“How’d she do?” he asked.
“They said great.”
“I’ll be there in a couple of hours,” he said. “Is that okay?”
“That’s fine.” I heard the coldness in my voice.
“Can I bring you anything?”
“No, I’m good.” I walked faster as I neared the recovery room. “I just want to see her.”
In the recovery room, I slipped my hand into Haley’s. Her puffy little face was at peace for the moment. I sat down next to the bed and watched for the flutter of eyelids. The twitch of her flaky lips. Any sign that she was coming back to me. She’d had to have general anesthesia three times in the past couple of months and each time I worried she would not come back the same girl, that somehow the anesthesia would alter her. But Haley opened her eyes and I saw my brave daughter in her tired smile.
“Ta da,” she said.
I touched her cheek. “It went perfectly,” I said. “Just great.”
A nurse lowered the blue hospital gown a few inches to check the pink skin around the new port in Haley’s chest. “How’s your pain on a scale of one to—”
“Three,” Haley said before the nurse could finish the question.
“Three in Haley world is about a six in typical people world,” the nurse said. She knew my daughter. Everyone at the hospital knew her. They called her a “frequent flier,” one of those kids who returned to Children’s again and again.
“Whatever,” Haley said. She raised her eyes to mine. “Where’s Dad?”
“On his way.”
“Good,” she said, and the corners of her mouth curled up ever so slightly as she drifted back to sleep.
I was still sitting with her in her lime-green hospital room an hour later. She’d been awake off and on in the recovery room, but now she slept deeply and I let her. I sat on the sofa that converted to a double bed, doing a little work on my laptop. It was admin stuff, boring but necessary. Every few minutes, I’d stop and look at Haley’s face, her too-pale, too-rounded cheeks and the remnants of a rash on her neck from one of her medications. I’d tucked Fred into her arms, and his big brown plastic eyes stared into space. After a while, a nurse walked into the room. He was African-American, skinny as a toothpick and bespectacled, and I recognized him right away.
“Tom!”
“Hey, Ms. Knightly,” he said. “You remember me?”
“I do!” I stood and gave him a hug. Ten years earlier, Tom had been one of Haley’s nurses, a favorite of both of ours. He looked exactly the same. “I don’t believe you’re still here!” I said.
“Where am I going to go?” He laughed. “I’ve actually been out for the past few months taking care of some family business—” he rolled his eyes “—and when I came in this morning and saw Haley Hope Knightly on the board…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry she has to go through this again.”
“Me, too,” I said. I remembered him slipping one time long ago, talking about how he often saw kids come back to the oncology unit years after remission. Strange, the things you remembered. The things that could haunt you. He’d caught himself; I remembered that, too. He’d backpedaled, telling me that most kids did just fine and that he was sure Haley would be one of them.
I watched as he took Haley’s vital signs and adjusted one of the bags hanging from the IV pole. Then his gaze lit on the framed photograph of Haley and my nieces where it sat on the nightstand. He let out a whoop and picked it up.
“The cousins!” he said. “Look at them! All grown up.”
“You remember them?” I asked, surprised.
“How could I forget them? They’d come barrelin’ into the room like a flock of geese, chattering up a storm, looking more like quintuplets than sisters.”
“Quadruplets,” I corrected. “There were only four of them. Just seemed like more than that. One set of twins and another two just a couple of years apart.”
“I have to tell you, I hated the days they visited.” He laughed. “They’d come in all chaotic with their little-girl germs.”
“Haley loved it, though,” I said.
Tom pointed to the girl in the center of the photograph. “And this here in the middle is our Miss Haley.” The picture had been taken in the Outer Banks last summer. The redbrick Corolla lighthouse stood in the distance behind the girls who were posing like little vamps in their bathing suits. Madison and Mandy stood on the left. Megan and Melanie on the right. Each of them wore her hair in a dark ponytail slung over her shoulder. Haley stood out from her cousins with her lighter brown hair. Her lighter eyes. She’d been giggling so hard it had been a challenge to get her to hold still long enough for me to take the picture. Haley looked so incredibly healthy in the picture. No sign of the disease that had been planting its seeds in her body at that very moment. She’d insisted on bringing the picture to the hospital with her each time she came. I hadn’t wanted her to. What was it like for her to see that vibrant former version of herself every day?
“I hear her daddy’s with y’all this time,” Tom said. He’d set down the picture and was writing something in Haley’s chart.
All sorts of responses ran through my mind, but I decided to be charitable. “He is,” I said. “He was living in California, but he moved back here as soon as I told him Haley’d relapsed.”
“I remember the last time, how it was just you and her.” He finished writing and looked across Haley’s bed at me. “I don’t remember every single patient but I remember you and Haley real well, because even though she was just a kid, she was like a little adult. She took care of you as much as you took care of her.”
It might have seemed a weird thing to say except that it was so true. Haley always seemed to sense that there
