Dad rubs both hands over his face. “Since a little before eight. They think it’s fluid — around the heart, from the first surgery, pressing on it until it can’t fill. They’re trying to drain it without opening her back up.”
Almost six hours.
Almost the whole drive.
The whole time I was changing, leaving, driving through the dark with my hands locked on the wheel, my mother had been on a table while a stranger worked to pull the fluid off her heart.
Before I can ask the next question, the doors at the end of the hall open.
A doctor in blue scrubs steps out with his cap still on and his mask loose under his chin.
“McAllister family?”
Dad straightens.
I move beside him.
“I’m Dr. Hernandez. We’re through the worst of it.”
I feel Peyton shift closer at my back.
Not touching.
Close enough that my body knows where she is.
“It was the pericardium,” the doctor says. “Fluid built up around her heart after the first surgery — enough to keep it from filling. We drained it. We did not have to open her chest again. The valve held. She’s stable.”
Dad exhales once, hard.
My knees almost do something embarrassing.
“She’s going to be okay?” I ask.
“Tonight was critical,” Dr. Hernandez says. “She made it through. The next twenty-four hours matter, but right now everything looks good.”
The words do not land all at once.
I heard a version of them in this same building months ago and let the relief stay at arm’s length then, the way I kept everything.
I do not have the distance for it tonight.
Behind me, one of the twins wakes.
“Dad?”
Dad is already turning. “Mom’s okay.”
The little sound Emma makes hits me harder than anything the doctor said.
Lily wakes next, disoriented and furious about it. Peyton sits between them on the couch while Bill explains in the softest voice I have ever heard from my father. Emma cries into Peyton’s sweatshirt. Lily pretends not to cry by asking detailed questions about valves no ten-year-old should have to know.
I stand there uselessly, hands open at my sides, until Peyton looks up at me.
Not accusing.
Not pitying.
Come here.