I smiled. “I’m out of practice.”
“But talented.”
“Go home now,” I said then. “Get some rest. You’ve had a rough day so far.”
Josie nodded. “Not a big fan of hospitals.”
“I’ve got this,” I said, trying to sound way more at ease than I felt. “I do this for a living.”
Josie took my hand and held it, and then peered at me like she was making a decision. Then she said, “She turned around, you know.”
I frowned, thinking we were talking about the seizure. “She turned around?”
“On your birthday. The day she left. She drove for hours, crying the whole time, until finally, somewhere in Arkansas, she decided to turn around and go back. She couldn’t do it, she decided. She couldn’t leave. She pulled off at a truck stop, planning to get back on the interstate going south instead of north.
“Before she even finished at the pump, she got a call from Wallace. He was just checking in. Just saying hello. But the sound of his voicestopped her. She stood there for several minutes after they hung up. Then she called it: She couldn’t leave him to face it all alone.”
“And she kept going.”
Josie nodded. “He needed her.”
“Ineeded her,” I said, almost a whisper.
“But you had your dad. She told herself you’d be all right.”
My throat tightened. Oh God. What if she had turned around? What if she had showed back up at our house that night? Could my life have unfolded in a completely different way?
But it wasn’t a real question. Even if she’d come back, it would have been too late. Even as she stood by the side of the highway in Arkansas deciding what choice to make, I had already made choices of my own.
There was no changing it. There was no possibility of a different story.
There was only what had happened. And how to carry on.
I looked up to see Josie smiling at me. Then she reached out and tucked a wisp of hair behind my ear. “She believed you’d be okay,” she said again. “And she was right.”
JOSIE WAS BARELYout of sight when a doctor appeared beside me.
“You’re the fireman?” he asked, looking me over.
“I’m the fireman,” I said, looking him over right back.
“She told me about you.”
He had a couple of black nose hairs poking down out of his right nostril. “What happened?” I asked, staring at them.
“Fairly common, in her situation,” he said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before.”
I looked up. “You mean the eye? The blindness?”
“It was an occipital seizure,” he confirmed. “That explains the hallucinations and the blurred vision afterward. Also the headache. All very common with this region.”
Hallucinations? Blurred vision? “I don’t understand how blindness in an eye could cause seizures.”
He frowned at me. “It’s not the eye causing the seizures. It’s the tumor.”
I stopped breathing.
Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink.
