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“Oh my God! Why didn’t you tell him thaton the phone?You made him drive to fu—?”
I smack a hand over my mouth just before I really burst out of control.
Lolly…died.
She died.
Landon’s beloved mother figurediedand they wouldn’t tell him over the phone so he could preparebefore he got to her room.He went up thereby himselfbecause he didn’t know what was going on.
I’m absolutely sickened.
“I’m on my way,” I snap out in a wobble over whatever Joyce is trying to say. “Tell him I’ll be right there.”
I hang up, try to breathe a modicum of calmness into myself so I can handle this…this…oh my God.
Ohmy God.
“Rae, baby,” I call in a rush, “we have to go. We have to go right now.”
She shuffles into the hall from around a corner, and I know by the look on her face that I did a poor job of hiding that something is wrong.
“What happened?” she asks softly.
Don’t cry, Liv. Don’t cry. You have to be strong right now. Landon is going to need you to be strong.
I know that’s true and I’ll make it happen when I get to him, but for right now, my eyes are stinging and all the rest of me is shaking. “I’ll tell you in the car.”
By the time we get to Quiet Springs, Rae is crying. I am, too, despite what I told myself. I can’t stop thinking about how Joyce said he was on the floor—they told him Lolly died and he couldn’t even keep standing. He went straight down.
We hear him crying before we can even see into Lolly’s room.
I kiss the top of Rae’s head and leave her with a kind-faced nurse. Then I hurry through the doorway, steadily filling with horrible sadness that this is real.
It worsens when I see Lolly’s body lying lifelessly in her bed, but seeing Landon is what really agonizes me, because he actually isn’tjustcrying. He’s in sob-wrought pieces on his knees on the floor near the bed, his head in his hands.
I can’t even choke out his name as I stumble over and grasp for his shoulders. But he knows it’s me, somehow—just as I’m about to kneel with him, he sucks in a breath and fumbles his hands up my arms like silent, desperate rasps of my name. He blinks his wet, anguished eyes to mine and drags himself to his feet, and then he’s hugging me with all the strength he has left in him, which isn’t much.
I hold him my hardest right back, try to hold what’s left of him together, even as I cry with him.
I have absolutely no idea what else to do.
Do I try to talk to him? Do I demand answers from the staff? Do I bitch them out for handling this the way they have?
A couple minutes pass with me not deciding on anything. I don’t do anything but continue hugging Landon—I don’t even manage a whisper to him, which I guess is just as well, because what the fuck could I possibly say to ease the pain he’s in right now? I know he appreciates that I’m here, butwhatI could I possibly say…?
Soon, we get interrupted. The woman’s voice is supposed to be nice, I think, but it sounds a little bit like a razorblade when she asks if she can talk to us about what happened. I don’t know if she mentioned the brain aneurysm to Landon already or not, but I know this is the first time he’s hearing about Quiet Springs’ post-death procedures because he starts crying into his hands again.
“Can we have a little more time before we get into all this?” I ask her with a sniffle. “He needs another minute to breathe.”
“I understand that this is hard to talk about, but we—”
It finally bursts out of me: “It’d be easier to talk about if you’d given him the news on the fucking phone! We come see her this morning and get told she’s fine, she’s doing fine, nothing weird is going on with her, and then she passes away and you don’t even fucking tell him that when you call so he can try to prepare, you justblindsidehim with this shit and then—and then you want to give him fifteen or twenty minutes to be able to talk about what comes next? No!Give him a little more time!”
She doesn’t appreciate being yelled at, I can tell, but I don’t care. I realize Lolly isn’t the first Quiet Springs resident to pass away and, yeah, there’s no great way to deal with it, butIdon’t appreciate this stupid bullshit.
I glare at her for a second before I turn my focus to finding Landon some tissues. The one he’s been holding isn’t worth much anymore.
After I do that, I need to go check on Rae. He comes with me because he doesn’t want to be alone and likes the idea of moving a little, and we find her eating a candy bar behind the nurse’s station. He returns the hug she gives him, and I promise the nurse watching her that we’ll be back again soon. She assures us Rae is fine, so we go back to Lolly’s room and sit down in a couple of chairs.
