“She tires easily,” he warns me.

I flash him a wan smile. “So do I.”

We’re walking very slowly now. He’s holding on to my arm, and I’m leaning against him more than is polite, but if I didn’t, I think I would melt into the linoleum floor and not be able to rise. I see him glance at a wheelchair.

“I don’t want her to see me in that,” I say. “I want to be strong for her.”

He nods, and he doesn’t look at a wheelchair again.

“In retrospect, I should have used one until here and then ditched it.”

At last, we’re outside her room. He knocks on the door. “Mrs. Chase? I have someone here to see you!” His voice is cheerful again. I wonder if he practices that, the cheerful voice. It’s not quite as singsong as my doctor’s, but the tone is the same. Maybe they have group cheerfulness training. “Brace yourself,” he says to me softly, very softly. I’m not quite sure if he said it, or if it’s my own inner voice telling me to be strong.

I walk into the room.

Mom lies in the hospital bed. She looks as if half of her has melted away. Her skin sags against her bones, and she looks ashen-yellow. She has multiple IV needles puckering the skin on the back of her hand and tubes taped to her arms. Her body is under the thin sheet, but her face is so very thin. Still, she brightens as I hobble into the room.

“I look terrible, don’t I?” she says.

Clearly, I haven’t done a good job at hiding my expression. I consider lying. “You look like how I feel.”

She points imperiously to the chair by the window, a twin to the one I was sitting in when Dr. Barrett came to fetch me. “William, you should have wheeled her here. She didn’t need to walk.”

“She insisted,” he says. “She has your stubborn streak.”

“Stupid streak, you mean.” Mom glares at me. “You had me terrified, you know. Aged me at least twenty years.”

“Barely shows at all.”

“You mean beneath the emaciated ill look?”

“Right. That kind of overshadows everything else.”

“Dying is a helluva diet. I don’t recommend it.” She points again at the chair. Dr. Barrett, William, guides me over to it. His hands are warm and strong, and I think of Peter’s hands. They’re similar. Hands that are used often. In Peter’s case, it was to climb onto roofs. In William’s, I suspect it’s saving lives. Or maybe golf. It occurs to me that I have done such an excellent job of avoiding talking to any doctors in the past few years that I don’t know if golf is still the standard cliché.

“Do you golf?” I ask him.

If he’s startled by this change of subject, he doesn’t show it. “Not regularly.”

“He plays basketball with friends,” Mom says.

“Sometimes. There’s a league in the hospital. We meet at lunch whenever we can.”

“Lauren likes to swim,” Mom says. “Or did. She used to be a fish.”

“Still am,” I say without thinking.

Mom snorts. “You haven’t been in the water since...well, she used to be an excellent swimmer. I’m sure she still would be if she’d make time for it.”

“I have. I mean, I will.” I feel myself flushing red. “Mom, are you trying to set us up?”

“I’m compressing three months of mothering into three minutes,” she says. “Now, give your phone number to the nice doctor, sit up straight, and don’t let your mouth gape open. You’ll catch flies that way, and while they are high on protein, it’s not attractive in front of a potential mate.”

I am blushing furiously now. “You’re right,” I say to Dr. Barrett. “She is extraordinary.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lauren.” Mom snaps her fingers. “Hand me a pen, William.”

Bemused, the doctor obeys. Mom scrawls on a napkin on the side of her lunch tray. I notice that she’s barely touched the food. I also notice that her hand is shaking as she writes. Her hands were always so steady. A few months ago, she could thread the tiniest needle in a half-lit room and then sew a button without even looking at it, much less piercing herself. If I attempted that, I’d bleed all over the button. She shoves the napkin at him. “Now give us some privacy, and call my daughter later.”

Wordlessly, he accepts the napkin. I suppose they didn’t cover this in medical school.

“You really don’t have to,” I tell him.

“I’d never dream of disobeying your mother.” He tucks the napkin into his clipboard, and then he leaves. Mom is chuckling. She then sobers and looks at me.

“Have a nice nap?” she asks.

“Tolerable,” I say. “Weird dreams, though. And terrible morning breath.”

“Don’t scare me like that again. Whole upside of cancer is supposed to be that there’s no chance that your children die first.” She looks at me as if expecting me to tell her not to talk like that, to tell her she’s not going to die. But I don’t say anything. Softly, she says, “I really look that bad.”

I don’t want to answer that, neither with a lie nor with the truth. “Want me to tell you about my weird dream?”

“Does it have someone attractive of the male persuasion?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it does.”

She folds her hands across her chest. “Then I’m listening.”

I tell her everything.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mom doesn’t interrupt once. She listens to every detail and then after I finish, she contemplates me. I watch the display on the heart monitor. The line jolts in rhythm to the beeps.

“You disappoint me, Lauren. Three months of dreaming about a hot, half-nude wild man, and you only kissed?” Mom clucks her tongue. “Or are you sanitizing the story for your mother’s ears? On second thought, don’t tell me. I don’t want the mental picture in my head.”

“He slept in my closet most of the time.”

“That wasn’t a metaphor, was it?”

“Nope. Literally in my closet. To protect me.”

“From dangerous hangers?”

“From attackers. I think he planned to surprise them.”

She coughs, and I have to grip the sides of my chair to keep myself from going to her. Her entire body quakes from the coughs as if every muscle were spasming. When it subsides, she continues as if nothing happened, “A conventional guard would guard the doorway and stop the attacker before he enters the room.”

I make myself smile. Her logic is sound, of course. “Peter was anything but conventional.”

She squints hard at me. “Now, Lauren, don’t you fall for an imaginary boyfriend after I went through all the trouble of getting sick in order to find you a nice, handsome doctor to marry.”

“Aha, I knew there was an explanation for all of this.”

“Take it from me, imaginary boyfriends will only break your heart.” Her smile fades, and her eyes flutter closed. I listen again to the beep-beep of her monitor. I used to hate that sound, but today I find it soothing. She’s still here, it says. I lean my head back on the chair. My limbs feel heavy, and they throb. I know I should try to pee, but I don’t think I can face the burning. I ignore it. Her breathing is slow and even, and I think she’s fallen asleep. But then her eyes flutter open. She turns her head to look at me. “Oh, good. You’re still here. Unless I’m hallucinating?”

I pry myself off the chair and try not to wince. Shuffling the few steps to the bed, I take her hand in mine. It feels so fragile, like holding a baby bird. “Real.”

Her fingers close around my hand. “You should rest.”

“I can rest here.” I point to the chair. “It reclines. Besides, it’s not like there aren’t doctors and nurses on this floor, too. In fact, they’re kind of in abundance. I’ll stay until they kick me out.”

Mom pats the bed next to her. “Come on, Laurie-kitten. Let me hug you.”

It’s the nickname that gets me. She hasn’t called me that in years. I feel my eyes heat, and to hide that, I sit on the edge of the bed. It takes some maneuvering to squeeze me in beside her without disturbing any of her wires or tubes. Some get caught in my hair, and we laugh as we untangle them, occasionally setting off the IV alarm. It’s either laugh or cry, I realize. After a while, though, I manage it. We lie side by side on our backs. I’m panting from the effort of climbing onto the bed with limbs that haven’t worked much in three months. She’s breathing shallowly, too, and I wonder if this was a good idea. But then she slides her hand into mine, and she sighs softly and it’s all okay.