“Oh… I haven’t told you,” she said, her words were framed like what she was saying was nothing, like it was funny, like she was telling him some cute gossip that he wasn’t quite in the loop enough to have heard yet. “I have a blood clotting disorder. I have to take blood thinners to help me not die, and as a consequence, I get bloody noses. Sometimes, they’re pretty bad.”

“Oh?” he said, following her as she started walking back to his truck at a quick gait. 

“Yep. I told you, didn’t I, that my aunt died of a blood clot? Yeah. I know I did. I just didn’t like to mention that I have the same disorder. So did my mother, which is why she died when I was seventeen. When that happened, I went to live with my Aunt Rita, which is why her house is so special to me. She wasn’t exactly like my mother, but she was a really good ‘other’ mother.” She was walking away from him while she talked.

Bart chased after her. “Why haven’t you told me this?”

She skipped ahead like a little girl playing a game where the object of the game was to die in the most carefree way possible. He saw her skip on the other side of cars like they were trees and he was a kid playing night games outside with his friends after dark. 

“Because,” she said, almost like she was telling a ghost story. “If you look up how to care for people with my disorder, the number one thing you must avoid is… What? Bart? What?”

He stared at her quizzically before he straightened and answered her. “Head injuries.”

She laughed like she was the head bully leading a mob in the schoolyard. “Exactly right! Give the man a prize!” She clapped her hands like it was more wonderful than anyone could take before she jumped and side-hopped down the parking lot. “No one was more surprised I didn’t die the night we met than I was.”

“It’s icy. Please slow down,” Bart called after her.

She laughed before she fell down. He raced around the back of a car and he saw where she had fallen. She had landed next to a tree with her knees on the lip of the circle of bricks that surrounded it. For some reason, she looked like she had fallen into a martini glass and the snow was what they had used to rim the glass with. They were in the adult world again, and she lay in the imitation cup like a garnish they used to decorate the drink with. Was she a slice of lime, or an olive on a toothpick?

“I didn’t hit my head,” she said as she let her head fall backward as looked up at the clear night sky. “And a really bad bruise anywhere could be my undoing.”

“This was why you kicked me out of the hospital the night we met? So I wouldn’t hear you talk to your doctor about what was really going on?”

“Yeah. Sorry about that. I just didn’t think you could take it that night from a legal perspective. None of what happened was your fault. Even if I dropped dead in the hospital, which could have happened, I didn’t want you to feel like it was your fault. It wasn’t. Even if you had been the one to throw that glass that hit me, it still wouldn’t have been your fault. Some things… Some people are just not meant to last.”

He crouched next to her beside the lip of the cup. It was a cold night. Normally, he would have hurried to put her in the warm cab of the truck, but something was different under the night sky filled with stars. He wanted to hear the story before even one more thing happened. “So, now are you ready to tell me about Chalmers?”

She breathed, her breath like ghost vapor, floating up into the air like death was all around them. “When we were engaged, I asked him for a wedding date on two separate occasions. When I went to open my mouth to ask for a wedding date the third time, I stopped myself. Why would this time be different from the times he refused to give me an answer? I tried the words out in my head a few times. Then I said them aloud when I was alone, just to see how they sounded. Do you know what I sounded like asking for a wedding date?”

“What?”

“I sounded like a child. Like a whiny child who wasn’t getting her way, talking to a parent who is putting her off. The parent wants to do what the child is asking for, but for reasons that are too complex for the child, they’re not going to explain it to her. They are going to brush their child off and hope that they forget about the thing they were asking for. At least, that was how my mother used to speak to me. And I realized with a gut-wrenching lurch that a part of him wanted to marry me and another part didn’t. I mean, if there’s something I really want to do, I want to do it right away. I thought he felt the same way since he knew about my condition when he asked me to marry him. I’d already told him I didn’t need a big wedding. We didn’t need to spend a year planning it or spend tens of thousands of dollars. I just wanted to get married and get the most out of my life.”

“What did you tell him the third time?”

“Oh…” she breathed, staring at every star in the sky rather than meeting Bart’s eyes. “I never had that conversation with him. There was no point. Something had changed since he proposed. He didn’t want to marry me anymore, but he didn’t want to break up. Breaking up with a woman who could die at any moment is complicated. I’ve seen it before. So, I went back to basics. If he didn’t want to marry me, then the next question was if I wanted to marry him. Did I want to marry him so bad that I couldn’t live my life without him? Well, it turned out that I had cooled off too. As I explained before, he wasn’t my only long-term boyfriend who thought he was the type of man who could get together with a woman like me, but after a good long think… he couldn’t. They couldn’t.” Maisie turned to Bart and finally looked into his eyes. “I’m a coward for not telling you sooner.”

“Do you think I’m like Chalmers?” Bart asked, rubbing his gloved hands together.

“Most of the men I’ve known want to play a love game where they call the shots,” Maisie said softly. “If he wants the woman for a one-night stand, she should be okay with that. If he wants her for a perpetual girlfriend, until he finds the woman he truly wants to marry, she should be fine with that too. If he wants her to marry him and have his babies, she should do that too, but I’m a terrible choice for all three women. I can’t be someone’s one-night stand. One thwap too hard against a headboard and I’m in an ambulance and he’s talking to the police.”

“Has that happened?” Bart asked in a territorial rasp.

“No. I may be careless, but I’m not that careless. Whoever I’m with has to know my situation. Still, I can’t be anyone’s long-term girlfriend. I require too much maintenance. The point of a long-term girlfriend is that it is the relationship that requires the least amount of work. I’d make an even worse wife, dropping dead after having babies. No one is going skiing with me. I’m not good for vacations, bearing children, or even planning a life with. It’s… the worst for a million reasons. What if I die tomorrow? What if I live to be eighty? What if I take on responsibilities and take on the burden of another person’s heart and then I’m just gone?” She touched Bart’s face with her wet-gloved fingers. “I’m sad I had to tell you the truth.”

“Do you think that I’ll leave you now that I know all this?” Bart asked gravely.

Maisie let her head loll back even further into the snow and looked at the sky instead of him. “No. If you’re like other men, tonight, you’ll act brave. Tomorrow, you’ll still think that being with me is a great idea. It won’t occur to you until after you’ve been with me a while that you are losing your opportunity to be with healthy girls who can be slammed up against headboards… or who don’t bleed onto white pillowcases for no reason and give you reason to worry whether or not they have dropped dead whenever they don’t answer the phone immediately. It wears people down. You have nothing to be ashamed of if it wears you down too.”

Hearing all that put Bart in a pissy mood. He wanted to scream things. What things? He wasn’t exactly sure. He did not want to be like the other men. Bart didn’t answer her. He ground his teeth together and didn’t answer.

“Chalmers was at my aunt’s funeral with me,” Maisie explained. “Before that, he didn’t think my blood disorder was something real, even if I told him my mother died when I was seventeen, even if I told him the doctor told me to be careful, even if my nose bled. It wasn’t real until he saw Aunt Rita’s corpse and she looked thirty instead of forty-five in her casket. Suddenly, everything I had told him was real. Her funeral was quite a long time before I got possession of her house.”

“I bet,” Bart agreed, knowing a bit about how long it took inheritances to be received.

“Perhaps I should have broken up with him in person, but I didn’t want to hear what he had to say about our breakup. He wanted it. He just didn’t want to ask for it. Wanting to dump me made him feel like a monster. You saw him. He didn’t have anything to say. When he met me at the restaurant on the night you met me, I had already broken up with him. He just wanted to leave me with the impression that he wasn’t a bad guy because he felt squeamish about marrying me. Listening to him made me want to slit my wrists just so I would never have to listen to another man say those horrific, defensive, washed-up excuses again. I warned him. I began our relationship by warning him, but it wasn’t real to him until there was a dead body.”

Bart blew a stream of air into the stars above their heads. “So, you didn’t tell me?”

“No. I didn’t. I still wish you didn’t know because I wish it wasn’t true.”

“Why? You don’t think I’ll understand?” he asked, sitting up straighter and brushing the snow off his coat. “You could have told me that first night at the hospital.”

“I don’t know if you’ll understand or not. All I know is that now that all this is out in the open, you’re going to want to have multiple conversations about it. Should I go skiing tomorrow? Is it safe? What if I dismount the ski lift poorly and it hits me in the back of the head?” She put her elbow in the snow and turned on her side. “What do you think?”

If Bart hadn’t been a banker, he might have replied the way Chalmers did. He might have told Maisie that she had to play it safe. If she played it safe… Suddenly, he remembered all the old televisions screens they had packed off to the eco-center. Her aunt had played it safe. She had stayed home, watched TV, and interested herself in a safe hobby like clothes, but she had still died at forty-five. 

The reason being a banker stopped Bart from falling into the same trap as Chalmers was that when he invested money on behalf of his clients, there was risk. Often, there was a lot of risk. Risk was a natural consequence of going for something that had a large reward. The thing that made Bart such a successful banker was that he was unaffected by the risks others took. He put those risks out of his mind when he did his work. 

Looking at Maisie now, he understood why her other men had failed. They weren’t the type who could throw everything they had into one madcap scheme, and they certainly couldn’t throw all of Maisie into it. The truth was that they didn’t want to be responsible. If Maisie died, they didn’t want to pick up the pieces. They didn’t think that the joy of being with her (while they could) outweighed whatever pain was caused when she died.

But she might not die.

Just like she said, she might live to eighty. Every minute, doctors got better at treating disorders and diseases. She might be just fine. 

They weren’t willing to take that risk every day for the rest of their lives. Maybe they were afraid they’d end up alone. Maybe they were afraid they’d end up alone with children they needed to parent. Maybe they were afraid they’d be left with children who would die just like their mother.

Bart swallowed.

It was a big risk.

“Maisie,” he said, suddenly falling on his back next to her in the frozen martini glass of salt-like snow. “I love you. I bought a ring. I was planning to ask you to marry me.”

She gasped next to him.

“And I want you to go skiing with me tomorrow. I love skiing and it’s something I want to do with you. Right now, I don’t understand all the limits. Maybe I don’t want to understand them. I understand that being with you is risking everything each day. I can really understand those boys crapping themselves when you don’t answer the phone. What I can’t understand is why they would want to cut themselves off from you. You are the loveliest woman I’ve ever met.”

Her breath caught and she didn’t answer him.

“It could be,” Bart said gently. “That the thing I love about you most is how you approach life because you know it’s fleeting in a way they don’t. If every day is a miracle to you, I want to live my life that way too.”

“Are you asking me to marry you?” she asked in a hushed whisper.

He rolled his eyes and looked at the stars. “I have been thinking of what kind of proposal would be best for you. I’ll ask you to marry in any way you want me to. With a thousand balloons? A thousand candles lit in a heart? On one knee at the fanciest restaurant in the city? What dream do you want to come true?”

She rolled over onto him. “I want this.”

He held her and kissed her as the moment lasted. 

Kissing in the cold is a little like kissing a dead person, as their lips are cold like frost, like death, like the future is already past. The stars gleamed in the sky above them and their breath froze like mist. It all reminded them that some things last forever and some things are gone like the breath of a person’s words that disappear in the chill of the night.