Page 11 of Deacon

It wasn’t dramatic. Nothing inside the room shattered with it. One ugly crack split the middle of the sentence, enough to betray me, and I pressed my lips together as heat stung behind my eyes.

I stood there breathing carefully through my nose until I trusted myself again.

Then I released the rail, bent over him, and pressed my lips to his cheek, careful of the tape and the tube.

His skin was warm.

That hurt more than it should have.

I straightened, wiped my face with the heel of my hand, and glanced at the monitor long enough to reassure the nurse in me that nothing had changed.

Then I left before I did something humiliating, like tell a comatose man I still loved him.

I sat inside my car in the hospital parking garage and called home.

Jade answered on the third ring, and for one brief, disorienting second, I heard only the ordinary sounds of her life. A cabinet closing. The television murmuring somewhere in the background. Paper rustling, probably the color-coded study guides she pretended not to care about and guarded like classified documents.

“Hey, Mom.”

Her voice was easy and distracted in that distinctly teenage way that meant she was doing several things at once and would somehow remember each of them better than I would.

I closed my eyes and rested my head against the seat. “Hey, baby. Sorry I’m running late.”

“You’re always running late.”

There was no heat behind it. Just Jade being Jade, dry as dust and far less inconvenienced than she wanted me to believe.

“I know.” My voice softened without permission. “I’m not coming straight home. I’m going to Aunt Blue’s for a little while. We had kind of a day.”

Silence lingered on the other end. Long enough for her to hear what I hadn’t said, but not long enough for her to pry.

“You okay?”

The quiet concern in those two words came closer to undoing me than anything else had. I swallowed and forced my voice steady. “I’m okay. Just tired.”

“Mmhmm.”

That sound carried precisely the amount of teenage skepticism I expected.

“There’s lasagna in the freezer,” I said, retreating into practical because practical felt safer. “The good one, not the sad low-fat version I bought during my delusional week. Put it in at three-fifty and cover it for the first half so it doesn’t dry out.”

“I know how to heat lasagna, Mom.”

“I’m aware. I’m choosing to tell you anyway.”

She released a theatrical sigh, and I could picture the eye roll attached to it. “Yes, Mom.”

“I want you to look over your chemistry notes before bed. You have that test tomorrow.”

A second sigh arrived, heavier than the first. “I know.”

“And your Of Mice and Men paper is due next week, so don’t wait until Sunday night and pretend your laptop betrayed you.”

“First of all,” she said, summoning offense on principle, “my laptop did betray me that one time.”

“It didn’t. You had seven tabs open and a smoothie balanced beside the keyboard.”

“That is slander.”