I sat down in the chair behind me. I don’t know if I chose to sit or if my legs simply gave. I pressed the locket into my palm and closed my fingers around it, and for a while I didn’t think anything coherent. I just sat there with the fluorescent lights overhead and the sounds of the hospital moving around me and the locket warm in my hand.
My mother had taken that photograph. I remember her lifting the camera, a small disposable one, and I remember not having the energy to ask her to stop. I had been awake for thirty-one hours. I had no idea, in that moment, that she had kept the photograph, or that she had given it away, or that thirty years later it would end up in a plastic bag being handed to me by a nurse in the small hours of a Wednesday morning.
Leo woke up just before sunrise. The doctor found me still in the corridor and told me I could go in, and I walked into his room and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at him in the bed, pale and smaller than I ever think of him, the various tubes and monitors arranged around him with businesslike indifference. I pulled a chair beside his bed and sat down, and after a moment his eyes opened, slow and effortful, and he found my face.
“Mom.” His voice was raw from the intubation, barely above a whisper.
“I’m here,” I said.
He swallowed. His lips barely moved. “Is she okay?”
I told him she was in a coma but alive and stable, and watched his face absorb that the way you watch someone absorb something they were afraid of but had already prepared themselves for. His eyes closed briefly and tears ran sideways across his temples into his hair. I pulled a tissue from my bag and wiped his face, and he didn’t say anything for a while, just breathed.
Then he said, “I met her at the community center. Near campus. The one I’ve been volunteering at on Wednesdays.” He stopped to rest, then went on. “She started coming in a few weeks ago. Didn’t really talk at first, just sat in the corner with a cup of coffee. But she kept coming back.”
