I shrug for about the fiftieth time. I don’t know. I don’t even know what theater. Normally, I would ask. In the past, I would have asked. I’m getting sloppy. I’m never letting them go anywhere again without telling me all the details first. I’m never letting Granddad go anywhere again, ever. If he even comes home in the first place.
One . . . one . . . I try to count, but I can’t even remember what I’m counting about.
“Did you leave them a message?” Meg holds up a phone—my phone, which she has somehow pried out of my fingers without me noticing, in some sleight-of-hand magic trick.
I shake my head, unable to find words again.
“I got this,” Meg says. She unlocks my phone with a swipe, types in my passcode, and taps the speed dial button that, if it was a real button and not a touch screen, would be completely worn through after the past hour. Puts the phone to her ear. Waits. “Hi, Mrs. Daley? This is Meg. Kat got a message from the Royal Alex that Granddad is in the ICU there from I think a stroke, so when you’re done with your movie, you should head straight there. We’ll catch the bus and meet you at the hospital. We’ll call again if we get any more news. Ciao.”
She hangs up, shoves the phone into my pocket, pulls my coat out from where she’s been holding it between her knees, and continues to dress me just like she does Kenzie—one arm, wind around, other arm, zip up right to the neck, pat on head.
“Okay,” she says, “you’re ready. Let’s go.”
I shake my head again, perfecting the part of the speechless Neolithic cavewoman I’ve apparently devolved into. “I can’t,” I say, and Meg furrows her brow, clearly confused. Perhaps if I grunted and pointed, she’d understand me better.
“Can’t what?” she asks.
Just can’t. I reach up and tug at my coat’s cold, purple zipper pull, flipping it up and down and up and down.
One . . . one . . . one . . .
I can picture him now—face battered and bloodied from the green bean cans he bounced off of as he pitched in slow motion to the grocery aisle floor. Left side of his mouth sagging with the weight of the words his brain no longer knows how to speak. Eyes wide and expectant as he waits for me to murmur some meaningful, poetic thing that will comfort his soul as it slips out of this world into the darkness only absence brings.
“Kat?” The word’s full of impatience—Meg’s always impatient—but it’s full of worry, too.
Meg’s concern is enough to start the words flowing.
“I just can’t,” I say. “What if he doesn’t look like himself? What if I say something idiotic and insensitive? What if he dies? What if he dies in a fit of coughing and blood and beeping monitors and there’s nothing I can do? What if he dies while I’m right there?”
Meg reaches out and takes my hand like we’re five years old, fingers interlocking with my own. She puts her other hand firmly on my wrist and looks me in the eyes. “Kat. What if he dies and you’re not there?”
Then she marches out the door, pulling me behind her.
When I was little, maybe six or seven, Granddad took me to a carnival. I can’t remember if he was visiting us or if we were visiting him, but I only got about ten feet inside the gates before I started crying. I don’t know why. The flashing lights, the hiccuping music, the shrieking children—could have been anything. Granddad scooped me up, kissed me on the top of my head, and murmured, “It’s okay, Katharina. It’s okay.” Then we went out for ice cream instead.
I want to go for ice cream now. I want Granddad to walk into this waiting room, dapper and tall, and tell me, “Katharina, don’t worry about these fluorescent lights, or bustling noises, or contagious patients. Let’s blow this joint and nab us some two-scoop chocolate cones.”
Though would Granddad choose chocolate? What’s his favorite ice cream flavor? What does he usually have? I can’t remember. I’m losing him already.
Meg turns from speaking to the front-desk nurse and looks at me expectantly, as if waiting for the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
“What?” I ask.
“Your granddad. What’s his name?”
I tell her, and she continues chatting with the nurse, and then we are following a nurse—the same one or a different one, I couldn’t say—down flickering beige hallways, and I’m trying not to look in any of the rooms at the puking and the monitors and the bruises and the dark, sunken eyes.
Then we’re standing in front of heavy black double doors. And the nurse turns to us and says, “I’m sorry, family only. You’ll have to wait out here.”
I start to sit obediently in one of the gray plastic chairs lined against the wall, but then Meg grabs my hand and pulls me back up.
“Not you, silly. You’re family. She means me.” She taps me lightly on the back, nudging me in the direction of the big, black entryway to hell.
I reach out and grab Meg’s hand, and she looks fiercely up at the nurse. “Look,” she says, “she’s—can’t I—”
“No,” the nurse says. “Family only. No exceptions.” She’s tall and broad, like you’d expect a prison warden to be. She frowns at us, compassionless. I bet it’s not even a real rule. I bet she just doesn’t want a pair of teen hooligans set loose in her ICU.
Meg slides off my coat, undoing her previous work, and lays it over a chair. “I’ll be right out here,” she says, as if I’m Kenzie, except that Kenzie would just go roaring right in and start dancing with every patient, even the ones in comas.
I can’t get my feet to move an inch, let alone dance.
Meg unzips her coat, revealing her favorite black cardigan with the oversized purple plastic buttons. Out of nowhere, she grabs one of the buttons and pulls. There’s a snap, and then she’s pressing the button into my palm and folding my fingers around it.
“There,” she says. “Now it’s like I’m with you.”
Heat from our sweaty rush from sidewalk to bus to lobby in downy winter garb seeps from the button into my palm, and my eyes prickle with tears. Before I can dissolve into full meltdown sobs, Meg grasps my shoulders and turns me around, pushing me through the hell-door that’s now being held open by the prison-ward nurse.
Then I’m trotting after her through a sea of curtains with Meg’s button pressed so deep into my palm I can feel my heart pulsing through it.
I would count, I should breathe and count, except I can’t remember the numbers.
Curtain. Curtain. Nurse. Cart. Monitor. Curtain.
And then, Granddad is there.
There’s no blood, at least not on his face, but his eyes are shrunken into his head, and there are tubes and needles taped into his hands, and he takes up so little of what is already a tiny bed. I look away, find the nurse’s face instead.
“He’s lucky he collapsed in a public place,” she says. “Ambulance got there and got him on TPA real quick, which breaks down the clot. And it’s the right side of his brain, not the left, so his speech and language should be fine.” I nod at her, barely hearing her words. I can still see Granddad’s skeletal frame out of the corner of my eye. “Well, go on,” she says, waving at the chair beside his bed. “Go talk to him.”