I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “It’s been four weeks!! Four weeks since I lost everything I cared about. Can I get five minutes to adjust?”
“Yes! Of course! And in the meantime, let’s go teach a bunch of hospitalized children how to knit a slug.”
“Dammit, stop trying to fix me!”
Ian showed up in the doorway then, but that didn’t slow us down. Kitty flung her arm in his direction. “Ian gets to try to fix you!”
I glanced over at him. “It’s his job to fix me.”
“So?”
“So! A job is different.”
“That’s better?”
He was right there, listening, but I was hell-bent on making my point. “Yes! Because in less than three weeks, I will never see him again. He won’t think about me, he won’t worry about me, and he sure as hell won’t spend the rest of my life telling me to cheer up. He will feel a wash of relief as I roll out the door to go live my tragic life, and then he’ll be done.”
I was about to go on, but Ian stepped in closer. “That’s not true.”
Kitty and I both turned toward him. “What’s not true?” I asked.
“I will think about you after you’re gone. I expect I’ll think about you often.”
Was there more? Nope. A man of few words.
But just enough, as we stared at him, to stop the fight in its tracks.
“Want some Moroccan tagine?” Kitty asked after a bit, peeling the lid off a container and holding it out.
Ian said no.
“Maggie’s knitting a slug,” Kit said then. “Want to see?”
She got him to smile. I loved when he did that. “I’d love to see,” he said.
“Hey,” I said to Kit, “don’t—”
“Shh.” Kit held her finger out. “For a scarf, it’s terrible. For a knitted slug, it’s divine. Just go with ‘slug’ and be proud.” She thrust it at Ian.
He held it for a second, looked back and forth between us, and then said, “That’s a fine knitted slug.”
Kit turned to me. “Does everything sound sexy in Scottish?” Then, back to Ian, “If you were a kid at the craft fair, wouldn’t you love to see that?”
He looked up. “The craft fair?”
“Yeah, they’re holding one for the kids, but Cranky McCrankypants doesn’t want to volunteer.”
I gave Kitty a look.
But I did have to give her credit. He seemed to like it when she teased me. His eyes crinkled up at the edges in an expression that was almost warm. And then, like just a normal, friendly, healthcare professional, he shook his head all wryly and said, “Now you make me think of my mother.”
Kit and I both frowned. “Your mother?”
“She always said, ‘When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for someone else.’”
*
WE WENT TO the fair. What choice did we have? Neither of us had the guts to disobey Ian’s mother.
The fair turned out to be the most fun I’d had since my incarceration.
There, surrounded by kids of every variety, I felt more relaxed than I had been in all these weeks. In the rehab gym, the focus was on how we could fix what was broken about me. In my room, I was, well, in a hospital room. But in this rec room in the children’s wing, it was just bright colors and helium balloons and yarn animals and sing-alongs and face painting. Noisy? Yes. Chaotic? Totally. As I sat at my finger-knitting station with Kit, teaching kids what to do when they came up, and chatting with Kit in between, I felt noticeably peaceful.
“These are your people,” Kitty said.
“They do seem to get me,” I said.
“You’re craftier than I realized,” Kit said next, eyeing the long yarn snake I’d been making.
“I’m craftier than I realized,” I said with a shrug.
It was here, among all this chaos and peace, that Kit decided to give me two pieces of information.
One: She’d booked her flight back to New York. She was leaving on the morning of the same day I was getting discharged.
“You’re not going to come home with me?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “No.”
“Not even for a couple of hours? To help me get settled?”
“No. This was the cheapest flight, and I took it.”
“I can’t believe you’re leaving me.”
“It’s not for two weeks.”
‘Two and a half,” I corrected.
“That’s, like, ten years in hospital time.”
“Now I have to dread it.”
“I did everything I came here for,” she said then. “I cleared things up with you. I confronted Mom. I went on an erotic journey with Fat Benjamin.”
“Did you come here for that last one?”
She squinted. “I guess Fat Benjamin was a surprise.”
“And did you clear things up with Mom?” I asked.
“As much as I ever do,” she said.
“’Cause it seems like we haven’t talked about”—I didn’t know how to describe it—“your information since the day it all came out.”
Kit shrugged. “Yeah, well. We’ve all been kind of busy.”
True, we’d been busy. But this was also a classic Jacobsen-family technique for responding to big, earth-shattering news: pretending it didn’t exist.
There was probably a more delicate way to ask the question, but I said, “Don’t you want to know who your real dad is?”
Kit got quiet at the sound of the words out loud.
“Our dad is my real dad.”
Had I hurt her feelings? “Of course he is,” I corrected. “I just I meant your biological dad.”
She thought about it. “I’ve thought about it. I am curious. But as long as Dad doesn’t know, it feels disloyal to take it any further.”
“And Dad will never know.”
We agreed.
Two: Kit’s other piece of news was she had decided to throw a party on her last night here. In the rehab gym.
“They’ll never let you do that,” I said.
“It’s closed at night. No one has to know.”
It was a “Valentine’s Day party,” even though it would happen on the first of April.
“Details,” Kit said, making a pshaw motion. “Love can happen anytime.”
“Do you know that’s April Fools’?”
“Only you would notice that.”
“You realize what happened to me the last time it was Valentine’s Day,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
Of course she knew. We all knew. But I said it anyway. “I was in a plane crash.”
“Duh. I’m aware of that. I’m giving you a do-over.”
I shook my head. “No.”
But she had a fire in her eyes. “I’ll do everything. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll talk to the nurses, hang the decorations. I’ve got a vision! Little heart-shaped chocolates everywhere, punch that we’ll call ‘love potion,’ and Fat Benjamin’s got a chocolate fountain that he stole from a catering gig. Streamers, and karaoke with nothing but love songs, and I’ve got that old disco ball in my high school bedroom. I love stuff like this! Let me do something for you. Yes?”
Maybe it was because the kids’ craft fair was so unexpectedly charming, but I let out a long sigh, and as soon as my shoulders sank, she knew she’d won.
She held up her arms in victory.
“Who would you even invite?” I said. Then I pointed a warning at her: “Nobody from Facebook. No normal people, okay?”
“Just injured people. Just the folks on your floor. And the nurses. And anybody else good. Plus Fat Benjamin, of course.”
“Why do you have to do this?” I asked. “Let’s just eat tacos and watch TV.”
“I need to go out with a bang,” she said. “And guess what? So do you.”
That’s when it hit me. “You’ve already started planning this, haven’t you?”
She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “It was supposed to be a surprise, but you know I can’t keep a secret.”
“You sneaky weasel!”
“I dare you to be mad,” she said, “when you’re drinking straight out of the chocolate fountain.”
Twenty
THE NEXT NIGHT, Kitty showed up with some astonishing information: I’d been granted a furlough.
She held out a box of spanakopita with a triumphant flourish and said, “Great news!”
I was knitting a new slug. “What?”
“We have an amazing birthday present for you.”
I had to think about it. Sure enough, my birthday was coming up on Sunday. “I forgot about my birthday,” I said.
“You are not going to believe how great your present is.”
“My face is back to normal?”
Kit frowned and then squinted at me. “Not quite,” she said. “But close.”
“What, then?”
Kit stretched up taller. “We are about to blow your mind.”