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I remember the near-silence, the hum of the equipment around me, and it dissipates faster than snapped fingers as soon as I open my eyes.
My parents are on either side of me. Mom is always worried—Dad’s the calm one. But he’s anything but calm now, his brows pinching in, his lips in a tight little line. His normally tan face is pale, and his palms are sweaty. He’s holding on to my hand with both of his in a death grip.
“Aurora,” Mom whispers. “You’re okay, baby. You’re in the hospital.”
I nod slowly. It isn’t the first time I’ve been here, although it is the first time my chest has ached quite so bad. Like I went toe to toe with an elephant, and instead of fighting, it decided to sit on me.
“You had surgery,” she adds.
My mouth is dry, and it takes a minute to swallow those words. Surgery. The doctors said there was a slim chance I would need a repair. But?—
“Don’t worry,” Dad interrupts my thoughts. “We’ve got this covered. We’ve talked about this.”
The money. The insurance. Late nights sitting on the stairs in the shadows, eavesdropping on my parents’ conversations about medical bills, prescriptions, deductibles, copays. Things that shouldn’t have hurt us but just seemed to keep stacking higher and higher.
Tears fill my eyes, and no amount of comforting makes it any better.
“I’m sorry.” My voice comes out low.
Mom pours me a cup of water and puts the straw between my lips. She strokes my hair, exchanging a glance with Dad. But they don’t say anything. They don’t say it’s not my fault, but they don’t blame me either.
It just is what it is.
One of the nurses shoos them out an hour after visiting hours end, but still I fight sleep. I kept checking the heart monitor, watching the steady bumps. Trying to pick out if they were coming unevenly, too fast or too slow. If there might be something else wrong with my heart.
I’ve got a weird thing about sleeping in hospitals. There’s so much death here. And life, too, if I think about it enough. It’scyclical. Around and around life and death skate. But closing my eyes seems, in my opinion, too much of a temptation for death.
“Hey, sunshine,” a voice comes from the doorway.
Knox Whiteshaw. Next-door neighbor since we moved in almost a decade ago. Once he realized I could kick his ass on the ice, he got a lot nicer to me. Especially when my dad became the coach of his league.
“What are you doing here?” I rasp.
He slips in and closes the door. He manages to keep one hand behind his back until he’s right up next to me, then he reveals his little surprise.
A single flower. A yellow rose.
“Yellow for friendship?” I raise my eyebrow.
He snickers. “Yellow for you. For sunshine.”
“People usually associate Aurora with blues and greens. The Northern Lights, you know?”
“Nah.” He taps my leg.
The feel of it zaps through me, going straight to the butterflies in my chest, and I shift to the side. Making room for him to sit on the bed.
“Are you okay?”
I shrug.
“Sunny.”
“I’m fine,” I mumble. “I had surgery. All’s well that ends well.”
He frowns. “My parents said it came on suddenly?—”
“It did. But it’s fine.I’mfine.” I’ve got to believe that.
