chapter 13

CYLIN

ABOUT a week after our first visit to the hospital to see Dad, Mom said we could go back. He was doing better now, she told us. He was able to walk around a little bit and didn’t need to be on oxygen all the time.

The night before the visit, we were all a little nervous about what he might look like, but not really scared. I got out my cousins’ art supplies and started making a card. I was in the den coloring when Lauren walked in. “What are you wearing to the hospital tomorrow?” she asked me. I was embarrassed to tell her that I hadn’t really thought about it.

“I have a dress that’s too small for me, maybe you’d want it,” Lauren said casually.

I looked up from my card. “Really?” Lauren had the most beautiful clothes I had ever seen—she and Aunt Kate both dressed really well and their things were expensive.

“Come upstairs, try it on.” Lauren smiled. We’d been having a hard time all living together, and I had honestly forgotten how nice she could be.

The dress was black silk and cut in a Chinese design, buttoning over one shoulder. It was long and sleek and beautifully embroidered. I looked like a princess in it. “It’s not quite right for the hospital,” Lauren said knowingly, “but you can still have it. Wear it when you get home, like to a party or something.” The way she said it, it sounded like she knew we would go home eventually—to our old lives where everything would be normal. It implied there would even be parties to go to, and that I could wear this dress like nothing bad had ever happened. It made me feel good.

“Here, try this on.” Lauren handed me a pink shirt with a tiny alligator on the front. “This won’t fit Cassie for ages, so you should take it.”

I slid off the silky dress and put on the shirt. It was pretty and preppy, like stuff that the rich kids at school wore. “Wear your jeans with that tomorrow; your dad will say you look nice,” Lauren told me. I wanted to make Dad happy, so I decided to wear the shirt.

When we saw Dad the next day, I was disappointed that he looked the same. His face was still wrapped up in bandages, and there were lots of tubes and wires connected to him. I had pictured him really being better, like Mom had said, looking more normal somehow. But he did seem more awake; he was sitting up and writing a lot of notes to us on his board. There were handmade cards all over the room, taped to every wall and surface, probably fifty or more—and they weren’t all from us. “Who made those?” I asked Mom, looking at the cards on Dad’s bedside table.

“The kids from your school,” Mom answered. “They all made cards and sent a big package. Actually, there were too many to hang up.” She showed me a huge envelope stuffed with construction-paper cards. There must have been more than a hundred. I looked at a few of them. “Get Better Soon, Officer Busby!” one read, signed by Matt. “Hope you feel better,” another one said, with a really good drawing on the front of a brown dog with round pink ears.

I didn’t even know these kids. They went to my school? I studied the envelope and looked at the careful handwriting on the outside, and all the stamps. They must have had every class at school make cards. For my dad. We had been in Boston so long I had almost forgotten that school had started back home a couple of weeks ago, that my friends were there, that they knew what had happened to us.

While I looked through the cards, my brothers stood close to the bed and watched as Dad wrote on his board. I saw Shawn studying Dad’s face, his eyes, as he wrote, and I knew he was trying to make sure this really was Dad. By the end of the visit, we hadn’t seen him get up and walk, but I was pretty sure that it was him. His notes to us sounded like our old dad.

“You guys are going back home and going to school,” he wrote in his familiar block letters. “I’ll be home soon, too.”

Looking at what Dad had written, Mom nodded. “Next week, we’re going home. I have school, you guys have school. Your dad will stay here a little bit longer, but as soon as he can eat, they’ll let him come home too. Right, honey?” she said, pushing some hair back from Dad’s forehead. It still seemed weird that Dad couldn’t say anything. How could he come back and live in our house? Where would all his machines and tubes go? I couldn’t picture it.

On the way back to Uncle Joe’s house, Shawn asked how Dad was going to eat.

Without turning around in her seat, Mom said, “He’s going to have special food for a while.”

“Yeah, but how is he going to eat it?” Shawn asked again.

At first, I didn’t get what Shawn was asking. But then I did: Dad had no mouth. Where was the food going to go?

Uncle Joe laughed a little. “Good question,” he said.

“Well, he’s going to have a liquid diet. They’re going to show us how to insert it using a syringe,” Mom said.

“Insert it where?” Eric asked. “That tube in his stomach?”

“Yes, it’s called a GI tube,” Mom explained. “We’ll put a special type of liquid food in there.” Mom made it sound like this was all very normal, so we just nodded like we thought it was too.

When we got back to Uncle Joe’s house, I asked Mom when we would go back home. I liked the idea of going back to school and seeing my friends. Now that they all knew about what had happened to Dad, I was sure they would want to ask me questions, and I would feel very important. I also wanted a chance to wear the new clothes that Lauren had given me. I would be going back to school a whole new girl.

“A few more days,” Mom said, but she looked sad. “And then Dad will come as soon as he’s stable.”

That night, Mom and Uncle Joe made dinner for us because Aunt Kate was at work. I was happy to sit in the kitchen and help, especially since I knew we were having something normal, not gourmet food. “He might as well recover at home; I’m practically a nurse now anyhow,” Mom said as she cut up some vegetables for the spaghetti sauce. “After the trachea heals up, they can close his GI tube and then he should be fine until it’s time for his surgeries. He’ll do better at home.”

“I don’t think it’s his recovery they’re worried about,” Uncle Joe said. “It’s his safety—and yours.” They seemed to forget that I was sitting there. “At the hospital they’ve got him covered twentyfour hours a day, and no one knows where you guys are,” Uncle Joe pointed out.”If you’re all under one roof . . . I don’t know, Polly.” He looked over at her and stopped stirring the pot on the stove. “I just don’t know.”

Mom didn’t say anything, just kept chopping up the vegetables like she hadn’t heard him.

By the end of the week, we had packed up our stuff, rolled up our sleeping bags, and put everything into the back of the old brown Pinto that Uncle Joe had given Mom. Dad’s car was ruined, they said, and couldn’t be driven anyhow because the police detectives had it, so we needed something to drive. I had carefully packed the hand-me-downs that Lauren had given me—I couldn’t wait to show them off at school, especially the new Izod shirt and the silk dress.

“Here,” Lauren said, handing me a book as we stood in the driveway saying our good-byes. It was one of her Nancy Drews. I couldn’t believe it. They were numbered on the spine, a real series, she couldn’t just give one away!

“But it will be missing from the set,” I told her, looking at the cover. It was the one about the clock that I had wanted to read.

“Just bring it when you come back,” Lauren said, looking down. I could tell she was sad we were leaving. We hugged my aunt and uncle and climbed into the car to go. As we backed out of the driveway, waving, I realized that it was the first time we had been together, just us four, in almost a month. It felt good to be on our own, even though Dad wasn’t there. It felt normal. I looked down at the book in my lap and thought about my new clothes in the trunk, the fact that we would be home soon. When we got close to the Bourne Bridge, I held my breath—the way you do when you drive by a graveyard. I told myself if I could hold it until we reached the other side, everything would be okay. Dad would come home soon, and he would be fine. As we crossed the bridge, I could see the cranberry bogs, the berries already getting fat and ripe in the fall sunshine.

“We’re home,” Mom said quietly. I took a deep breath and was happy for the first time in a long time.