The air was freezing cold, as if they found a way to suck the Freon and the power from all the air conditioners in Gatlin County and pipe it into County Care. I wished it was this cold anywhere but here, where the cold wrapped itself around the patients like corpses in a refrigerator.
This kind of cold never felt good, and it definitely never smelled good. At least sweating made you feel kind of alive, and that smell was about as human as you could get. Maybe I’d spent too much time considering the metaphysical implications of heat.
Like I said, crazy.
Bobby Murphy didn’t say a word when I walked up to the front desk, didn’t even look me in the eye. Just handed me the clipboard and a pass. I wasn’t sure if Lena’s Shut-the-Hell-Up Cast still affected him all the time, or only when I was around. Either way was fine with me. I didn’t feel like talking.
I didn’t look in the other John’s room or the Unseen Needlepoint Room, and I walked right past the Sad Birthday Party Room. I held my breath as I passed the Food That Wasn’t Food Room, before the smell of Ensure hit.
Then I smelled the lavender, and I knew my Aunt Prue was there.
Leah sat in a chair by her bed, reading a book in some kind of Caster or Demon language. She wasn’t in the standard County Care peach uniform. Her boots were propped up on a hazardous waste disposal container in front of her. She’d obviously given up trying to pass for a nurse.
“Hey there.”
She looked up, surprised to see me. “Hey, yourself. It’s about time. I’ve been wondering where you’ve been.”
“I don’t know. Busy. Stupid stuff.”
Freaking out and chasing down hybrid Incubuses and Ridley, my mother and Mrs. English, and some crazy thing about some crazy Wheel…
She smiled. “Well, I’m glad to see you.”
“Me, too.” That was all I could manage. I gestured at her boots. “They don’t give you a hard time for all that?”
“Nah. I’m not really the kind of girl people give a hard time.”
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.