He reached for her hand again. “Whatever happens, Mags, I’m here for you. I’m your friend, and I can listen to you talk about her or dry those tears you are fighting like mad not to shed or just put you on a bike and let the wind help you forget. I’m here for you.”
Maggie looked at him through her blurry eyes. She wasn’t sure, with the exception of Jo Ellen, that she’d ever had a friend like that before. Acquaintances, garden club ladies, neighbors, family. Even Roger had never been a “friend” but always her husband.
The thought gutted her.
“You know, Brick,” she said through a tight throat, “I’ve never had a friend.”
He drew back. “I think you got one upstairs in the ICU.”
“I had Jo, yes. The deepest of friendships, but we were separated by our husbands for thirty years. But other than Jo, I’ve actually been very…lonely.” Her voice cracked and the first tear fell. Cursed thing. “I think that’s why I keep dreaming about my late husband. He’s trying to tell me something and maybe it’s that I’m going to be lonely again. Maybe he knows…Jo’s coming.”
“No, no.” He took her hand again, his own eyes swimming with tears. “Maybe he knows you’ve got the people in your life to get rid of that loneliness, Maggie.”
She blinked, managing not to lose another tear but still give him a warning look. “I don’t want?—”
“I know. I’m not offering that.”
“Good, because I’m seventy-eight.”
He squeezed her hand lightly. “My romantic days are done, Mags. But I can be your friend in the truest sense and I’d like to be.”
“You are,” she whispered, looking at him. “My most unlikely friend.”
He gave her that smile again and ran a hand over his beard. “Come on, now, sister. Finish that pastry and let’s take a walk. You need food and air to face this day.”
She picked up her napkin, finally, and patted her eyes with it. “What I needed was you,” she whispered as she followed his order and ate the croissant.
After she finished, she squared her shoulders and took a breath. “Okay, Brick, I’m ready.”
She wasn’t, really, but he’d given her the strength to try.
Kate walked down the ICU corridor at twenty-eight minutes past midnight, officially “the next day” now. She was on her fourth shift since they started weaning the propofol.
Tessa had finished the last one, and finally agreed to go home because Dusty called and said Olive was having a time. Eli was here now, and the two of them agreed to leave after this shift, at one. Vivien, Peter, Meredith, and Dusty had all lined up for the overnight so Eli and Kate could sleep for a few hours. Maggie would come in the morning, and by then…maybe Mom would be awake. And…normal.
The scheduling gave her peace. The waiting gave her a splitting headache.
She glanced down at the sweatpants and T-shirt she’d changed into…sometime earlier this evening. She’d zipped home for an hour, took a shower, ate half a granola bar, and came back. She’d passed exhaustion hours ago. Now, she felt like glass—fragile and transparent.
She smiled at the night nurse at the station—not Marlene tonight, but Talia, a younger woman with a very businesslike attitude.
The nurse nodded back. “She’s been steady. We dropped the propofol another step at midnight. Vitals holding. We’re keeping an eye on her.” She gestured toward a bank of monitors but none of them showed Mom’s face. Just a series of medical graphs that each measured something important.
Thanking her, Kate went into the room she now knew by heart—from the stain in the ceiling to the pattern in the tile floor. She knew the feel of the pleather chair, the sound of the ventilator, the wonky wheel on the rolling tray, and the antiseptic smell that permeated everything.
The monitors murmured and beeped, and Kate glanced up at them. She’d made a point of learning every single one during her shifts. She Googled what she didn’t know and figured out what the graphs meant, committing the numbers to heart.
Pulse-ox on the screen reading ninety-seven. Heart rate reading seventy-four. The ICP holding in the goal range. Good. They were behaving.
Settling on her chair, Kate let herself take a good long look at Mom. She maybe appeared slightly less sedated than she had earlier this evening. Was that a faint flicker of movement under the closed eyelids? Yes, it was.
Her hand on top of the blanket had twitched earlier, and it definitely looked like that pink-tipped index finger had moved.
Was her body starting to regain consciousness? Starting to become Jo Ellen Wylie again? Holding that thought, she took her mother’s hand.
“I don’t feel like talking,” she said softly. “I know everyone else is, but maybe you just want silence so you can do the work to break out of the fog and come back to us.”
She thumbed her mother’s slightly knotted knuckles and stared at a face she’d seen most every day of the last fifty years. She sat very still for five minutes, thinking about the highlights of those fifty years—the long talks, the laughter, dinners aroundthe table with Dad and Tess, the simple exchanges, the sad calls this past year when she knew Mom was sitting in Dad’s recliner, crying.
