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Brooke exchanged a stiff hug with Teddy at passenger pickup when he got out of the car to put her suitcase in the back of his Ford Explorer. It was a nice car, nearly new. He worked in information security for a company she couldn’t remember the name of, but it seemed like he was doing well for himself.
“Is there any news about Dad?” Brooke asked as Teddy pulled away from the airport. Her flight had left LAX at one in the morning, so she hadn’t talked to their mom since last night.
Teddy shook his head, his knuckles whitening as his fingers gripped the steering wheel. “The doctor’s supposed to come by this morning and give us an update.”
They made a few minutes of strained small talk on the way to the hospital. She’d never had to make small talk with her brother before, andgood griefwere they both terrible at it. After they’d run through all the standard conversational bases, they fell into an uncomfortable silence for the duration of the drive.
Brooke had never been so happy to arrive at a hospital, although she had no idea what awaited her inside. Her father was in the intensive care unit after suffering a stroke, and they didn’t know how bad it was yet. Whether he’d recover, or if there’d be lasting damage if he did.
She mostly felt numb when she thought about it. She’d been operating on autopilot since she got the news last night. But the decision to come home had been a no-brainer. Brooke wasn’t here for her father, who probably wouldn’t want her here if he was able to speak for himself.
She was here for her mother, who was scared of losing her husband and shouldn’t have to go through this alone.
Debbie Hilliard lookedsmall and pale and fragile. But her relief when she saw her daughter walk into the ICU waiting room was so palpable that Brooke knew it had been the right decision to come here.
It was the first time she’d hugged her mother in almost six years, and she had to blink back tears as they clung to one another.
Brooke’s brother Justin was there too, looking quite a lot more grown-up at thirty than the twenty-four-year-old stoner she remembered. He gave her a slightly more exuberant hug than the restrained one Teddy had given her, and they all sat down to wait together.
The mood in the ICU waiting room was oppressively solemn, despite the bright paintings of wildflowers that attempted to lend some cheer. Brooke was keenly aware that every family sitting around them was there because of some personal catastrophe.
Usually Debbie could be relied upon to fill the silences at family gatherings with banal chatter, but today their mother was uncharacteristically silent. That scared Brooke more than anything else.
The neurosurgeon came to talk to them an hour later. He explained that Brooke’s father had suffered an acute ischemic stroke. They’d been treating him with intravenous thrombolytics, and he’d regained a lot of the feeling he’d lost in his arm and leg, but was still unable to talk. They’d done a CTA scan to pinpoint the remaining blockage and found a clot in the cerebral artery that the neurosurgeon believed could be accessed with endovascular surgical treatment.
After going over all the risks, he requested the family’s permission to perform the procedure, which they gave.
They spent the next several hours drinking shitty hospital coffee and trying to keep Debbie’s spirits up. Brooke assigned herself the task of bringing everyone food from the hospital cafeteria. Justin was more extroverted than Teddy, and attempted to keep the conversation going and focused on neutral topics. Teddy mostly sat and stared at the floor.
By noon, Ed Hilliard was reported to be awake and in recovery. At two o’clock, they moved him into his own room on a different floor.
The procedure had worked to clear the remaining clot, and Ed was doing as well as could be hoped. He was out of danger, and expected to regain some if not all of the abilities that had been affected, although recovery would be slow and entail months of rehabilitation. It was fortunate he’d finished his last course of chemo, which had left him physically weak. Hopefully he’d get stronger much faster as he recovered from the chemo treatments.
Only two visitors were allowed in the room with him at a time. By unspoken agreement, Brooke and her brother Teddy stayed in the waiting room by the elevators while Justin and her mother went to sit with Ed.
Justin came out a while later and told them Dad’s vitals were good, but he still couldn’t talk. He was sleeping now, and Mom wanted Justin to go to the house and pick up some things for her and Dad. One of the chairs in Dad’s hospital room reclined into a bed, and Mom would be sleeping here tonight—and probably for the next several nights.
Brooke volunteered to go get the stuff instead. She didn’t plan on seeing her dad, on the assumption her presence would cause him more stress than comfort. So she might as well make herself useful some other way.
Justin was happy to hand off the errand, and went over the list of requested items with Brooke, passing on their mother’s car keys and detailed instructions on where everything could be found in the house.
That was how, a half hour later, Brooke found herself alone in her childhood home.
The house hadn’t changeda bit in the last six years. Brooke would have thought some small details, at least, would be different, but it was like a TV show set that had been freeze-framed, or a museum exhibit trapped behind glass. Same textured rug in the entryway, same framed elementary school photos of her and her brothers on the living room wall, same floral wallpaper in the kitchen.
Same smell, even.
It all hit her like a freight train full of memories, and she had to stop and grab onto the doorframe for support while she got her bearings again.
So many years spent in this house. So many emotions connected to the experiences she’d had here. All of it churning up out of the place where she’d buried it and hoped to keep it buried down deep.
It didn’t help that she was dead tired. She’d barely slept on the plane, and a long, tense day spent sitting around a hospital with her family had her yearning to crawl into her old bed and take a nap.
Not a possibility, unfortunately. Mom wouldn’t be comfortable until she had all the stuff she wanted. After she’d brought everything back to the hospital and made sure Debbie ate some dinner, then maybe Brooke could come back here and get some sleep.
She pulled out her mother’s list and got a reusable grocery bag out of the cupboard next to the fridge to carry everything she’d need to take back to the hospital. There was medication on the kitchen counter, for both her father and her mother: a collection of tiny bottles to stave off the assorted ailments of aging. Some of them were new. The meds for her father’s high blood pressure and acid reflux were familiar, but now there were also anti-inflammatories and estrogen for her mother, and—
Lexapro. Which was used to treat anxiety and depression. Prescribed to her father.
