Chapter One

Marly counted the days on her fingers as she walked down the hospice hallway. Four. It had been four days.

She had been telling herself the whole drive that four days wasn't long enough for anything to change. Ginger had practically shooed her out of the room the last time. Go home, Mar. Get some sleep in your own bed. Eat something that isn't from a vending machine. Come back in a week. I'll be here. And then, that grin that had been getting Ginger out of trouble since 1938: I'll be hard to miss.

Marly had laughed because Ginger wanted her to. Then she'd driven back to Phoenix, slept twelve hours, and woken up Tuesday morning to the phone ringing.

It was the day-shift nurse. Marly didn't catch her name. She caught the rest. You should come.

The hallway smelled like industrial cleaner and the faint sweetness of whatever they used to mask the industrial cleaner. Marly passed an open door on her left. An old man was sitting up in bed watching a game show with the sound off. He didn't look at her. She passed another door, closed. Then another, where someone was crying quietly and someone else was murmuring something that sounded like a prayer.

She kept walking. She didn't want to think about how she knew which room was Ginger's just by the feel of the hall.

The door was ajar. Marly stopped just outside it and made herself breathe.

Then she went in.

Ginger was awake. Of course she was awake. Ginger had never been someone who slept when there was company coming.

She was thinner than she had been on Friday. More than thinner. Drawn, in a way that went past weight and started taking the shape of a person down with it. Her cheekbones had sharpened. Her wrists, on top of the blanket, looked like they belonged to a much older woman. The IV line ran into the back of her left hand.

But.

But her hair was brushed. Someone had helped her with that, or she'd done it herself, which would have been more like her. The little gold hoops Marly had bought her for her fortieth birthday were in her ears. Her eyes — still that same sharp green, still amused at something nobody else could see — found Marly's the moment she came through the door.

Worse on Ginger, Marly thought, was still better than most people had on a good day. Her sister was the kind of woman who had walked into a room and changed the temperature of it, and even now, even like this, the room was warmer because she was in it.

"There you are," Ginger said.

Her voice was rougher than it had been four days ago. It was still her voice.

Marly tried to say something. Couldn't. Settled for sitting in the chair by the bed and reaching for her hand, which was cold, and which closed around hers with more strength than it should have had.

"You look terrible," Ginger said.

"You look —"

"Don't." Ginger smiled. "Whatever you're about to say. Don't. It's fine. I have a mirror. The nurse is very thorough."

Marly laughed once, wetly, against her will.

"There she is," Ginger said. "There's my sister."

For a while neither of them said anything. The room had a window. The window had blinds, half-open, and the late morning light came through in stripes across the foot of the bed. Outside, somewhere, a landscaper was running a leaf blower. Inside, a clock ticked. Ginger's chest rose and fell, rose and fell. Marly watched it like it was the only thing in the world worth watching.

"You're staring at me breathing," Ginger said, without opening her eyes.

"I'm not."

"You absolutely are."

"I'm watching the light."

"You're watching me breathe and pretending it's the light. I know my sister."

Marly didn't argue. She moved her thumb against the back of Ginger's hand, slowly, the way their mother used to do when one of them couldn't sleep. Ginger's eyes opened halfway and watched her do it.

"I'm gonna be all right, Mar."

Marly's throat closed.

"I mean it. I'm gonna be all right. More than you could ever know." Ginger's grip tightened around her fingers. "And we'll see each other again. I promise you that."

Marly nodded. She didn't trust her voice yet. Ginger watched her, and Marly had the strange feeling, not for the first time in the last few months, that her younger sister was looking at her from very far away. Not in a fading way. In a seeing more than you way. Like Ginger had moved up onto a higher floor and was looking out a wider window.

"Hey." Ginger's voice was lighter again. "Don't do that face."

"What face."

"The face where you're trying to hold it all in for me. You don't have to do that, Mar. Not with me."

Marly felt the tears come and let them, this time. They ran down her face without her permission and she didn't bother to wipe them.

"There you go," Ginger said softly. "That's my girl."

She slept for a while after that. Marly watched her sleep, and then watched the stripes of light move across the foot of the bed, and then watched her sleep again.

Sometime around noon a nurse came in. She had silver-blonde hair pulled back into a bun and a kind, watchful face. She checked Ginger's pulse without waking her, adjusted the angle of the bed by an inch, replaced a half-full water cup with a fresh one, and looked at Marly the way nurses look at family members.

"You must be the sister," she said quietly.

"Yes."

"Marly?"

"Yes."

"I'm Catherine. I called you this morning." She didn't say I'm sorry. She didn't say how are you holding up. She just gave Marly a small nod that contained all of it. "I'll be on shift until seven. If you need anything."

"Thank you."

Catherine looked at Ginger for a moment with something in her face that Marly couldn't read. Then she left, pulling the door not quite closed behind her.

Marly sat with the silence. The leaf blower outside had stopped. The clock ticked. She thought, suddenly, about how long it had been since she had eaten anything, and immediately decided she didn't care.

Ginger stirred.

"Was someone in here?"

"Catherine. She was checking on you."

"Mm. She's good." Ginger's eyes drifted, half open. "I like her. She doesn't lie to me."

"Why would she lie to you?"

"People do." Ginger shifted on the pillow, a small wince, and Marly watched the wince and tried not to react to it. "People come into rooms like this and they lie. They say you look great today when you don't. They say the doctor sounded encouraging when he didn't. They mean well. But it makes you lonely. Catherine doesn't do that."

Marly thought about that. She thought about all the times in the last three months she had told her sister she looked great when she hadn't.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what?"

"For all the times I said you looked great when you didn't."

Ginger's mouth pulled into a tired, real smile.

"Oh, Mar. I knew. I let you do it. I figured you needed to."

That hit somewhere Marly hadn't been protecting. She had to look away, at the window, at the stripes of light, at anything that wasn't her sister's face.

"You always made me feel like I was getting away with something," Ginger said, and Marly turned back, because the line had come out of nowhere, and Ginger was looking at her again from that high-floor wider-window place. "Just by being happy. Like I was — I don't know. Like there was a rule I didn't know about, and I was breaking it, and you were watching me, and you weren't going to tell on me, but you also weren't going to —"

She trailed off. Her eyes closed.

"Ginger."

Nothing.

"Ginger. You weren't going to what."

But Ginger was asleep again, her chest rising and falling, the sentence unfinished, possibly forever.

The afternoon slid by in pieces. Ginger woke and slept and woke and slept. Once, around two, she was sharp and present and asked Marly about the cosmetics counter, about whether that woman with the eyebrows had finally bought the whole Lauder line she'd been circling for a year. Marly laughed and said yes, last week, and Ginger said I knew it. I called it. You owe me five dollars. Once, around three-thirty, she woke and didn't quite seem to know where she was for a moment, and Marly held her hand and said her own name, slowly, until Ginger came back.

Around four, Ginger said, with her eyes closed, "Did Sophie come?"

"Last week. She drove down on Tuesday."

"That's right. She's a good kid, Mar."

"She is."

"You're hard on her."

Marly didn't answer.

"You don't see it. But you are. She loves you. You should let her closer."

"I let her —"

"No, you don't." Ginger's voice was gentle. "You hold her at arm's length because you're scared. Same way you hold everybody. Same way you held me, until I stopped letting you."

Marly's throat did the closing thing again. Ginger reached, with effort, and patted her hand.

"It's fine. I'm not telling you off. I'm telling you a thing you can fix. There's a difference."

"Okay."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

Ginger squeezed her hand gently. She held Marly's gaze for a moment longer than usual, like she wanted to memorize her, then smiled, closed her eyes and drifted to sleep.

At six-thirty, Catherine came in with a clipboard and another nurse Marly didn't know. They moved with the quiet competence of people who had done this many times, who knew that the family was watching and that what the family saw mattered. They checked Ginger's vitals. They turned her, gently, onto her side, the way someone might reposition a sleeping child. Ginger barely stirred.

Catherine looked at Marly when they were done.

"You should think about something to eat," she said. "There's a vending machine at the end of the hall. Or there's a cafeteria on the first floor — it's not great, but it's hot. Either way."

"I'm not hungry."

"You should eat anyway." Catherine's voice was kind but did not soften. "It's going to be a long evening."

Marly understood what she was saying. She nodded.

"I'll be just down the hall," Catherine said.

When they left, Marly sat for a long time looking at her sister.

Ginger was breathing differently now. The rise and fall had gotten shallower since the morning, and there were small pauses at the top of each breath that Marly didn't remember being there before. The IV line in the back of her hand looked obscene against the thinness of her wrist. The gold hoops were still in her ears. The light from the window had gone orange. The clock ticked.

Marly thought about a hundred things at once. She thought about being five years old and looking through the bars of a crib at a baby who had her face but smaller. She thought about Ginger at twelve, climbing the tree behind their house higher than the boys would. Ginger at twenty, leaving for California with a duffel bag and a man whose name nobody else ever learned. Ginger at twenty-five, calling Marly from a payphone in New Mexico to say she was fine, just so Marly wouldn't worry, and laughing when Marly said I was already worried, that's why you called. Ginger at thirty, holding baby Sophie, completely uninterested in babies and yet somehow exactly the right person to hold this one.

Ginger at forty-nine, sleeping in this bed, on her way somewhere Marly couldn't follow.

Marly leaned forward and kissed her sister's forehead.

"I'll be right back," she whispered. "I'm just going to get some coffee. Don't go anywhere."

Ginger didn't stir. The corner of her mouth moved, maybe. Marly couldn't be sure.

The vending machine at the end of the hall had a flickering light and three options for coffee: black, with cream, with cream and sugar. Marly pressed with cream. The machine hummed and groaned and produced a thin paper cup of something brown and steaming. She held it for a moment, feeling the warmth come through the paper, and then she sat down in one of the orange plastic chairs in the little common area by the window.

The window faced east. The sun had set on the other side of the building. Out here the desert was already going blue-grey, the way it did in March before the real warm came in. Marly could see the parking lot, half-empty, and beyond it a strip of asphalt and a billboard for a car dealership that Ginger would have made fun of.

She lifted the coffee to her mouth.

She had not slept properly in five nights. She had driven three hours that morning. She had cried twice, that she could remember. The chair was not comfortable, exactly, but it was holding her up, which was more than her own body was doing.

She took one sip of the coffee. It was bad in the specific way hospital vending coffee is always bad.

She closed her eyes for a second.

Just for a second.

She opened her eyes to Catherine's face.

There was a moment, in the half-second before she registered Catherine's expression, when Marly was just disoriented. Where am I. Why is someone bending over me. Why is the light wrong.

Then Catherine's face resolved.

Marly knew.

The coffee cup was still in her hand. It had gone cold. A little of it had spilled onto her lap and she hadn't felt it.

"How long," she said. Her voice didn't sound like hers.

"About twenty minutes," Catherine said quietly.

"Why didn't you —"

"I came as soon as I knew. I'm so sorry, Marly."

Marly stood up too fast. The world tilted. She held on to the back of the orange plastic chair until it stopped tilting, and then she walked, and then she was running, and Catherine was somewhere behind her saying something Marly couldn't process.

The door to Ginger's room was open. The light was on.

Ginger was still in the bed. The IV line had been disconnected. Someone had folded her hands on top of the blanket and turned her face slightly toward the door, the way you might if you wanted whoever came in next to see her clearly.

She looked, Marly thought stupidly, like she was about to open her eyes and say something cutting.

She didn't.

Marly went to her sister's side and sat in the chair where she had been sitting all afternoon.

She took her sister's hand. It was no longer warm, but not yet cold.

Marly lowered her forehead onto the back of it.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She said it for a long time as she sobbed deeply.

She didn't know who she was apologizing to.

Sometime later — she would not remember how much later — Catherine came in and stood in the doorway and waited, the way nurses know how to wait. Marly lifted her head. Her face was a mess. She didn't care.

"I should have been here," she said.

Catherine didn't answer.

"I should have been here."

Catherine took a small step into the room. Her hands were folded in front of her. Her face was very kind and very steady.

"I know," she said. "I know you wanted to be."

"She was alone."

"She wasn't alone. I was with her."

Marly looked at her. The kindness in Catherine's face was not the professional kindness from earlier. It was something else. Something Marly couldn't name, and didn't have room to wonder about.

"There are some things to take care of when you're ready," Catherine said. "There's no rush. Take as long as you need. I'll be at the desk."

She left. The door closed quietly behind her.

Marly turned back to her sister.

The little gold hoops were still in her ears. The light through the window had gone purple. Outside, somewhere far away, a car horn honked once and then was quiet. The clock still ticked.

Marly held her sister's hand.

"You said you'd be hard to miss," she said.

Ginger didn't answer.