Home Again

“Of course,” he said softly. “Follow me.”

The hospital hallway was eerily quiet. Nurses walked by on crepe-soled shoes, barely rippling the air with their presence. Room after room was dark, the curtains drawn. Empty chairs lined the white walls, magazines lay slumped on Formica tables.

Lina had grown up in hospitals. As a child, she’d played in corridors like this, waddling after smiling nurses, reading Dr. Seuss books on waiting-room chairs. She’d always thought of hospitals as her mother’s workplace, no different from a lawyer’s office or a beauty salon.

But now she saw them for what they were—shadowy warehouses where the dead and dying were housed in quiet, curtained rooms, where machines sucked and wheezed and held on to life through thick electrical cords.

She felt her mother beside her, heard her penny loafers click on the linoleum floor. She wanted to slip her hand through her mom’s hand and squeeze, but she couldn’t make herself do it. Her arms felt limp and heavy at her sides, her legs felt as rubbery as fresh Jell-O. Tears were a stinging, burning veil that turned everything into a smear of white.

Finally Dr. Nusbaum stopped at a room. The door was closed. Beside it, a large observation window revealed the room. A yellow curtain was drawn around the bed, shielding Francis from their eyes.

The doctor turned to them. “He looks …” He shot a quick glance at Lina, then spoke quietly to Madelaine. “The injury to the left side was extensive. He’s bandaged, but…”

Lina thought instantly of Francis’s smile, the big one that seemed to take over his face, crinkling his eyes, creating a dozen little folds across his cheeks.

She drew in a sharp breath.

“Thank you, Dr. Nusbaum,” her mother said in a stiff, wooden voice. “I’ll speak to you after I’ve seen him.”

Lina stared at her mother in shock, wondering how she could

be so matter-of-fact right now.

Dr. Nusbaum nodded and left them alone.

“I don’t understand, Mom,” she whispered, trying her best not to cry. “Maybe he’s in a coma…. People come out of comas, don’t they? Maybe if we talked to him—”

Mom swallowed hard. “It’s not a coma, baby. Francis’s brain is dead. The machines are keeping his body functioning, but everything that he is—he was—is gone.”

“That man in Tennessee … he woke up—”

Mom shook her head gently. “This is different, baby.”

Lina wished she didn’t understand, but she did. She was a doctor’s kid, and she knew what brain death meant. In a coma, the brain functioned, and so there was hope. When the brain died, there was no hope. Francis, her Francis, was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

For a long time—Lina could hear the quiet ticking of the clock above their heads—they stood there, staring past each other, saying nothing.

“I need to see him,” her mother said finally.

Lina turned to the window, moving closer. She put her hands out, touched the pane, thinking—crazily—that it would be like touching Francis one last time. But all it felt was cold and flat.

Beyond the thin veil of the absurd yellow curtain, she could see the shadowy outline of a body in a bed, the rise and fall of a black cylinder beside it. She tried to see through it, to imagine just for a second what it would feel like to walk into that room, to see her Francis lying in a hospital bed, his cheeks white, his face slack, his eyes—oh, God, his blue, blue eyes …

“I can’t do it, Mom,” she whispered, shaking her head. The words stuck in her throat, felt so disloyal. But she couldn’t do it, couldn’t look at him and then sleep at night. Not if his eyes were blank, not if he couldn’t smile at her and reach out his hand. “I can’t look at him that way….”

Her mother moved closer, swept a cold, reassuring hand along her cheek. Lina waited for her mom to look at her, but she never did, just kept staring at that curtained window.

“I saw my mother after she died,” she said at last in a voice so twisted, Lina barely recognized it. “My father took me into her dark bedroom and told me to look at her, to touch her cheek…. It was so cold.” She shivered slightly and drew her hand back, crossing her arms. “For years and years after that, when I thought of my mother, I thought of … the wrong picture, the wrong memory.”

She turned to Lina at last. “I don’t want that for you, baby. I want you to remember Francis the way he was.” Her voice cracked.

Was.

“You should have told me, Mom.”

Madelaine frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”

Lina stared at the window, at the shadowy outline of the man she’d taken for granted so many times. The man who’d dried her little girl’s tears and held her hand when she was scared. She hadn’t really realized until this very second how much of her world revolved around him. How much she loved him. “When I was throwing my tantrums and looking for my father …” She started to cry, hot, stinging tears that rolled one after another down her cheeks and splashed on her T-shirt. “You should have told me he was right there all along.”