“Nah,” Jake stood up for his great-uncle. “Uncle George is never grumpy.” His brow creased into a frown. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him raise his voice or seen him get angry.”
“Even when Buddy had an accident on his expensive rug,” Sophia remembered.
“Well, now he’s going to be in a lot of pain, and it’s going to be a long road to recovery for Uncle George,” Linda warned them. “It’s hard for a very active person to suddenly have to curb their energy.”
She crossed the causeway, the bay glittering out to her right in long bright streaks of gold, and let out a slow breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. The familiar shape of the islandunfolded around her. The low palms along the verge. The pale wooden signs pointing toward the various beaches. The sleepy pace of the cars ahead of her, slower already than mainland traffic, slowed by some unspoken local agreement that nothing on Sanibel was worth rushing for.
And underneath the gentle settling of being back, underneath the small, tender flicker of homecoming, something else had begun to rise in Linda’s chest. Something she hadn’t quite let herself look at yet.
She wasn’t just going to Sanibel. She wasn’t just going to Uncle George.
She was going to that hospital. Linda’s fingers tightened on the wheel. The same hospital. The same low cream-colored building set back from the road behind a row of tall palms. The same automatic glass doors. The same long corridor she’d walked her mother through five years ago for the last time, holding her mother’s hand and trying not to let her see how scared she was.
Linda hadn’t been back. Not once. Not until today. The thought landed in her stomach like a stone.
She tried to push it away. She had Uncle George to think about. She had two children in the back seat who needed her steady. She had Tom waiting for her in that waiting room, and Tom had been holding things together by himself for hours, and the very last thing he needed was for Linda to fall apart in the lobby. She tightened her hands on the wheel and reminded herself, very firmly, that she was a grown woman of fifty-nine and that she could walk through a set of doors.
The hospital came into view at the end of the road.
Exactly as it had been five years ago. The same low building. The same row of palms along the front walk. The same wide circular drive with the wheelchair ramps and the automatic doors and the small bench off to the side where she’d sat for an hour after her mother was gone, unable to make her legs walk her back to her car.
Linda turned into the parking lot and found a space near the entrance. She put the car in park, switched off the engine, and sat for a moment with her hands resting on the wheel.
“Gran?” Sophia asked from the back. “Are you okay?”
Linda drew in a slow, careful breath and let it out again. “I’m all right, sweetheart. I just needed a moment.”
She turned around in her seat and looked at her grandchildren. Sophia had unbuckled her seatbelt and was leaning forward between the seats. Jake had sat up properly and was watching Linda with serious, worried eyes that were too old for nine years old.
“Are you ready?” Linda glanced at them and managed a small smile for them as they both nodded. “All right. Let’s go in.”
She got out of the car on legs that felt steadier than she’d expected, opened the back door, and Jake climbed out with Sophia behind him. Linda took Jake’s hand on one side and Sophia’s on the other and walked them across the parking lot toward the entrance.
The automatic doors hissed open as she stepped onto the mat. The smell hit her first. The typical smell of a sterile hospital. Disinfectant and floor wax, and the faint, slightly stale undercurrent of recycled air that Linda was going to smell indreams for the rest of her life. It was not a vague, generic hit. It was the exact smell of the worst day she had ever lived through.
Linda’s knees wobbled slightly, but she tightened her grip on Jake’s hand. She drew in a careful breath through her mouth and reminded herself that this was not that day. This was Uncle George. Uncle George was going to be all right. Her mother was not in this building and hadn’t been for five years. Linda pulled herself together.
“Gran?” Jake’s small voice piped up beside her. “Your hand is squeezing tight.”
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Linda whispered, and loosened her grip a little. “Just give me a second.”
“Are you okay?” Sophia asked softly on her other side.
“I will be,” Linda told her, and meant it. “Just give me a second.”
She stood in the entryway for a long moment, her grandchildren on either side, breathing. In. Out. In. Out. The lobby stretched ahead of her. The reception desk. The small cluster of plastic chairs near the window where she had sat with Tom in the early hours of that morning five years ago, before they’d let them in to say goodbye. The corridor that led off to the right toward where her mother had been.
Linda did not let herself look at the chairs. She walked, instead, toward the reception desk.
“Hello,” Linda said to the kind-faced woman behind the counter. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “I’m here to see George Heart. I believe he’s in surgery.”
“Yes, I have a record of Mr. Heart,” the woman said warmly. “Are you family?”
“His niece,” Linda responded.
“You’ll want the surgical waiting room. Down that corridor and to your left at the end, you can’t miss it. Mr. Reilly is already there waiting.” The nurse pointed in the direction.
“Thank you,” Linda said.
