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When he comes back, it’s exactly when she needs him.
And she thought she was incapable of being surprised.
“What are you doing here?” she asks. Her hair is twisted around her face, her cheeks and chin still stained with tears, and he’s standing there, just down the hall from where she’s seated on a bench in the hospital where her daughter’s doctor just told her that Hannah has only weeks to live.
“Why wouldn’t I be here?” he asks, and she forgot how his voice sounded except for in those moments when the memories are clearest, when they assail her with the feeling of the present and she can feel the shape of his jaw under her fingertips.
“I don’t know,” she admits. But in all her future memories, all those echoes of loss yet to occur, she never saw him. She was always alone. “She’s sleeping. But you can go in.”
She was crying just before he came, and she can hear it in her voice. So can he, because he has always been able to hear her. He doesn’t head for the door to Hannah’s room. Not right away. He hovers near her for a moment, and when he sits, it’s with a ponderous slowness, like he can’t quite believe he’s letting himself do this. Louise doesn’t look at him. It’s a guilty feeling that keeps her from raising her eyes.
“So this is it, huh?” he asks. Cavalier, but she hears the tremor in his voice, like a preface to something stronger, a tiny seismic bubble before the quake.
“This is it,” she confirms. She isn’t going to say anything else. What else could she say? But it comes out anyway. “I thought it would feel like more time.”
She can tell that he’s looking at her. She can feel his face turned in her direction, but she can’t see his expression, and in truth she doesn’t want to.
“You know, I…I picked up the phone at first. Once a day, then once a week. Then I stopped picking it up, because I convinced myself that it wasn’t important. That I didn’t care. But you never told me, and it has bothered me since the day I left that you didn’t…”
He trails off, and now he’s the one looking at the ground. He runs his fingers through his hair, both hands pausing at the base of his neck, his eyes closed. He does this when he’s stressed, and for a moment she’s standing beside him in combat boots and Woodland Camo pants, and she’s watching him pace, his fingers laced behind his head. And then she’s standing just outside his office, and she’s wearing only his shirt over bare legs, and she knows she’s going to walk up to him, take one of those hands on his head, and she’s going to press it against her heart.
“That I didn’t what?” she asks him, in the hospital now. Tell him sooner? They’ve had that conversation, though.
“That you didn’t tell me why.”
Now, eye contact. She thinks (and she’s right) that this is the first time they’ve actually locked eyes since the day she watched his heart break in his.
“Why,” Louise says flatly, and she’s lying in bed beside him, both of them gazing down at this tiny angel laid out on the sheet, her face screwed up in a scowl, tiny fists pumping, and Ian laughs and dodges imaginary punches and says our girl’s a fighter, you see that?
“Why did you…I mean, if you knew it would get us here…?”
“Why,” she says again, and she understands what he’s asking, so it’s a sobbing exhale of a word, and she sees Hannah shrieking as she dashes through the kitchen, waving around a plastic magic wand, and Ian falls dramatically, groaning in pain, yelling you got me! Oh no, you got me!
Blades of grass bending under curious fingertips, tiny boots splashing in tiny puddles, laughter. Always laughter. Songs and silly poems and questions. “What’s that? What’s this?” and sometimes Ian gives her real answers but sometimes he’ll say something obviously wrong, and Hannah will sigh, dramatic and trying not to giggle. And there’s a day when Hannah says she doesn’t like grapes, they feel funny in her mouth, and later Ian says she was a peanut. She was a tiny peanut on a screen that some doctor showed us, and now she doesn’t like grapes. Shit, Louise. Human life is incredible.
Muddy cheeks, mud-stained hair, earnest entreaties to own a pet ferret. Her teacher beaming at Ian and Louise both, saying, “your daughter is remarkable!” and Ian replying, “hell yeah she is!” without a second thought. Hannah’s tiny arms pinwheeling as she falls back off her skateboard, laughing and rolling to her stomach, pushing herself up, jumping to her feet to try again.
“If you knew what would happen to her, what would happen to us…?”
“I saw her,” Louise says, because she needs to answer to stop the flood of memories, razor sharp and biting at the skin of her mind like teeth. “I saw her, and I loved her. And I loved you. I saw moments of such…” she can’t say it, can’t say happiness right now. “I wanted her to exist. I wanted her to live, even if it was only for…”
She thought she was finished crying, but now there’s a fresh wave of tears, and she puts her face in her hands and she lets them come. Ian doesn’t say anything to her, and he doesn’t stay there long after that, but he puts his hand on her shoulder for a moment before he goes, and it lingers.
She never saw the after.
Those flashes, those hyperreal premonitions masquerading as memories, they ended in a hospital room. And now that the after is fast approaching, for the first time she wonders what will happen now.
The moments of Hannah’s illness that she has long dreaded begin to happen. They are no less painful for having seen them before.
But there are moments between them that she did not see.
She always found, during the happy parts, that those in-between moments were her favorite. Jokes and smiles and silly games. She caught only glimpses of the future from her new understanding of time, and so every new treasure unearthed with Hannah and with Ian was a surprise to be cherished. And the same is true even now, even in the bad parts.
Hannah crying as she stares in the mirror at her hair falling out.
The doctor’s eyes falling to the floor when Ian asks him if there’s anything that can be done.
Hannah curling on her side, her eyes dry, clutching Louise’s hand but refusing to speak to her.
Ian watching them from the doorway as Louise tucks Hannah in for the night, just like she used to do when Hannah was a baby.
“Goodnight, Starstuff,” whispers Ian, and he kisses Hannah on the temple.
“I love you, daddy,” she says. Eyes swiveling. “I love you, mommy.”
And Louise has to hold Ian up in the hallway as he clings to her and sobs.
“How could you?” he asks her, another time. “How could you put her through this?” And Louise doesn’t have an answer.
But clutching a letter in his hands, written in his daughter’s shaky, imperfect handwriting, he later says, “I understand. She’s here. She’s real. I understand why.”
Louise doesn’t think that’s true, but it still helps to hear.
The end comes, just as she remembered it. She closes her eyes, lays her head next to her daughter’s, and begs her to come back.
But Hannah won’t. Hannah doesn’t. Louise saved the world, she gave humanity the key to a crucial level of understanding. But she couldn’t save the thing most precious to her. She was always fated to fail in this.
She wanders the hospital halls once the nurses arrive and ask her to step outside. When she works up the courage to go back, Ian is waiting in the place where he found her months ago, and he walks up to her, and he hugs her, and she wonders if it’s too late to warn herself that it wasn’t worth it. To reach out to herself, years ago, and tell her to leave Ian standing there in that field, unkissed.
But that’s a temporary thought, and it leaves her even as the pain burrows itself into this deep well in her chest. Of course it was worth it. Of course Hannah was worth it.
After arrives.
Ian leaves with the rest of the mourners, leaves the gravesite talking to some of Hannah’s friends from school, who are sobbing out nonsense while clinging to mementos they brought to remember her by. Louise stays staring down at the coffin, covered now with roses. Seeing Hannah’s smile in sharp relief, feeling Hannah’s tiny hand wrapped around her fingers for the first time, hearing herself cry Ian! Come look! She’s smiling! Her first smile!
“Hi,” she says, and she opens the door to let him in even though she’s afraid. He barely spoke to her at the funeral. Barely looked at her even when they were planning it. He doesn’t move from the front step for a long time.
“I understand,” he says, and she doesn’t point out that he said that already.
“I wish you did,” she replies. Seeing him here and in her memories at the same time is a jarring, terrible thing, opening the gulf inside her even deeper, like shovels biting down and down and down into the earth to dig her daughter’s grave.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, because it’s the only thing she knows for sure he wants to hear. He hesitates, and she can see that he almost decides to leave. She doesn’t need the future memories to tell her that if he goes now, it will be for the last time.
She accepts it. It’s her penance for not telling him. She deserves this, probably.
“Do you think you could have changed it?” he asks. She shrugs, tired suddenly. Tired in a way that makes her whole body feel the opposite of weightless.
“I could have walked away from you. I don’t know. I think I could have.”
“But Hannah…”
“There was nothing they could have done for her. Once she was born, that was it.”
“I didn’t think I would ever forgive you for this.”
“I never thought you would either.”
“You didn’t see this, then? Didn’t see me standing here confused out of my fucking mind?”
“I didn’t see anything after.”
“After?”
“After her.”
A long, delicate pause, and Ian frowns at her, eyes narrowed.
“Why do you think that is?” he asks finally.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. Maybe if I…I don’t know, if I tried? But I’m not…I’m just tired, Ian.”
It isn’t meant to sound like an admonition, but she thinks it might. She wants to apologize. She doesn’t know if it would help. It never has before.
“I’m sorry,” he says. And it’s a surprise to hear it, to have it reversed. “I should have been here. I should have…I don’t know. The choice was made, right? I didn’t do any good by leaving.”
“You were always going to leave.”
“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have.” A pause, because she doesn’t know what she should say to that. “So what’s the plan now? What’re you gonna do?”
The endlessness of that question stretches out in front of her.
“I haven’t thought about it. Is that weird?”
A small, humorless smile to match the one on his face. He laughs, looks down at his feet.
“No. I haven’t either. But I don’t get, you know, flash forwards.”
“Yeah,” Louise says, and for a moment they’re back at the base, and he’s leaning over her shoulder to point at one of the sentences on the screen, and she can smell him. “Well, neither do I any more. Just…memories.”
“Some good ones, right?” he asks.
“They’re all good ones,” Louise replies. She doesn’t say because Hannah was not dead in them. That’s the only thing about this that feels like a relief: no more dread. It happened. That forward look at grief has come and gone, and she made it to the other side.
“Maybe that’s a good thing. Can’t be fun to see where you’re going, right?”
“Not in my experience, no.”
“You sound tired,” Ian says, and he sounds sad. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You didn’t…”
“Yeah, I did. I’m still mad as hell. I still hate what you did. But leaving the way I did…I could have been here for you. I should have been here. For both of you.”
“Maybe.”
He takes a step closer, and he reaches for her, and her whole body, every molecule, shivers towards him. But she grips the doorframe to keep firmly rooted in place. His fingertips slide down against her skin, against her shoulder.
“I’m here now,” he says. “If you still want me.”
And she’s pressing kisses to his throat, she’s standing with him on the beach, she’s holding his hand, their rings in place. She’s watching him fish with his brothers and their children. She’s bending down to press a kiss to his temple as he looks up at her from his work, smiling. She’s laughing as he twirls her around the reception hall at his nephew’s wedding. She’s hugging him tightly and listening to the words he whispers in her ear. She’s pulling her hair back, graying now, and he tugs her ponytail as he brushes by her, the way he always has.
And she says, “yes,” and she says, “of course I want you,” and she lets herself crash into him again.
She will lose him one day too. She knows that now. But these moments, these memories, the gift they gave her, they will travel with her until the day she dies.
Maybe that’s what Ian meant when he said he understood. Maybe that’s what drew him back.
Time isn’t what they thought it was. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t finite. There is a beginning and an end to every story, even if it takes a few loops and turns before it goes. If you know your story will be painful, that doesn’t mean you should turn away from it. That means you should embrace the parts that make it worth it.
And this, this kiss, this moment of reconciliation, this moment of grief transforming into catharsis, understanding, healing, this is worth it.
Even as she sees her gray head bent over his chest in his hospital bed, even as she watches him close his eyes, even as she knows that one day she will have to do this all over again, this love is worth it.