Chapter One: The Phone Call
The paramedics were already loading the stretcher when Wren Callahan burst through the front doors of Port Ivy General, her sneakers slapping against linoleum still wet from someone's mop. She caught one glimpse of white hair and a familiar cardigan the color of old rust before the doors swallowed the gurney whole, and a nurse's arm came up like a gate across her chest.
"Family only," the nurse said, not unkindly.
"I am family," Wren said, and her voice cracked in a way that embarrassed her even in the middle of everything. "That's my grandfather."
That was two hours later, of course. First, there was the phone call.
It came at 6:14 on a Tuesday evening, while Wren was drying dishes and her father, Daniel Callahan, was scraping grill grease off the porch railing with a butter knife because he refused to buy the proper brush. She remembered the exact number of rings, three, before he wiped his hands on his jeans and picked up.
She remembered because she was watching his face, and because she had learned, over three years of living alone with her father in the house at the end of Larkspur Lane, to read the weather in it before he said a single word.
"Hello?" A pause. His shoulders, which always sat like a shelf, high and square from years of framing houses, dropped half an inch. "Ruth. Hey."
Ruth Okafor ran the register at Callahan & Sons Books, had run it for eleven years, and did not call Daniel Callahan. Wren knew this the way she knew the tide charts, without needing to think about it, because it was one of the small permanent facts of her life: her father and his father did not speak, had not spoken since before her mother died, and anyone who worked for Walter Callahan understood that calling Daniel's number was crossing a line someone else had drawn a long time ago.
"Is he all right." Not a question, the way Daniel said it. A demand dressed as a question.
Wren set the dish towel down very quietly on the counter, the way you set something down when you don't want it to make a sound and give you away.
"When," Daniel said. Then, after a silence that went on a beat too long, "Which hospital."
He hung up without saying goodbye. He stood at the kitchen counter with the phone still in his hand, looking at it like it had betrayed him, and for a moment Wren thought he might actually go, might grab his keys off the hook by the door and drive the eleven minutes to Port Ivy General the way any normal person would when they heard their father had collapsed behind the register of his own bookshop.
Instead he set the phone down, picked the butter knife back up, and said, "Finish the dishes, Wrenny. I want to get that grease before it sets."
"Dad." She said it carefully, the way you'd test ice. "That was about Grandpa Walter."
"I heard what it was about."
"Are you going to the hospital?"
He didn't answer. He went back outside to the porch railing, and through the window over the sink Wren watched him scrape at a stain that had been there since July, his jaw working the way it did when he was chewing on something he had no intention of saying out loud.
Wren was sixteen years old, and she had exactly one memory of her grandfather's hands that didn't hurt to think about, which was this: she was maybe six, sitting cross-legged on the worn oriental rug in the back room of Callahan & Sons, and Walter Callahan was reading her the last chapter of a book about a fox who outsmarted a hunter, doing the fox's voice in a register so absurdly high that she had laughed until she hiccupped. He had smelled like pipe tobacco he wasn't supposed to smoke anymore and the particular dust of old paper, and when she hiccupped he had thumped her gently on the back and said, "There now, don't die of happiness in my shop, the insurance won't cover it."
She had not been inside that shop in three years. She had not spoken to her grandfather since the last Christmas her mother was alive, a Christmas that had ended, as she understood it only in fragments even now, with her father and grandfather standing in the shop's back room with their voices low and furious, and her older half-sister Iris walking out the front door in the snow without a coat, and not really coming back after that, not to any of them.
Wren dried the last plate and set it in the cupboard and made a decision the way sixteen-year-olds do, which is instantly and completely, without the caution age would eventually teach her.
She was going to see her grandfather. Whether her father came or not.
She left a note on the counter, DAD I WENT TO GET FRIES WITH SAM BACK BY 9, which was a lie constructed so quickly and so smoothly that she felt a brief, guilty flash of pride in it, and she took her bike instead of asking to borrow the truck, because a bike didn't require an explanation.
Port Ivy General sat on the hill above the harbor, close enough that on clear days you could see the fishing boats from the cafeteria windows. Wren had been there twice in her life: once when she broke her wrist falling out of the Marshes' oak tree at age nine, and once, three years ago, on the worst night of her life, when her mother's heart had simply stopped in the kitchen doorway and no amount of anyone's hands had been able to start it again.
She chained her bike to the rack with fingers that weren't quite steady and went in through the sliding doors just as they were wheeling her grandfather past, an old man swallowed by white sheets, so much smaller than she remembered him, his eyes closed, an oxygen line taped under his nose.
"Family only," the nurse said, her arm coming up.
"I am family," Wren said. "That's my grandfather. Please. My dad won't come and I need to know if he's okay."
Something in her voice must have landed, because the nurse's arm lowered a fraction, and she looked at Wren the way adults sometimes looked at her lately, like she was older than her face suggested, which Wren supposed was true. Losing a parent did that to a person. It aged something in you that never quite went back to its original size.
"He's stable," the nurse said. "It looks like his heart, we're running tests. You can wait in the family lounge. Is there another adult coming?"
Wren thought of her father on the porch, scraping at a three-year-old grease stain like it was the only thing in the world that mattered, and thought of the eleven minutes between Larkspur Lane and this hospital that he had chosen, again, not to drive.
"I don't know," she said, and it was the truest thing she'd said all evening. "Maybe."
She sat down in the family lounge, in a plastic chair the color of a healing bruise, and pulled out her phone. There were two people she could call. She could call her father, and hear him say nothing at all, which she already knew how that would go. Or she could do the thing she had been thinking about doing for three years and had never quite had the nerve for, which was to find her sister.
Iris Callahan had not answered a single message Wren had sent her in three years. But Iris had also, Wren happened to know from an old photo tagged in someone's graduation post, moved to Ashford, forty minutes up the coast, and worked at a plant nursery on weekends, and this felt, suddenly, sitting in a hospital that smelled like antiseptic and stale coffee with her grandfather somewhere behind swinging doors being kept alive by machines, like something that could not wait any longer.
Wren opened her messages, found the thread that had gone unanswered so many times it had become almost a ritual of hopelessness, and typed with shaking thumbs: Grandpa Walter collapsed. He's at Port Ivy General. I don't know if you still care but I thought you should know. Please.
She hit send before she could think better of it, and then she sat in the ugly plastic chair with her phone clutched in both hands, watching the little word deliver appear and disappear, and waited to find out if her family, whatever was left of it, would come back for this.
The three dots appeared. Then vanished. Then appeared again.
Somewhere behind the swinging doors, a monitor was keeping her grandfather's heart in a rhythm none of them, for years now, had managed to keep for themselves.