But she was his mom, and that was his life. It was all he had known.
I looked at Foster. I had also never realized before that I loved him, but I did. And his pain was my pain, and it hurt, but it also felt good in a strange way, knowing that we could share in it together.
I hugged him, and he cried, and it was a long time before I realized that Ezra was standing in the doorway.
“Hi,” Foster said thickly as he pulled back from me.
“You want me to come back later?” Ezra said.
“No,” Foster wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “It’s okay. You can come in.”
Ezra stepped into the room.
“Did we win?” Foster asked.
“I don’t know,” Ezra said. “I left right after you did. They wouldn’t let me back here, though. I had to ninja my way in.” He paused. “Are you okay?”
“No,” Foster said. His mouth twisted and his eyes flooded again.
Ezra considered this for a moment and then said, “You know what you should do?”
“What?”
“Close your eyes, real tight, and then count to three hundred. That’s all you have to do. You just count to three hundred, and when you open your eyes, five minutes will have passed. And even if it hurts or things are shitty or you don’t know what to do, you just made it through five whole minutes. And when it feels like you can’t go on, you just close your eyes and do it again. That’s all you need. Just five minutes at a time.”
Foster’s eyes were red. He nodded weakly. “Okay.”
“Let’s do it.” Ezra sat down on the edge of Foster’s bed and glanced over at me. “We’ll all close our eyes.”
I closed my eyes, and we counted, “One … two … three…”
By fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six, Foster’s breathing became even. By one hundred seventy-eight, one hundred seventy-nine, I could hear him settling back against the pillows. At two hundred fifteen, two hundred sixteen, two hundred seventeen, I reached out across the blankets and found Ezra’s hand. I squeezed it hard.
We reached three hundred.
I opened my eyes.
Foster let out a long breath, looked at me, and nodded ever so slightly.
I nodded back. He squeezed his eyes shut.
And started to count again.
36
Ezra stayed with us until my parents arrived. My mom was beside herself. “I can’t believe we weren’t here,” she just kept saying. She fluffed Foster’s pillows about twelve times in the first ten minutes she was there.
“I’m fine,” Foster just kept replying, which was good, because my mom seemed to need a lot of reassurances. I swear she was just shy of making him say the alphabet backward and forward, to make sure they hadn’t knocked a few letters out of his brain.
As my parents tended to Foster, Ezra shifted closer to the door.
“Thanks,” I said when I noticed this. “For … you know.”
“No problem.”
Ezra had his phone out, and it struck me for the first time how late it must be. “I bet you want to get home.”
He shook his head. “No, I just … don’t want to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding.”
He smiled a little. And then he held up his phone: “Jordan’s been texting me like nonstop from the waiting room.”
“He’s here?”
“Yeah. I told him Foster was okay, but I guess I should probably go out there.”
My parents were occupied with Foster, and Foster, in turn, was occupied with them. So I went with Ezra to the waiting room.
Lindsay, Cas, and Jordan were all sitting out there. They straightened up when we walked in.
“Champ.” Jordan jumped to his feet and closed me in a hug. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s going to be fine.”
“Good. Great.” He pulled away. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay.”
“You look tired,” Lindsay said, and then her eyes grew wide. “Not that you don’t look great, I mean, you always look great, it’s just that—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I am tired.”