Forever Wild (Wild 2.50)

“Thanks for this.” Jonah slips the thermos from my hand and kisses me in one smooth motion before peeling away. “I should get going.”

I hook my hand around his arm, stalling his escape. “Not before you tell me what that was back there. Why are they staying in Agnes and Mabel’s room, if the cabin is okay?”

Jonah pauses to pinch the bridge of his nose as if in pain. “My mom had a pulmonary embolism last year, in August.”

“Oh, wow. That’s … bad, right?” I stumble over my words. I don’t actually know what that is, but I’m doing the math—last August was just before my father died. “That’s something to do with her lungs?”

“A blockage, yeah. She started having chest pain, so they rushed her to the hospital and ran all the tests. They found a blood clot. A pretty big one.”

“Did she have to have surgery?”

/> He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Something to do with a catheter put into her lung to feed medicine in to break up the clot. It sounds like surgery to me, but she said she was awake through it. Then they put her on blood thinners. Her blood clots really fast. It’s always been like that. She’ll probably have to take the thinners for the rest of her life.”

“Is she doing okay now?”

“She says she is, but who the fuck really knows. She didn’t tell me about this, so what else isn’t she telling me about?” Jonah is scowling. “Björn should have called me.”

“It sounds like she told him not to.”

“I don’t care. He should have told me, anyway.” He paces around the plane engine. “I’m her son.”

“You’re right. Someone should have told you. But why do you think she might not have? What would you have done?”

“I would have gone to Oslo!”

“Right.”

He seems to consider that for a long moment. “I would have flown back the second she told me, and then I might have not been there for Wren when he died. Or you.”

I’m not sure what to say to ease Jonah’s frustration. If that had been my mother or Simon, I would be just as furious to find out more than a year after the fact.

“And then fucking Björn”—he spits his name out like a curse—“he has the nerve to lay a guilt trip on me for making her fly all the way here to see me when I had no clue this was going on in the first place! Like, of course I would never have agreed to this, had I known! She shouldn’t be flying halfway across the world! Long plane rides are a risk for people with her condition. What if the thinners stop working and she’s out there, in the middle of the night, with a huge blood clot working through her veins? And she can’t even get a signal to call for help.”

“That’s why you want them staying at our house.” The pieces are beginning to fit together.

“At least if she’s in our house and something goes wrong, I’m there.”

Whether that’s a legitimate concern, I’m not sure. What I do know is that Jonah won’t sleep a wink with her across the lake.

“It’s the right decision. I’ll call Agnes and give her the heads-up. She won’t mind. Mabel was whining that she wanted to stay out there, anyway.” Though that was before she learned that the Wi-Fi setup was delayed.

“Thanks.” He nods slowly. “It caught me off guard. I didn’t think I’d have to start worrying about her health yet. She’s still so young.”

“And it sounds like she has things under control.” I reach up to comb his freshly groomed beard with my fingertips. “She’ll be fine.”

“Yeah?” He sounds doubtful.

“Yeah. Susan, Simon, Astrid, and Björn under one roof. What could go wrong?”

He tips his head back with a groan. “Besides Björn calling Simon a quack?”

“Besides that.” Björn doesn’t hide the fact that he thinks psychiatrists are fake doctors.

“Maybe Björn can stay in the cabin by himself.”

“Stop it.” I laugh as I stretch on tiptoes to kiss his lips.

I ease my Jeep into the row of parked vehicles at the Trapper’s Crossing community center at twenty-five past ten, preparing myself for grief about my tardiness. Muriel doesn’t differentiate between paid positions and a person graciously volunteering their entire Saturday before Christmas. In her eyes, a job’s a job and you give it your all, no matter what.