I rap my knuckles on the side of the shower. “I’m done,” I say thickly, wondering how long before I’m no longer ambushed by these memories. I hear the click of the door, and Vee comes in with a towel. She yanks open the plastic curtain and turns the faucet off. Not even being stark naked in front of her can rob me of the joy of finally being clean.
Vee watches me drag on my sweatpants and sweatshirt and then hands me a brush for my hair. I try, but the snarls and mats after all this time are impossible for me to deal with. She sits behind me on the bed and starts to pick through the knots, combing the hair back from my face.
“I think I’m in heaven,” I tell her.
She laughs. “No, we’re happy you didn’t wind up there.” Her fingers fly over my scalp in an intricate pattern. “I do French braids for my girls all the time.”
“I never learned how.”
“No?” Vee asks. “Your mama never taught you?”
I feel her weave and pull and twist. “She wasn’t around much,” I reply.
And now that she isn’t far-flung and hightailing it all over the world, I haven’t been around her much, either.
That could change.
I have always believed we are the architects of our own fates—it’s why I so carefully planned my career steps and why Finn and I dreamed in tandem about our future. It is also why I could blame my mother for choosing her career over me—because it was just that: a decision she made. I have never really subscribed to the mantra that things happen for a reason. Until, maybe, now.
If I was so sick that it nearly cost me my life … ?if I was one of only a handful to survive ventilation … ?if I returned to this world, instead of the one embedded in my mind … ?I would like to believe that there is an explanation. That it isn’t random or the luck of the draw. That this was a lesson for me, or a wake-up call.
Maybe it is about my mother.
Vee ties the braid off with a rubber band. “There,” she says. “You’re like a whole new person.”
Not yet.
But I could be.
She pulls over a wheelchair and sets the brakes and then positions Alice nearby so that I can do the stand-pivot-transfer move to seat myself. “I believe I promised you a surprise,” Vee says.
It’s probably a trip down to the multipurpose gym to do more physical therapy. “Do we have to?” I ask.
“Trust me,” Vee says, and she opens the door to my room.
She gives me a surgical mask and pushes me down the hallway, past patients who are carefully moving behind their own walkers or with four-footed canes. A couple of the nurses smile at me and comment on my appearance, which makes me wonder how terrible I looked before. Instead of heading into the elevator, though, Vee turns right at the end of the hallway and hits an automatic door button with her elbow, so that a glass panel slides open. She rolls me into a tiny courtyard that is walled in by four sides of the hospital building. It’s unseasonably warm, and the sun falls in an amber slant. “Fresh air?” I gasp, tilting my face, and that’s when I see him.
Finn stands at the far end of the narrow courtyard, holding a little bouquet of tulips.
“I think you can take it from here, Doc,” Vee says, and she winks at me and slips back inside.
Finn stares at me, and then unloops his mask so that it dangles from one wrist. The bridge of his nose is still dark and bruised, but my God. To see that smile.
I cry out, frustrated by my inability to get to him, and as if I’ve willed it, Finn is at my side a second later. He kneels, his arms coming around me. “Look who tested negative,” he says.
I unhook my mask and set it in my lap. “You read my labs?”
He grins. “Professional perks.”
Finn rests his forehead against mine. He closes his eyes. I know that this moment is too big for him, too. To hold him, to be held. It is as if I’ve been trapped underneath ice, and suddenly, I’m back in a place where there is sound and warmth and sun.
“Hi,” Finn whispers against my lips.
“Hi.”
He closes the distance between us, feathering his mouth against mine, before pulling away with a stripe of pink on his cheeks, as if he knows I’m still recovering but couldn’t help himself.
I wait for it, that last click of the lock, that satisfying final puzzle piece, that familiar sigh of reaching home.
This is where you belong, I tell myself.
“You were so lucky,” Finn says thickly, as if he’s struggling to push away the shadows of what could have happened.