“Neither will mine,” I tell her. “Now go on, splash your face, and take a breath. I’ll hold on here, okay?”

“Okay.”

A crunching sound as she puts her phone down, shuffling, the tap-tap-tap of her sticks against tiles, a tap running, a nose blowing, a toilet flushing.

I wait.

“Hello?” she says, after a while. Her voice is quieter than usual. Paler. But she has stopped crying.

“I’m here.”

“How did you find me?”

“I asked for Mary Lennox.”

“But how did you know I—”

“Because I know you.”

“You do,” whispers Iris.

I press the phone against my ear, shut my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Iris. I...I shouldn’t have said the things I said. I was just... I was hoping you wouldn’t go through with it.”

“The thing is... I’m not sure if I can go through with it,” Iris says.

A surge of something—adrenaline maybe?—reaches up through my body, swells at my throat, my ears, my fingertips. It’s like an electrical charge. I grip the phone tighter. “It’s okay to change your mind. People do it all the time. I’ve been looking at the statistics. Only thirty percent of people end up going through with it, and—”

“No, what I mean is, I don’t think I can go there on my own.”

“Oh.”

“Will you come with me?”

I lean my forehead against the coolness of the window that doesn’t open. Close my eyes. But there is no need to come up with something. No need to think. It is a simple question. A yes or no answer will suffice.

I want to say, “No.”

I want to say, “This makes no sense.”

I want to say, “Why?”

I want to say, “No.”

I imagine a scenario where I say, No, and Iris decides that she can’t go on her own so we all go home, like nothing happened. I’ll go back to being Brendan’s wife. Being Kate and Anna’s mother. Iris will go back to work, to being her dynamic, forthright self who just happens to have primary progressive MS.

She will continue to say fuck MS backwards, but she will cope because that’s what she does.

But we can’t go back. Either of us.

Iris always knew that. She was just waiting for me to know it too.

I imagine her at the other end of the line. She is wearing something simple. Her wraparound dress maybe. Her silver sandals. Her legs and arms brown from the sunshine of these last days. If she is smiling, her left cheek will be indented with her one, solitary dimple.

But I don’t think she is smiling. She is waiting.

Waiting for me to say something.

Waiting to see if I am the person she thinks I am. Am I?

32

Be alert in case the overtaking vehicle suddenly pulls back in front of you.

I park outside her hotel. On double yellow lines. Through the glass front, I see her.

Iris Armstrong. Checking out.

From this distance, she looks like her usual self, signing a piece of paper with her theatrical flourish.