Page 121 of Here We Go Again
Rhiannon groans. “I really said that to you, didn’t I? I—I’m sorry, too. That was a shit thing to say, and it isn’t true anyway. No one cares about their students as much as you do,” she says genuinely. Logan looks up at the sun cutting through the branches on a maple tree. “You care about being a good teacher. You care about nineties pop country a littletoo much.You care about your dad. And everyone in Vista Summit knows how much you care about Joe Delgado.”
She lets this list wash over her as she takes a bite of baklava from her overalls’ front pocket.
“I was just bitter because you didn’t care about me,” she finally confesses, and Logan feels the hurt in her voice through the phone.
“For what it’s worth, that wasn’t about you. I didn’t let myself care about anyone.”
“I know.” A tenuous silence stretches between them before Rhiannon suddenly says, “I want you to know that I had a lot of sex this summer. With some incredibly hot people. People who werewayhotter than you.”
“I’m very happy for you.”
“Thanks. Now. Please never call me again.”
Rhiannon hangs up, and Logan stares at her black phone screen. She sees her wild-eyed reflection staring up at her, and all at once, she knows what she needs to do to make things right.
She needs to show Rosemary how much she cares.
Chapter Thirty-Six
ROSEMARY
Rosemary didn’t think she could ever wish for Joe’s death, but that was before she learned what deathis. Its recursive nature, its prolonged process. Its pattern.
Joe continues to decline. Logan returns in the middle of the night from her mysterious adventure, and she tells Rosemary to go upstairs for a proper night’s sleep. But Rosemary is too afraid to leave Joe’s side.
Nurse Addison comes by the next day and tells them it’s the end, that they should say their last goodbyes. So they do. They observe nighttime bedside vigils, Rosemary leaning against Logan’s shoulder saying, “This is it. Tonight’s the night.” Holding his hand until morning. Holding each other’s hands despite everything.
Then small miracles. His vitals get better. He wakes up and his breathing steadies. He holds down water or Jell-O or mashed potatoes. He goes a day without needing morphine. He smiles. He tells a joke. His brown eyes come into focus. He says, “my girls,” and squeezes their hands back.
But he never actually getsbetterbetter. He’s still in pain, his lungs are still full of fluid, his whole life is still confined to one bed.
He’s never going to get better. They’re all here trying to help him let go. But Joseph Delgado is strong and stubborn until the bitter end.
One night, after Guillermo has gone home, it’s just her and Logan. “What do you think he’s waiting for?” Logan asks.
Rosemary clutches his hand tighter. “I think he’s scared.”
“Of death?”
“Of finally surrendering control.”
Two days later, Rosemary watches Nurse Addison take his vitals, and then shouts, in a fit of tears and rage, “You can go, okay! I give you permission, you proud, proud man. You can go!” She sobs into his chest for hours.
That same day, Logan asks Guillermo while he prepares dinner: “What percentage of your patients die?”
“All of them,” he answers plainly. “That is my job.”
“How do you deal with it? Watching all those people die?”
“It’s an honor,” he says, “to be there for someone at the end.”
The next morning, when Guillermo arrives at the same time as Nurse Addison, he has a copy ofOne Hundred Years of Solitudein its original Spanish tucked under his arm. He doesn’t make coffee or tea; he sits by Joe’s bed and reads him Márquez the way he was meant to be read, and Joe is alert enough that he weeps. Even Nurse Addison stays to listen, comes back again and again for more chapters, while Rosemary prays for the end.
“Logan is up to something,” Rosemary tells Joe the next morning as she sits beside him with her coffee. His eyes are glassy from the morphine, but they’re open.
Logan is banging around upstairs, and Rosemary glances at the ceiling. “I’m not surewhatshe’s up to, but it’s something.”
The banging started as soon as Logan returned from her unexplained day away. Given Joe’s health, Rosemary moved her suitcasesand the typewriter downstairs so she could always be with him, but Logan keeps disappearing upstairs for hours at a time, emerging for meals and to check on Joe, occasionally going on mysterious errands and returning with mysterious bags.
