Safe with Me: A Novel

One Year Later . . .

There is a moment—only a moment, right when she wakes up—when sunlight streams in through the streaked windows of her new apartment and the world is still too fuzzy to tell dream from sleep, that Hannah doesn’t remember. She doesn’t see the shell of Emily’s body as it lay hooked up to machines in the ICU; she doesn’t hear the steady beep . . . beep . . . beep of the EKG monitor. Dr. Wilder told her that this was the machine’s heartbeat, not Emily’s. Emily—Hannah’s Emily, whom she fed strawberry waffles that morning—was already gone.

Emily is gone. The weight of this truth lands like a boulder on Hannah’s chest, and suddenly, everything falls clear. She remembers it all, a scene stuck on replay in her head, no matter how hard she tries to stop it. She sees Sophie standing next to her, crying softly as Hannah leans over to kiss Emily’s forehead.

Her daughter’s skin was taut and cool; her head had been shaved for the surgery that didn’t save her. Her eyes were closed, and there was a black-stitched, horseshoe-shaped incision on her scalp.

“Baby girl,” Hannah whispered. “Oh, sweetie. I love you so much.” Her jaw trembled, her entire body jittered. She looked at Dr. Wilder. “Please . . . are you sure there’s nothing you can do?” The words caught in her throat like jagged bits of metal.

Dr. Wilder pressed his lips together and shook his head before speaking. “I’m so sorry. I wish there was.”

Hearing this, Sophie released a shuddering breath and crumpled into a chair by the window, shoulders curled forward and her hands over her face. Hannah glanced at her, then back to Emily. She felt strangely hollow, as though her insides had somehow slipped out of her onto the floor. She searched her daughter’s face for some hint of the girl she knew—the girl who scaled the pear tree in their backyard like a monkey, who sketched intricate drawings of dragons and queens, who danced in her room to rhythms that played only in her head.

“Can we wait for her grandparents?” Hannah asked. Sophie had called them when she arrived at the hospital and they were already headed to the Boise airport. Isaac was on assignment somewhere in Hong Kong and hadn’t answered his cell, but Sophie left him a message to call as soon as he could.

“Of course,” Dr. Wilder said. “But I need to know . . . have you decided if she’ll be a donor?”

“She’d want that . . . don’t you think?” Hannah asked Sophie. Her words quaked.

“Of course,” Sophie said, dropping her hands to her lap. “She is such a kind girl . . .” Sophie’s voice broke and tears streamed down her cheeks. Even crying, she was beautiful. Her red hair lay in a smooth sheet well past her shoulders, and her model-like cheekbones forced you to appreciate her clear green eyes and arched brows. She was the kind of woman other women accused of plastic surgery but was guilty only of exceptional genetics.

“She is, isn’t she?” Hannah said, running her hand over Emily’s smooth cheek.

“Yes,” Sophie said softly. “Kind and generous.” She let loose a heavy breath. “It’s the right thing to do, chérie.”

Hannah knew this was true. There had to be something good that came out of this horror. Some drop of joy amid an ocean of sorrow. “What do I need to do?” she asked Dr. Wilder.

“I’ll contact the transplant coordinator,” he said. “Zoe Parker. She’ll take care of everything.”

An hour later, a petite woman with short black hair and a clipboard entered the room and went over the entire process. Confidentiality was guaranteed—all the recipients would know was Emily’s age and city, and that was all Hannah could know about the recipients. “I can tell you right now that there’s a girl here in Seattle who desperately needs a liver,” Zoe said. “She’s been ill for years.” She paused. “Your daughter will save her life . . . and many more.”

Hannah nodded—she opted to donate every viable part of Emily: her heart, her lungs, her liver . . . even her skin to help burn victims—but inside she was screaming, What about my daughter’s life? Why can’t someone save her? Still, she signed where she needed to sign and wished with everything in her that she could cry. Since her initial tears in the ER waiting room, her breaths had become tight and dry, scorched and cracked as the desert. Nurses swirled around Emily’s bed, injecting medicines into her IV that Dr. Wilder said would prep her organs for successful transplants. Hannah tried not to think about the surgery, about scalpels slicing into her daughter’s skin. But over the next several hours, as she sat by Emily’s side waiting for her parents to arrive, she couldn’t stop the images from flashing through her mind.

Hannah heard her mother before she saw her. “Oh, no!” her mother cried out as she entered the ICU and saw Emily in her bed. Hannah turned around, noting that her parents hadn’t bothered to change out of their work clothes before leaving for the airport. Her mother wore a white T-shirt and jeans smudged with dirt from her garden; her father, baggy Carhartt overalls with small holes in the knees. Her mother’s gray-streaked black hair, usually worn in a tight bun at the base of her neck, hung loose about her face; her eyes were red, her jaw trembled.

Hannah stood, and her father strode across the room, taking her in his arms. He kissed the top of her head as she clung to him, her face pressed against his chest, breathing in the smell of hay, damp earth, and sweat. “It’ll be okay, baby,” he whispered.

“No, it won’t,” she moaned, and then Sophie entered the room after a trip to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Seeing Hannah melting into her father’s arms, she quickly explained what had transpired since she’d called them earlier.

“No,” Hannah’s mother insisted. “I refuse to believe there’s nothing they can do. There has to be something. Some procedure they haven’t tried. An operation. We can’t give up on her.”

“It’s too late, Mom,” Hannah whispered. She felt like she was reciting lines from a play, acting out the part of the mother whose child was about to die. “They tried everything. But she’s going to save other lives . . .” It seemed like the right thing to say, the only way to make sense of what was happening to Emily. “She’s going to donate her organs . . .” Hannah’s voice trailed off, and she finally pulled herself away from her father. Both he and her mother took a step over to Emily’s bed, gazing at her with tears running down their cheeks.

This was how they all spent the next few hours, talking in hushed voices, murmuring words meant to comfort, trying to find a way to say good-bye to Emily. Hannah wondered if, after her daughter was gone, she could still call herself a mother. It struck her that when a spouse died, a person became a widow or widower, and when a child’s parents died, he or she became an orphan, but there was no word to describe a parent who lost a child. Perhaps the pain of the experience was too vast to be captured, too gruesome to be wrapped up in one tidy little term.

Dr. Wilder returned around three in the morning, and seeing him enter, seeing the look on his face, Hannah knew it was time. Zoe had said the procurement process—dozens of tests run on Emily’s body to ensure the organs were in the best shape possible for harvesting, as well as coordinating with the transplant center for delivery to all the various recipients—could take up to seventy-two hours, but the girl with the failing liver needed the transplant sooner than that, so Hannah had agreed to taking Emily off life support as soon as it was feasible to operate. She thought about the girl’s parents, who were likely glued to their child’s bedside, too, and for a moment, Hannah hated them. She hated them for anxiously awaiting Emily’s death; she hated them for having a daughter who would live. The feeling passed as quickly as it had flashed through her, and she forced herself to focus on how grateful those parents must be, knowing a life had to be sacrificed for their daughter’s to continue.

Hannah glanced around the room. Her father dozed in the chair, her mother on the small couch. Only Sophie was awake, sitting on the other side of Emily’s bed looking weary and sad, one arm clutching her stomach, one hand curled into a fist over her mouth.

“Emily, honey,” Hannah said, clasping her daughter’s limp hand between both of hers. “It’s okay, baby. You are the best thing that ever happened to me . . . did you know that?” She took in a shaking, shallow breath, then released it. “I’m going to miss you so much. I love you.” The tears finally came, then, flooding her parched body. Her lungs convulsed, and her shoulders shook with violent despair.

Sophie rushed to Hannah’s side, throwing her arms around her so she wouldn’t crumple to the ground. Hannah pressed her face into her friend’s neck, remembering the feel of her daughter doing this, too. Crying over a broken toy or fight with a friend. Looking to Hannah for comfort. Who would offer her child comfort now? At the sound of her cries, her parents awoke and joined her by Emily’s bed, wrapping their arms around both Hannah and Sophie.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Wilder said, “but we really need to get her up to surgery.”

“My god, give her a minute!” Sophie snapped, clutching Hannah more tightly. “She is saying good-bye to her child!”

“I understand,” Dr. Wilder said gently. “But it’s a time-sensitive process—”

“Take her, then,” Hannah whimpered, cutting him off. “Oh god, please. Just take her. I can’t . . . I don’t know how to let her go . . .” She pulled away from Sophie and drew Emily to her chest one last time. She breathed her daughter in, sobbing, grief clawing at her lungs. “It’s okay, baby girl. I’m here. Everything’s going to be okay.” She wept as she spoke these words, words she knew were pointless, words that Emily couldn’t hear.

“No,” Hannah’s mother moaned; her father grabbed his wife to steady her.

Dr. Wilder came up behind Hannah and placed his hands on her shoulders. Gently, she released Emily from her arms. “I’ll take good care of her, I promise,” he said, and then she watched, helpless, as he took her daughter away.

A year later, Hannah can still feel the torturous pain of that moment in her chest. She has learned that the only way to escape it is movement, so this morning, after the scene plays out in her head, she forces herself out of bed. She slips on her shorts and tank top, pulls her hair into a ponytail, and tightly laces her running shoes. She doesn’t look in the mirror, already knowing what she’ll see: lined, sagging skin around her mouth and purple half-moons beneath vacant blue eyes. She’s always been thin, but now her muscles are ropy, her rib cage exposed. She quickly brushes her teeth in the small bathroom, then trots down the steep stairs that lead from her apartment to the soon-to-open new salon below. It’s only six thirty, so Hannah is startled to see one of the workmen already sitting in a heavily padded black leather salon chair, sipping a cup of coffee and staring out the large bay window.

“Good morning,” he says as she enters what had been the living room of the house she and Sophie were almost done renovating. “Beautiful sunrise out there.”

Hannah bobs her head. “You’re here early.” She recognizes him as one of the lead carpenters their general contractor hired, but doesn’t remember his name. He is dark-haired and wears worn jeans with a long-sleeved, plaid flannel button-down and black, steel-toed boots. He has a faded but thick inch-long scar next to his left eye; it pushes down enough of the lid to make it appear that he is winking.

“You’re here early, Mike,” he says with a slow smile, clearly understanding her struggle to recall who he is. “I like to get a jump on my day.” He holds up his mug. “Coffee? There’s plenty.”

“No, thanks,” she says. “I’m going for a run.”

“I’ll save you a cup, then,” he says.

She doesn’t bother telling him that she doesn’t drink coffee, that her doctor said her anxiety is already so high that adding caffeine to the mix might shoot her blood pressure up to a dangerous range. She does give him a brief wave as she heads out the front door, happy to see that the landscaping she’s been working on for the last two months is finally starting to take shape.

She didn’t know much about gardening when she started back in June, but she threw herself into the project anyway, taking recommendations from the local nursery’s staff, digging in the damp earth with her fingers to make room for the roots of a lilac bush and the whip-thin, yellow-popcorned branches of forsythia. There is a fountain built out of river stones, rosebushes heavy with fragrant blooms. In the shadier sections, white-edged, pale green gatherings of bishop’s-weed brighten the darkness. For Emily, she planted an enormous forget-me-not sea.

She starts down the street at an easy pace, relieved as her deepening breaths cause the claws in her lungs to retract. The sun is shining in a clear blue sky—a day so similar to the one of Emily’s accident, Hannah stumbles as she makes the connection. She spent the anniversary of her daughter’s death in the dark of her apartment, beneath the covers of her bed, feeling as though her every breath might be her last. Now, she focuses on the air moving in and out of her body, her feet pounding on the pavement, heel to toe, blood rushing through her veins and into her heart. She wasn’t a runner before Emily died. She’d loathed exercise actually, never comprehending the masses who poured in and out of the gym. “I’ll run if someone is chasing me with a knife,” she used to joke with her clients who espoused the glory of released endorphins. “My endorphins aren’t imprisoned,” she said. “They’re peaceful protesters.”

Now, though, running is her medicine. The only way to calm her nerves, to keep her focused on something other than what she’s lost. One foot in front of the other, one breath at a time.

When Hannah returns to the house an hour later, the rest of the work crew has arrived. Hammers slam against wood; nail guns spit out metal into the walls. The bamboo floorboards went in yesterday, and the bright white trim around the doors and windows should be finished today. Then, the four vanities with matching mirrors that Hannah found at an antique shop up in Anacortes can be taken out of storage and set up as workstations for her and her other stylists. She loves the contrast of the warm cherrywood set against freshly painted periwinkle walls. The flyers she sent out in a mass mailing last week announced the grand opening for August fifteenth. That gave them six days to get the rest of the work done, and with the way things looked now, they might be cutting it close.

Carl, the general contractor, stands in what will be the clients’ restroom, looking over the blueprints with Mike. He looks up when she comes through the door. “Just the woman I need to see,” he says.

She nods. “Let me grab some water first.” Sweat drips down her forehead; once in the small kitchen, she wipes it away with a paper towel, then pours herself a big glass of water from the pitcher in the fridge, gulping it down in one long swallow.

“Okay,” she says as she approaches Carl and Mike again. “I’m all yours.”

“Promises, promises,” Carl says with a silly wiggle of his thick blond eyebrows. Hannah manages a small smile. He holds out the blueprints for her perusal. “Okay. So, Mike is installing the vanity for the sink today. I just need to know if you’re good with where the plumbing comes in.”

Instead of looking at the schematics, which she doesn’t know how to read, Hannah eyes the pipes that are already through the wall. “Looks fine to me. It’s such a small space; I want to be sure the door isn’t going to hit anything when a client opens it.”

“It won’t,” Mike assures her, reaching over to pat her arm. Hannah jerks away from his touch. Since Emily died, she feels as though her skin is on inside out, all her nerves exposed. Physical contact, except from those she already loves and trusts, is excruciating. Mike raises a single eyebrow at her, but she averts her eyes from his, instead focusing on Carl.

“I’ll be upstairs if you need me again,” she says, her voice wobbly and thin. Don’t cry, she thinks. Don’t, don’t, don’t. She spins around, feeling their gaze upon her as she ascends the stairs. The small bit of peace she felt during her run has evaporated.

The phone rings as she is running the water for her shower. She hesitates only a moment before turning the water back off and grabbing it. After Emily’s funeral, she went through a phase of not answering her calls, which only led to the callers coming to her house to make sure she was okay. Verbal check-ins were still easier than face-to-face visits, so she has learned to always answer the damn phone.

“Good morning, Sophie,” she says and drops to sit on the closed toilet seat.

“Good morning, love,” Sophie says. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” she answers. “Just got back from my run.”

“Are we on schedule for opening?” Sophie asks.

“Looks like it,” Hannah says. Initially, she and Sophie had planned to manage the renovation of the new salon together, but a few months after Emily’s accident, Hannah latched on to the tasks of finding the right architect and contractor, of obtaining permits and designs, as a way to keep her mind busy. Spinning on thoughts of construction was the only thing that kept the grief at bay. Hannah decided the best way to stay on top of the project was to actually stay on top of it. Unable to live in the house she had shared with her daughter, she moved into the upstairs apartment of the new location. Hannah couldn’t stand the emptiness of that house without Emily in it; she couldn’t look at the street where Emily was hit without spiraling into hysterics or being overcome by rage toward the woman who’d killed her. It was an accident, Hannah knew. The police determined that the woman wasn’t intoxicated and that she hadn’t been speeding—witnesses confirmed that Emily really did shoot out from the driveway—so there were no criminal charges filed. And yet there were moments when Hannah couldn’t help but blame the woman. On her worst days, she hated her. It didn’t matter that the woman’s insurance company was paying out substantial death benefits to Hannah. All that mattered was that Emily was gone.

After Emily’s small funeral, Hannah had the majority of their things moved into storage and rented the home to an older couple who had no children. Seeing Emily’s friends around the neighborhood after the memorial was too much for Hannah. They wanted to talk with her about Emily, to have Hannah offer them some kind of comfort in their grief, but she couldn’t give that to them. She couldn’t even give it to herself. Their visits reminded her too much of all she’d lost. When she moved, she felt relieved, like the cramped apartment somehow contained her sorrow. Kept it from overrunning her life. She welcomed the constant noise below her, the Skilsaws and sanders. She liked the idea of starting over, refinishing the old to make room for the new.

Sophie seemed to understand Hannah’s inability to continue to work at the downtown Ciseaux, where Emily had grown up, where she had taken her first steps and played dress-up in front of the mirrors. For now, her savings and the death benefit payments are more than enough to cover the cost of renovation and give Hannah some to live on. Sophie agreed to be a silent partner at this location, with Hannah running the day-to-day operations.

“Your clients keep asking for you,” Sophie says now. “They miss you.”

“They can come see me here,” Hannah responds with a sigh. The truth is, she hates the idea of seeing her clients again—the pity on their faces at Emily’s funeral had been enough. She wants to exist in a new world with new clients, women who don’t know that Emily is dead. Women whose mouths won’t screw up into dark frowns and who won’t ask how she is doing. What does that mean, exactly? How do they think she is doing? Her daughter is dead. A hard knot forms in her throat, and Hannah swallows around its sharp edges.

“Hey, Soph,” she says, attempting to sound cheery. “I was just about to jump in the shower. Can I call you back?”

“I’ll just see you later this afternoon, darling. The meeting with the caterer for the opening?”

“Oh . . . right. Of course.” Like Mike’s name, Hannah had forgotten this. With the launch of the new salon next week, they are planning a catered open house to welcome clientele to the location, but Hannah has yet to decide on a menu. Party planning is more Sophie’s thing, so she asked her partner to join her. “I’ll see you at three, then.”

“Two, actually,” Sophie says gently, and Hannah smiles.

“What would I do without you, Soph?”

“Good thing you don’t have to find out.”

They hang up, and Hannah strips off her clothes. As steam fills the bathroom, she moves her fingers across her belly, brushing over the stretched, soft skin and silvery lines that carrying Emily created. She wishes she had more scars than these. She wishes the evidence of her pain were somewhere other than inside her body, believing that if other people could actually see how deeply she is wounded, they’d know to just leave her alone.

Climbing into the tiled shower, she stands under the hot water, letting it scald her skin. For some reason, she thinks about the cars she saw on the road during her run this morning. She watched the drivers talk on their cell phones and sip from their Starbucks coffee cups—how they took everything for granted. She wanted to warn them, to tell them how quickly everything can change, but she knew it was useless. There’s simply no telling whose life will be touched by tragedy. There is only a before and an after, with no way to predict the moment when one is over and the other begins.