Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 102355 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102355 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 512(@200wpm)___ 409(@250wpm)___ 341(@300wpm)
She’s usually unflappable. Inhuman, really. But not right now. She’s looking at me with sincerity I don’t recognize, sadness that tugs at my chest. Her dark brows are knit together, her lips pressed into a thin line. I worry she’s about to tell me something horrible. I hold my breath, waiting until she clears her throat and looks away. She stares out the window, and I watch the slow transformation take over. I see her tuck away her emotions and dissolve her worry with a lighthearted chuckle.
She turns back and reaches for another box. “You have to see this one dress. You’ll die. It’s totally perfect for the club scene there.”
She’s already tearing into the next package as if the last few seconds never happened. I reach my hand out to still her, taking hold of her slender wrist.
“Winnie?” I say her name gently.
“No, Isabel,” she snaps, sharp and stern, flinging my hand off in a rare fit of annoyance.
I jolt at her tone. It’s so unlike her that I’m too scared to push it, and she doesn’t let the awkwardness linger. She sets aside her tray table and makes room for me up near her pillows.
“You know what?” she says, her voice infused with excitement again. “We can worry about opening the rest of the stuff later. I was working on my list before you got here!”
Wanting to play along and make her happy, I kick off my shoes and climb onto her bed. I’m careful not to yank cords or dislodge anything that’s been placed by one of her nurses or doctors as I cuddle in next to her. In this place, she doesn’t smell like Winnie. She smells faintly of the hospital’s cloying cleaning products and unfamiliar laundry detergent. I’ve brought her shampoo and bodywash, but it’s not cutting it. We’ve spritzed this whole damn room with her perfume, enough that we almost gagged on the smell, but it didn’t last.
Winnie reaches for the purple notebook she keeps on her bedside table, the one she was writing in when I first arrived. The list is on a page that’s been dog-eared and flipped to a million times, though this is the first time she’s letting me see it. I’ve heard about her all-important summer bucket list, but she’s kept it under lock and key. I think she’s only revealing it now as a way to make amends for snapping at me.
A dozen or so things are listed in Winnie’s messy handwriting. A few jump out at me right away.
“A tattoo?”
She laughs and covers the list with her hand. “I’m not going to let you see it if you’re going to be judgy about every single thing.”
I sit back and let my shoulders relax, carefully adjusting my tone so it’s easy breezy when I reply. “No, no, I’m not. Where are you going to put it?”
She holds up her arm and points to the crook of her elbow. “Here or somewhere on my torso. I haven’t decided yet.”
“And what’s the design going to be?”
She shrugs. “Who knows? Who cares?”
This is such a Winnie response.
“Okay, what else?”
She moves her hand and holds the notebook between us so I can see it better. “Obviously I had to put all the standard things. Skinny-dipping, go to a crazy dance party, wild sex…”
“Obviously,” I tease. “ ‘Fall in love’?” I ask, pointing to where she’s written the sweet sentiment.
She looks at me, I look at her, and we both start cracking up.
She scrunches her nose. “You’re right. Too cliché. Let’s stick to the good stuff. Drugs?”
“Really?” I sound thoroughly unimpressed with her decision-making. So much for not judging…
“It’s Ibiza,” she points out, like I’m being slow to catch on.
“I know, but…”
I don’t mean to let my gaze drift down to her PICC line or the faint edge of her surgical scars that lie beside it.
“But nothing,” she replies firmly. “I want to try something.”
“Fine. Keep it. And keep ‘fall in love,’ too. That’s not too cliché. It’s sweet.”
“Okay, but I’ll add a second part to it…”
I wait while she does it, then snicker once I see what she’s written.
She hands me the pen and gets her phone, and together, we research Ibiza and come up with other items to add to her list. We spend the entire afternoon on her bed, huddled together, laughing as we picture what life will be like for her once she’s better.
It’s a painful memory to relive. Even two years later, I’m frustrated by the randomness of my sister’s death. It wasn’t Winnie’s valve that gave out, not the infection that eventually took her, but a chance blood clot and a massive stroke.
I was there when it happened. I heard the screaming—my screams—before a nurse gently forced me out of the room. Afterward, while I waited for my parents to arrive at the hospital, I sat in quiet agony by my sister’s hospital bed, staring at the boxes of clothes littering the floor. A few hours earlier, Winnie was collapsed back on her bed laughing so hard she was crying because I’d finally agreed to model that silly turquoise string bikini just in time for a group of physicians to come into Winnie’s room for their afternoon rounds and find me standing there, nearly naked.