We got released from the hospital on a Tuesday afternoon, which felt wrong on principle. Tuesdays are for errands and forgotten appointments and losing track of what day it is, not for walking out of a pediatric ward with your eight-year-old daughter and trying to pretend your hands aren’t still shaking from two weeks of watching monitors and counting breaths and learning medical terminology you never wanted to know. Chloe stood at the automatic doors with her stuffed rabbit tucked under one arm and her other hand wrapped around my fingers like a seatbelt, like if she let go we might separate and she’d end up back in that room with the beeping machines and the nurses who were kind but couldn’t make promises.
She looked better than she had—her color was back, her eyes were brighter, the terrifying pallor that had sent us to the emergency room in the first place had finally lifted. But she also looked like someone who’d learned too early that grownups can say “it’s okay” while simultaneously attaching tubes to you and sticking needles in your arm. “We’re going home now?” she asked, her voice small and uncertain, as if I might change my mind at the last second and swing back toward the elevators.
“We’re going home,” I said, keeping my voice light and steady even though nothing about the past fourteen days had felt light or steady. I was exhausted in a way that went beyond physical tiredness, the kind of bone-deep fatigue that comes from sustained fear and interrupted sleep and the constant vigilance of watching someone you love fight their way back to wellness. In the car, Chloe stared out the window at the familiar streets of our neighborhood, then back at me, checking my face like it was a weather report that might suddenly change from sunny to storming without warning.
“My bed is still there, right?” she asked, and the question made my chest ache because of course she was worried about that. We’d left so suddenly for the hospital—her fever spiking, her breathing labored, my own panic overriding everything else—that we hadn’t had time to think about what we were leaving behind. “Yeah,” I said, forcing confidence into my voice.
“Your bed is still there.” We shared a bedroom at my parents’ house—had for the past two years since my divorce left me financially unable to afford my own place. Chloe had her own little twin bed with the moon-and-stars comforter she’d picked out herself, her moon projector that cast constellations across the ceiling, and a pile of books she insisted were “for emergencies only” even though we both knew she read them every night. I had my own narrow bed on the opposite wall, a dresser I shared with Chloe, and the kind of minimal drawer space you get when you’re a temporary person living in someone else’s permanent life.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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