Page 42 of Starry Tides
“Thanks for calling me back,” Matteo said. “I probably sound out of my mind.”
“That’s what falling for somebody means,” Bethany said. “You’re out of your mind. And it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?”
Matteo agreed it was, despite everything.
Bethany calledRod to tell him she’d be a little bit later than she’d planned. “I want to check on Helena,” she said. Rod told her to be careful. He told her he loved her.
Once at Helena’s, Bethany walked right up to the door and rang the bell. Helena never went anywhere, so Bethany was pretty sure she was there. But it took another two rings of the bell to get her to the door.
The woman who answered was a meek, gaunt version of the sunny, tanned woman Helena had recently transformed into. It looked as though she’d spent days in bed, not eating or sleeping too much. Without hesitating, Bethany wrapped her arms around her and whispered, “Honey, it’s going to be all right.”
Helena’s voice was meek. “I don’t think it will be this time.”
Bethany and Helena went to the living room, where Helena had made a pillow-and-blanket nest on the sofa. A film was paused, something rom-com-y that Bethany couldn’t remember the name of. Helena collapsed back on her pillow pile and put her face in her hands.
“Matteo and I broke up,” she said into her palms. “Listen to me! I’m going to die, and I’m crying about a boy. This is why I told myself not to date. I knew it would turn into a sob fest. I knew I would spend time obsessing about him rather than making peace with the hereafter.”
Bethany sat beside Helena and rubbed her back. At this moment, she felt more like Helena’s mother than Helena’s friend, which she thought was fine. Helena needed the mothering that her own mother couldn’t do now that she was gone.
Although Bethany already sort of knew what had happened, she asked Helena to explain. Helena launched into it, telling Bethany about the sailing adventures, the picnics, the romantic dinners. She talked about finally getting up the nerve to ask Matteo to sleep over.
“I knew it was wrong,” Helena said. “I knew I needed to tell him. But I was falling in love with him! I couldn’t! I didn’t want him to go!”
Eventually, Helena seemed to get up the nerve to tell Bethany that Rod had been the one to spill the beans. “I’m not angry with him,” Helena assured Bethany. “It had to come out eventually.Honestly, your husband made it easier on me.” She tried to laugh, then burst into tears again.
“Oh, Rod.” Bethany shook her head, as though to say, what are we going to do with men? But she didn’t blame Rod. Rod always wanted to do what was best.
“I remember you told me that I needed to let Matteo make his own decisions about how he wanted to spend his time,” Helena said after a little while. “But I shouldn’t have taken it so far.”
Bethany squeezed Helena’s hand. She thought of the desperation in Matteo’s voice, about how eager he’d sounded to save Helena’s life.
Should I be the one to tell this to Helena?
But she knew that she couldn’t volunteer this information to Helena, not if Matteo decided to take it back. It was his body. It was his romance. All Bethany could do—as a doctor, as their friend—was sit and listen and hope.
And then, Helena’s voice lit up with a call. It was Matteo. It was Matteo with a question.
23
Two weeks after Matteo’s fateful phone call, Matteo and Helena were in the waiting room at the hospital, preparing to take a series of tests that would tell them if Matteo’s liver was a match. Helena’s fingers were laced with Matteo’s. She felt unable to speak. So many things had been said between them. So many promises had been made. What else was there left to say? But when their names were called, they stood, kissed one another, then moved as a unit into the back room, a room painted white filled with October sunshine.
The tests lasted no more than two hours—a mix of blood, antigen, and body-size testing. Because Helena was on the taller side, they hoped things would be okay. But there were no guarantees, Helena knew, and the doctors were careful to keep their opinions to themselves, lacking the science to back them up.
Helena hated feeling like a lab rat again. But, immediately afterward, as she handed the woman at the front desk her insurance card, she thanked her lucky stars again for having gotten insurance in the first place. She’d made this happen forherself despite all the doubt she’d had. She wasn’t sure where that hope had come from. Was it from Nantucket itself?
Afterward, Matteo drove them back to the house on the shore, a house into which Matteo had moved his few belongings the previous week. For Helena, it was still hilarious to see how easily Matteo’s things fit beside hers. It was like the house had really only been half-full before he’d come into it.
It would take a week to find out whether Matteo and Helena were a match. Matteo suggested they distract themselves in every way they knew how. “Kissing, for one,” he said playfully, listing them out on his fingers. “Watching movies. Reading books. Going for walks on the beach.”
Helena burrowed herself into his chest and listened to his heartbeat.
“You know, you don’t have to go through with this,” Helena told him for maybe the thousandth time.
Matteo pressed a kiss into her forehead. “Helena, I love you,” he said.
“But it’s crazy,” she told him. “We barely know each other.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Matteo said with a laugh. “I’ve known you for more than four months at this point. That’s a lifetime, really.”
