*adds ring light to cart
I laugh. No amount of distance could erase the way he makes me smile or how my pulse skitters at the sight of his name on my screen. Can’t imagine ever giving that up.
My reply is interrupted by an incoming call from a number I don’t recognize. I decline it and return to my texts.
Me
Miss you
Rowan
God, you have no idea
In my bedroom, my body begs for a nap. Except my sheets smell like him and I’m instantly taken back to last night. How he held and worshipped me. How it felt to touch him, be filled by him. How beautifully perfect and unsurprising it was—the way I felt so comfortable, like a prodigal child returning to the only home she wasever meant for. The tenderness, the passion. Dark eyes, chiseled skin, and a million tiny things that felt nothing like lust and entirely like love.
I want to pull the blanket over my head and lose myself in the memory of it. But the clock tells me I should shower and get ready to meet Mom at J&J’s.
Ten minutes later, I step out of my bathroom feeling marginally more awake, but capable of powering through brunch.
My phone lights up on the nightstand. A text from the same unknown number awaits me and I blink, confused, at the two calls I missed while I was in the shower.
I swipe to the message, lungs seizing in my chest.
Unknown number
Hannah, this is Richard.
I’m in an ambulance on the way to the hospital with your mom.
Please call me.
I’ve spenta lot of time in hospitals or hospital-adjacent facilities in my short twenty-eight years.
After my appendectomy as a kid, the bed at Boulder Children’s felt so big. A remote made it go up and down and the television played my favorite cartoons. The walls were the prettiest shade of pink and I got as many jello cups as I wanted. It was my best kid life.
When I returned a decade later, the bed was too small to hold Maddy’s big personality and even bigger heart. The nurses constantly adjusted the height to run their tests and I came to hate the mechanical sound. Watching television while I waited for my best friend to wake up wasn’t an outlet, it was a prison—no where to go and nothing to do for hours on end. I don’t recall if the walls were still pink then, my eyes barely took in anything beyond all the tubes and IVs. And every time I tried to eat, my stomach refused it shortly after.
Countless emergency room visits with Mom—infections broughton by her weak immune system. Doctors hauling those curtains open and shut behind them, each time with one more breadcrumb update as if it was their mission to torture us slowly. One test result, one blood draw, one vitals check at a time.
Chemo infusions. Those leather lounge chairs Mom always said were too cold. I started laying out a blanket before she sat down, then another on top of her to keep the shivers at bay. Infusion pumps that appeared complicated, but I witnessed nurses setting them up so many times I’d joke about being able to do it in my sleep.
The cancer bell. Three times I watched her ring it. The first time, I naively thought it was over. She’d faced the intense treatment head on and never faltered. Everything the doctors told her to do, she’d done. For the rest of her life she would wear the title ofcancer survivorlike a badge of honor. But it came back. It always came back. And each time I heard that bell I convinced myself she’d beaten it for good. This had to be it. It just…had to be.
And the doctor’s office where she received her final diagnosis. Half-a-dozen medical certificates framed on the wall and the oncologist we’d come to know on a first-name basis with his hands clasped over his cherry wood desk giving us the worst possible news for the fourth time. And Mom, poised in the seat beside me, lifting a hand to stop him when he started on about the treatment plan. Decision made.
That third bell was nothing but an omen.
A bone-chilling ICU room with ghostly white walls, a too-small mechanical bed that makes my skin crawl, and a single plastic chair. The chair I have to sit in when the doctors utter the words that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life.
Lung infection.
Pneumonia.
Sepsis.
End of life care.
For eight days, doctors pump her full of antibiotics and fluids to stave the infection while I send up prayer after prayer for her not to die here. If she could only stabilize enough to let me take her home, at least she could spend her final days in something other than this awful bed wearing this pitiful hospital gown I know, even in her unconscious state,she wouldn’t want to be caught dead in.Mom would be proud of that one. We could spend the time she has left watching our favorite movies. I could read to her, paint her nails.