I couldn’t make any more small talk. Talking was getting harder and harder every day, even with people I cared about. “Do you mind if I spend some time with Aunt Prue? You know, alone?”
“Of course not. I’m going to run out and check on Bade. If I don’t get her house-trained soon, she’ll have to sleep outside, and she’s really an indoor cat.” She tossed her book onto the chair and ripped out of the room.
I was alone with Aunt Prue.
She had gotten even smaller since the last time I was here. Now there were tubes where there hadn’t been, as if she was turning into a piece of machinery an inch at a time. She looked like an apple baking in the sun, wrinkling in ways that seemed impossible. For a while, I listened to the rhythmic pulsing of the plastic ankle cuffs on her legs, expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting.
As if they could make up for not walking, not being, not watching Jeopardy! with her sisters, not complaining about everything while loving it all.
I took her hand. The tube that ran into her mouth bubbled with her every breath. It sounded wet and croupy, like a humidifier with water inside it. Like she was choking on her own air.
Pneumonia. I overheard Amma talking to the doctor in the kitchen. Statistically speaking, when coma patients died, pneumonia was the Grim Reaper. I wondered if the sound of the tube in her throat meant Aunt Prue was getting closer to a statistically predictable end.
The thought of my aunt as another statistic made me want to throw the hazardous waste bin through the window. Instead, I grabbed Aunt Prue’s tiny hand, her fingers as small as bare twigs in winter. I closed my eyes and took her other hand, twisting my strong fingers together with her frail ones.
I rested my forehead against our hands and closed my eyes. I imagined lifting my head up and seeing her smiling, the tape and tubes gone. I wondered if wishing was the same thing as praying. If hoping for something badly enough could make it happen.
I was still thinking about it when I opened my eyes, expecting to see Aunt Prue’s room, her sad hospital bed and her depressing peach walls. But I found myself standing in the sunshine, in front of a house I’d been to a hundred times before….
The Sisters’ house looked exactly the way I remembered it, before the Vexes tore it apart. The walls, the roof, the section where Aunt Prue’s bedroom had been—they were all there, not a white pine board or a roof shingle out of place.
The walk leading up to the wraparound porch was lined with hydrangea, the way Aunt Prue liked. Lucille’s clothesline was still stretched across the lawn. There was a dog sitting on the porch—a Yorkshire terrier that looked suspiciously like Harlon James, except it wasn’t. This dog had more gold in his coat, but I recognized him and bent down to pet him. His tag read HARLON JAMES III.
“Aunt Prue?”
The three white rocking chairs were sitting on the porch, with little wicker tables between them. There was a tray on one of them, with two glasses of lemonade. I sat in the second rocking chair, leaving the first one empty. Aunt Prue liked to sit in the one closest to the walk, and I figured she would want that chair if she was coming.
It felt like she was coming.
She’d brought me here, hadn’t she?
I gave Harlon James III a scratch, which was strange, since he was sitting in our living room, stuffed. I looked at the table again.
“Aunt Prue!” She startled me, even though I was expecting her. She didn’t look any better than she had lying in her hospital bed, in real life. She coughed, and I heard the familiar noise of the rhythmic compressions. She was still wearing the plastic cuffs around her ankles, expanding and contracting, as if she was still in her bed at County Care.
She smiled. Her face looked transparent, her skin so pale and thin that you could see the bluish purple of the veins beneath it.
“I’ve missed you. And Aunt Grace, Aunt Mercy, and Thelma are going out of their minds without you. Amma, too.”
“I see Amma most days and your daddy on the weekends. They come by ta talk a lot more regular than some people.” She sniffed.
“I’m sorry. Things have been all wrong.”
She waved her hand at me. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. Not just yet. They got me on house arrest, like one a them criminals from the TV.” She coughed and shook her head.
“Where are we, Aunt Prue?”
“Don’t reckon I know. But I don’t have much time. They keep you pretty busy ’round here.” She unhooked her necklace and took something off it. I hadn’t seen her wearing the necklace in the hospital, but I recognized it. “From my daddy, from his daddy’s daddy, from way before you were even a thought in the mind a the Good Lord.”
It was a rose, hammered out of gold.
“This is for your girl. Ta help me keep an eye on her for ya. Tell her ta keep it with her.”
“Why are you worrying about Lena?”