mom says nothing, just opens her arms, enough room for both of us.

"You're sick," I say, and Quil's hand tightens around mine.

Mom's eyes soften, and I see her think about denying it. But she can't. "I'm sick."

Hearing the words aloud don't make them any easier to digest. They're stones in my stomach, so heavy they weigh my feet to the floor. I want to be in her embrace, but I'm scared it will be tainted. Or maybe that I'll squeeze too hard and make something worse. Fear isn't always rational.

"Does Callie know?" My voice is hoarse, like I swallowed saltwater and coughed it back up.

Dad's grip stays firm on Mom as he shakes his head. "We were going to tell you together when you got home. But you… well, apparently you already know, somehow."

"I heard you talking this morning."

"Oh Claire," Mom says, fresh tears clouding in her eyes all over again. "Your test. Did you—"

"It was fine," I interrupt, and immediately feel guilty when her tears well faster. "Seriously, Mom. I'm not worried about it. I promise. Right now I'd rather talk about this."

Quil gives my hand a reassuring squeeze, and Mom says, "Jonathan, go get Callie."

I've always had a special skill for handling panic. This morning, with the test, sure. But as I listen to Mom and Dad explain what things are going to look like moving forward, all I can think about is a few years ago, when I helped Nessie Black give birth.

That day, I'd come running straight from First Beach, terrified and embarrassed and so many other things after trying to kiss Quil.

I, being a mere fourteen, thought I would never recover. Nessie had been in the middle of trying to coach me through the seemingly unsurmountable obstacles between Quil and I, when her water broke, in a mess of blood and fluid, right there on her floor.

"Shit," Nessie had said, then followed it immediately with an apology for cursing.

"I think shit's a good word for that," I said.

Jacob was at work, and even though he was only a few minutes away, they were minutes she didn't have. Nessie had to call Carlisle, who told her she was in rapid labor. I wasn't a doctor, had no idea what that meant medically, but when Nessie spent the entire conversation having one big contraction, I had a pretty good guess.

"Claire," he'd said, "you're going to help Renesmee as she delivers her baby. You're going to call an ambulance. Then get clean towels, as many as you can. A bucket of hot water, too, if you have time."

And I was terrified, but I was going to do it. What other choice did I have?

I went and got the towels.

Nessie undressed—it was the first time I'd seen someone other than myself naked. Her body was different than mine in many ways. Even though she was pregnant, about to give birth on the goddamn carpet, she was still skinnier than I'd been in a few years. Her breasts were full and round, whereas mine hadn't finished growing. Her nipples (yeah, okay, I looked, get over it) were textbook, rosy. Mine were darker, wider, bigger. As she'd waddled to their bedroom and crawled on the bed, I noted her thighs didn't touch.

My mother always told me to love my body solely because it housed my heart and my soul. Everything else it could do—sleep, exercise, cry, laugh, have sex—were all just bonuses. My body is powerful because I am powerful, she'd say. My body is strong because I am strong. It's not the other way around.

Nessie was naked on her bed, screaming from pain, probably crowning, and then Jacob Black came through the door, fresh from phasing on the fly.

How could I tell?

He was naked.

And that was the second time I'd seen someone other than myself naked.

I was shaking, but I also wasn't going anywhere. I was going to help Nessie and Jake in whatever capacity I could. Mostly, I provided emotional support for Nessie when she didn't think she could do it.

Spoiler: she did. She pushed like hell, and out popped little Marie. Marie Claire, thank you very much.

Marie was pink and goopy and a little gross, and I think I said something flippant like "I'm never having kids." Who'd want to have kids after watching one come out like that? Not me. No thank you.

It was an eventful day.

A lot has happened since then. For starters, Marie's walking and talking now, calling me Auntie Claire with perfect pronunciation. I've grown more confident in my body, how it's different from Nessie's but how I carry it well because it's mine and I was given it to carry. I stopped trying to fit myself into spaces not made for me.

I've kissed Quil since then, had him kiss me back until I'm breathless and liquid and wanting. I've babysat more children and become much more comfortable with the idea of babies, but not to the point where I've decided one way or another about having my own.

And my mother, apparently, has grown tumors in her left breast and a lymph node under her left arm, plus a spot the doctors are "monitoring" in her right lung.

Regional triple-negative breast cancer.

"It's more aggressive," Mom says. "Because it's negative for all the usual markers that are common in other breast cancers. Estrogen, progesterone, HER2. Because it's negative for those, it goes undetected for longer. It's part of why it took so long to nail this down."

I ingrain the words in my brain like I'm studying for a test. I want to record this conversation, curl up in bed and do research. Spend hours reading studies. I can call Dr. Cullen.

Dad clears his throat again from one of the armchairs he dragged in front of the couch. Mom perches in another. Callie is crying on Quil's other side. He has an arm around each of us. Whereas Callie has curled into him, I'm sitting straight up. This is a Very Serious Conversation, and I don't want to let myself be even slightly comfortable, lest I forget something important.

"You're just so young, Hannah," Quil says. "I don't understand."

Mom nods, shuffling through a mountain of papers. "Being younger is a risk factor. Women under forty are more at risk."

Callie sobs so hard it wracks my body. "You're thirty-eight." Which, I know, in my Sister Brain, is her way of saying she doesn't care if this cancer takes people young or not, this is just too young.

"There's that other thing," Dad says, leaning forward to find the paper my mother is looking for. "The gene thing."

"'Women with a BRCA1 gene mutation,'" he reads off the paper, "'have a fifty-five to seventy-two percent chance of developing breast cancer by the time they are seventy.'"

It's Quil's turn now to shift straighter. "And that's a hereditary gene."

Mom's eyes water again, but she nods slowly. I can tell it pains her to do it. "There's a fifty-percent chance that the girls have that gene."

"I think that's enough for today, Daka," Dad quips. The term of endearment slips from his native tongue so naturally, it takes me a minute to translate it. Sun. He calls her the sun.

I think about Quil calling me sweetheart on his couch, telling me to get off in his bed.

To be fair, aside from Mom and the SAT, that's basically all I think about.

"I just want them to know," she says sharply, giving my dad a piercing stare. They've had months to figure this out. Why are they still at odds? Shouldn't Dad be more understanding, and shouldn't Mom be more considerate of his feelings?

But Dad nods, gently pries the papers away from her shaking grip and places her fist in his own. And he's not angry at her for raising her voice, and she's not pulling away because he disagrees with her.

Maybe there are some things I don't know yet about what love means.

Quil's thumb draws patterns on the skin of my upper arm, and it's warm in a way I haven't felt all morning, and even though my heart hurts now, I am looking forward to finding out those things when it doesn't.

I'm that girl.

That girl, whose mom has cancer.

That girl, whose friends don't know what to say or how to act. That girl, whose teachers give extensions on deadlines in the name of compassion (but it's actually just pity). That girl, followed by whispers and rumors and looks.

My only solace is that there's only one week of school left until summer, and I can step away from everything. It's exhausting living life in the spotlight. With a reservation this size, I feel like an ant burning under a magnifying glass.

I was fine to keep things quiet, and I did. Then one of Callie's teachers found her crying in the bathroom after lunch. For as wet as it is in this place, gossip still manages to spread like wildfire.

I close my locker, and in a flash of déjà vu, Jaxyn is standing on the other side.

"Hey Claire."

We haven't talked since the day of the test, when he ran outside to fetch Quil in the midst of my panic attack. I never did say thank you, and the words catch in my throat now.

"Hi," I say instead. I plaster on a fake smile. "Finals going okay?"

He adjusts his backpack on his shoulder, shifts from foot to foot. "They're alright. Thanks." He pauses, and I wait for this conversation to be over. These days they all feel long and unnecessary. "You know, you don't have to smile if you don't feel like it."

Quil said something similar last week, called me out for faking being okay. The sentiment lands just as softly here with Jaxyn.

My smile slips, and Jaxyn nods resolutely. "Planning on surfing this summer?"

The warning bell rings, and he nods down the hall, where we share a tribal history class.

I start to walk, and he follows. "I'm going to try," I say. "Hopefully I can get some time away from home. My…"

"Your mom. Yeah. Have like a thousand people said they're sorry? And if you need anything to let them know?"

His words are so honest, so on the nose, that it makes me wonder. "Do you know someone who…"

Once again, I don't finish my sentence. But once again, it doesn't matter this time either. Jaxyn nods. "My older brother, when we were kids. It's a little different, but I still know how you feel. I know nothing anybody says is going to make you feel better. I know you feel guilty when you laugh, and scared for the future, and angry at God or whoever."

The stone in my stomach—the one that took up residence the day I found about Mom a few weeks ago—gains another pound. I look away so he hopefully misses the tears welling up.

We reach the classroom. I try to walk in, but he grabs my arm.

"Can I give you my number?"

I pull out the biggest cliché in the world: "I have a boyfriend."

"I know. Quil, right? He seemed alright." He smiles, and his dimple pops out. "You like the older men, I see."

A furious blush warms my face. "Shut up," I mumble, punching his arm lightly.

"I promise. I'm not trying to hit on you. I can take no for an answer. I just figured you could use a friend who knows what it's like."

"Jaxyn, I—"

The final bell rings, and we scramble into the classroom. He moves toward his other friends, who all give me that sympathetic smile I've already come to hate, and I slide into my usual front-and-center spot.

This is the only class that separates me from being able to go home, see Mom, see what the doctors had to say today. They're working on a treatment plan, but it's difficult because of the whole triple-negative thing. Mom isn't crazy about the idea of a mastectomy, and Dad isn't crazy about the idea of radiation, and none of us are crazy about the idea of chemo.

All of them have risks and, frankly, all of this just fucking sucks.

"Did you hear about Claire's mom?" Ivy Rivers whispers, and she and Zoey Kaatoh talk about how heartbreaking it is.

I don't think the hairs on the back of my neck will ever lay flat again.

If there's a silver lining in any of it, I haven't found it yet. Not even when, as I walk through my front door, I get a text from an unknown number.

this is Jaxyn. got your # from Dylan who got it from Jamie who got it from your sister, hope that's okay. free to talk whenever. If not, have a good summer. :)

I don't save the number. But I don't delete the text, either.

With nothing to do now that school is out, my mind wanders to some questionable places. Mom has a surgery consultation for a potential mastectomy, but since it's "just a consultation," she doesn't let me tag along.

Callie spends most of the day sleeping, and on the days Quil works I find myself pacing ruts in the carpet.

The Gray pushes in a little tighter against my edges, especially when Mom isn't there to drown it out with her colorful laughter and obscure early-thousands alt rock.

This pattern of self-loathing lasts exactly sixteen and a half days before my mother calls me on my bullshit.

I've been staring at her for the last thirty minutes, trying to anticipate whether she'll need anything in the next four hours. The last time she started to get up, I said, "I can do it," and she said, "Claire, you've made me drink three bottles of water in the last hour, and now I have to pee."

Now she's back, and giving me The Look. I think she practiced in the mirror before I was born.

"Stop," she says.

"Stop what?"

The Look intensifies. "Claire."

She seems a little more tired than I remember. She's taken a leave of absence from work, and she's sleeping more, so I can only assume this kind of fatigue comes from the inside, places so deep in the soul they don't show up on MRIs or blood tests.

"Mom, I just… I want to do something." My nose burns, and I scrunch it. I'm tired of crying in the shower and on my pillow. "I feel helpless."

Callie comes into the living room, yawning. Her black hair is in a messy knot atop her head, and the sweatshirt she's wearing makes it look like she's not wearing pants. When she comes to sit beside me on the couch, I realize she isn't.

"I feel helpless, too," Mom says. "You're too perfect."

Callie and I share a conspiratorial look. "Too perfect," I say slowly.

Mom nods, and adopts the first genuine smile I've seen in months. "I want to be your mom. Punish you. Ground you. You should be, I don't know, trying to sneak out. Breaking curfew to make out with your boyfriend and drink beer on the beach at night. It's the summer before your senior year. I want you to be a teenager, Claire, not my doctor or my therapist or my errand girl."

"I want to be here with you," I protest.

She leans over to squeeze my knee. "And you are. But you can go other places, and I'll be here when you get back."

I think she realizes what she says a second too late, because her smile falters, and the stone in my stomach gains yet another pound.

Callie raises her hand. "Can I have permission to sneak out, too?"

"No," Mom and I say at the same time, and the three of us burst into fits of giggles. My pants-less sister laughs so hard she falls off the couch, which makes us laugh harder.

Finally, Mom gains control, and smiles at me. "Quil's off today, right? I'm serious. Go call him. Go surf."

With her permission, I let myself think about surfing with Quil. Seeing him in his board shorts, calves tensing as he rides a wave. I think about how he usually looks when we polish our boards, how his biceps swell with the movements. I wonder, maybe, if his arm would do that if his hand was between my legs. If his abs would contract the way they do on the water. If he'd call me sweetheart then, too.

I have a feeling it's going to be a long, hot summer.