Home.

It won’t feel like home. Mom’s not there. She’s here, in this hospital, three floors down. The auburn-haired doctor whose name I can’t remember promised that she’d have Mom’s doctor stop by to update me. In the meantime, I am to concentrate on getting better. My mother won’t want to see me weak. The doctor actually wagged her finger at me as she said that, as if I were an errant toddler.

Outside, the palm trees sway in a light breeze. Cars wait at a red light to enter the hospital parking lot. My car isn’t in that parking lot. It’s either outside an impossible town or it’s totaled in a junkyard somewhere. Or maybe it’s totaled and in Lost because I’ve lost it. Except that Lost doesn’t exist.

The auburn-haired doctor showed me photos of when I’d arrived, the X-rays from my initial examination, and the daily nurse reports. I had been here three months, which meant I couldn’t have been in Lost. I’d imagined it, like Dorothy and Oz. How cute. How quaint. I want to put my face in my hands and cry, but I don’t want another conversation with the nurses or the extra cheerful doctor.

At their insistence, I have eaten a little, liquids only. I didn’t have much appetite. A few spoonfuls of soup before I felt as if I was going to vomit. I pushed it away before I did. I’ve also walked around the room. Felt as weak as a baby and had to rest. They wanted me back in bed; I pleaded for the chair.

A man knocks on the open door. “Hello, Ms. Chase? I’m Dr. Barrett.” He carries a clipboard, and he has a koala bear clipped to his stethoscope. He’s young, early thirties I’d guess, and handsome, like a doctor in a soap opera. He has killer blue eyes and a lopsided smile to accompany his calm, baritone voice. In short, he’s exactly the kind of doctor that a coma patient is supposed to open her eyes and see and fall madly in love with.

Unfortunately, I’m already awake and don’t feel at all like Sleeping Beauty with my hair matted and my limbs shaking and bruises up and down my arms from all the needles that have been jabbed into me over the past few hours. Or three months.

“Are you the psychiatrist?” I ask. They promised one will come talk with me about my feelings regarding my lost three months. They said this completely oblivious to the appropriateness of the phrasing. My “lost” three months.

“I’m your mother’s primary oncologist,” he says.

“Oh.” I sit up straighter.

He lays out the diagnosis in plain terms in his soft, calming voice. Stage four ovarian cancer. It’s spread to the lymph nodes in the abdomen and to the liver. They suspect it may also be in her lungs and bladder. Her body is essentially riddled with cancer. As he tells me this, his blue eyes are full of compassion. I nod in all the appropriate places. And then I ask as calmly as I can, “Can I see her?”

He nods. “Of course. I’ll ask one of the nurses for a wheelchair...”

“I can walk.”

He looks at me dubiously but he doesn’t contradict me, which I appreciate. Pushing on the arms of the chair, I grit my teeth as I stand. My legs feel shaky, and my head spins. I wait for it to pass. Maybe my mom shouldn’t see me like this. I need real clothes. And a brush through my hair. Makeup wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. But handsome-doctor-guy whose name I have already forgotten has one hand under my elbow. “One step at a time,” he says. “You can change your mind whenever you want. It’s not as if it’s hard to find a wheelchair around here, being a hospital.”

I crack a smile since that’s obviously what he wants.

“Your mother is a very brave woman, you know. She’s a fighter. That’s why she’s held on as long as she has. She’s talking about what plants she’s going to put in her garden and how no one has weeded.”

“She’s beaten this before,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Yes, she has,” he agrees. But he doesn’t say she will again. He also doesn’t say she won’t, and human bodies are so complex with all sorts of factors. He can’t know for certain that she...

Stop it, I tell myself. Stop denying. Stop making excuses. Stop running away. My entire coma-induced hallucination had an obvious point. It was clearly my subconscious helping my conscious come to grips with my mom’s death.

I won’t let leaving Peter and Claire be pointless.

Even if they weren’t real.

Hobbling, I follow Dr. Handsome into the elevator. I sag against the wall. He watches me. “She’s rallied quite a bit since she heard you woke,” he says. “But I need to caution you...sometimes it’s a shock to see someone you love here.”

“I’ve seen her in the hospital before.”

“She’s weak.”

“I’ll be strong for her.”

He nods approvingly. “Good. She needs that.”

“That’s why I came back.”

I don’t know whether I mean back from Lost or back from the coma. I don’t think it matters. He seems satisfied, at any rate. I watch him out of the corner of my eye. His hands are clasped on his clipboard, and he’s watching the numbers tick down on the elevator. It’s a slow elevator, and it rattles a fair amount for what should be a smooth ride for patients. It’s also twice as large as a normal elevator with railings on all sides for handicapped. I’m clinging to one of the railings and trying to act as if I’m leaning casually against the cool metal wall. Half the other walls are filled with posters describing what to do in a medical emergency. “I’d really hope that here of all places those posters wouldn’t be necessary.” I’m trying to joke. I don’t really succeed.

“Emergencies happen.”

“But aren’t you guys supposed to be trained?”

His lips curve up into a smile, and I notice he has nice lips. I don’t know why I’m noticing this now, when I’m on my way to see my mother. My brain’s way of distracting me. Even my subconscious has avoidance issues.

I think of Peter’s kisses, and I have to turn away from Dr. Barrett.

See, I did remember his name. Funny that. I hadn’t realized that I’d committed it to memory. “How long have you been Mom’s doctor?”

“Three years.”

“Oh.” I’d never met him before. “I thought it was that man with the white hair...”

“Dr. Scola? He retired a year and a half ago. I inherited his practice. Your mother has been coming to see me regularly for a while.” He looked at me. “Don’t feel bad. You aren’t expected to know her doctors. I don’t think she wanted you so involved.”

“She did. I didn’t want to be. I wasn’t ready.”

The elevator dings and the doors slide open. “Are you ready now?”

It’s a genuine question, and I wonder how many deaths a doctor has to see to stop caring, how many until the soul scabs over, how many until the losses stop hurting. “Yes.”

He holds open the door for me.

I don’t move. “Honestly, no, I’m not ready. I should be. But I’m not. Is anyone?”

He considers it. “Sometimes. But usually, no. If you’d like to talk afterward, have the nurses page me.”

I dismiss this as politeness. He’ll be too busy afterward.

“I mean it, Ms. Chase. I hope you’ll take me up on my offer.” He leads the way out of the elevator and then pauses as I hobble out. He holds out his arm.

I wonder at the fact that he’s taking the time to do this at all, to escort an obviously slow walker all the way over here. In my experience, this isn’t how people act in hospitals. They’re nice enough, they care, but they’re harried. He must have other patients, appointments, things to do. “Why are you being so nice?” I know I’m being blunt, but I can’t help it.

“It’s my job.”

“Seems above and beyond. Not that I don’t appreciate it.”

“As I said, your mother is an extraordinary person,” he says. “When my father died, she went out of her way to be kind to me. I owe her.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.” I guess I didn’t know a lot of what my mother did while I was at work, including her friendships. I feel an unpleasant flash of anger, then jealousy... But I wanted her to hide this from me, all the details of her dying. She was only doing what she thought I wanted. “I think I have a lot to talk about with her.”