She paused for a moment, uncertain of how to proceed. Did Jonathan know she was coming? Would he be excited to see her? Or upset?
Jonathan’s mouth was obscured by a breathing tube that was fastened to his head by a plastic contraption that pinched his cheeks and caused the hollows beneath his eyes to look cavernous. One cheekbone was tinged yellow and green from the remnants of a bruise that must have formed when he fell through the ice. When he was rescued? It didn’t matter. It looked painful. Worst of all was the way that Jonathan stared at the smudged gray sky, unblinking, unseeing, as if he wished his eyes weren’t open at all. Juniper watched her brother and knew that this was not how he wanted to wake up. It gutted her.
“No need to hover!” A nurse came bustling past Juniper and went to stand beside the hospital bed. “You have visitors,” he told Jonathan.
She felt almost shy as her brother’s eyes swept from the window to Law and then, finally, to her. She lifted her hand in a little wave and took a single step closer to the bed, her heart beating madly in her chest. Jonathan stared at her, his blue eyes achingly familiar but clouded with medication and emotions she couldn’t begin to guess. Pain? Regret? It was impossible to read his expression.
The nurse had lifted Jonathan’s left arm from beneath the mass of blankets and was studying an IV in the crook of his elbow. “I’m going to have to move this soon,” he said, giving her brother an almost paternal pat. Then he turned to smile at Juniper. “Your dad is a seasoned pro at this, but you should know that Jonathan tires really easily and might drift in and out. It’s nothing to be concerned about. Also, he obviously can’t talk around the breathing tube, but there’s a marker board on his table if he wants to use it.”
Juniper glanced at the small table on wheels beside Jonathan’s bed. The bed was in the middle of the room, presumably so that doctors and machines were afforded full access for his care, and the table had drifted off to the side, far out of Jonathan’s reach. It struck Juniper that without the marker board, he was rendered utterly speechless. She felt a wave of panic at the thought. But Jonathan didn’t seem to care. He didn’t reach for the board or acknowledge the nurse’s departure or make any move to communicate with Juniper at all.
It’s Law’s fault, Juniper thought. If he wasn’t here…
But Juniper didn’t know if Jonathan would behave any differently if she was alone. She studied her brother on the bed and understood that Law was right: something had happened. Jonathan was changed. Maybe it was his fall through the ice, but Juniper felt like it had to be much more than just that, because there was one word that came to mind when she looked at her brother: hollow.
Juniper decided to ignore the fact that her stepfather was in the room. She went to stand over Jonathan’s bed, where she could hear the whoosh of the air being pumped into his lungs and look straight into his sunken eyes. He watched her move closer and didn’t look away when she leaned over the side of his bed to lay a sisterly kiss on his warm forehead. His skin felt feverish beneath her lips, just slightly, and dry as paper. Juniper feared if she blew, he would disintegrate in a cloud of dust before her eyes.
“Hey there,” she whispered. “I’m so glad you’re awake.”
For the first time since she had arrived in his room, Juniper wasn’t confused about how Jonathan was feeling. His eyes filled instantly, and tears slid down his temples. Her mother had warned her about this, about how ECMO patients were often intensely emotional when they woke: crying or feeling angry or hopeless. But it was hard to watch Jonathan cry all the same. It felt wrong to see her baby brother—who acted like her big brother—so reduced. He was strong and protective and always in control. Not like this. Juniper had seen him cry just a handful of times in her entire life, and it killed her to see his tears now.
“I have about a million questions,” she said. “But I’ll save them all until I can buy you a beer and some hot wings.”
That earned Juniper a small smile that was nothing more than a crinkling around his eyes.
“My treat.”
Another brightening of his eyes. It was painful to watch him try to smile around the breathing tube, but the starburst of laugh lines at his temples made her heart lift. Juniper wanted to keep that smile coming, to remind Jonathan that life was beautiful and he wanted to be a part of it. Even though she longed to ask him why he was on the lake that day, why he had her necklace in his pocket, and what exactly happened that summer, this urge took precedence, and Juniper tucked her hair behind her ears and leaned forward to keep finding ways to make him smile.