"Better," Sam said. "She ate a whole pudding cup at five a.m. The nurse said it was the best thing she'd seen all night."
When June woke up at nine, the first thing she did was look for him. She did not cry when she saw he was there. She just let out a long breath, the way you do when you've been holding something heavy, and held up her arms.
He sat on the edge of the bed and she climbed into his lap, IV line and all, and he held her, and he told her the truth, because he had promised her the truth. He told her that her mommy was not dead. That her mommy had been very sick, and had been in this same hospital the whole time, two floors up, and had woken up, and had asked for her. He watched June's face go through something he had no word for, something so large that it seemed to fill her whole small body, and then she began, finally, after three weeks in the dark, to cry.
She cried for a long time. Sam held her through all of it. Nora woke up and climbed onto the bed too, and put her arms around both of them, and none of them said anything at all.
That afternoon, with Gloria Maddox on one side of the wheelchair and Sam on the other and Nora pushing, June went up two floors in the elevator to see her mother.
Sam did not go into the room. He stood in the hallway and let Gloria take her in. Through the narrow window in the door he saw a young woman propped up in a hospital bed, painfully thin, with June's same cloud of light brown curls and June's same pointed face, her eyes huge and dark-circled in a face the color of paper. He saw her see her daughter. He saw her hold out both arms, the IV lines swinging, and he saw June scramble out of the wheelchair and up onto the bed, and he turned away from the window then, because some things were not his to watch.
Nora leaned against him in the hallway.
"She's going to go back to her mom," Nora said quietly. "Isn't she. Someday."
"Maybe," said Sam. "If her mom gets better. That's the goal. That's what's supposed to happen."
Nora was quiet for a while.
"That's okay," she said finally. "That's good. Everybody should get their mom back if they can." She swallowed. "I just don't want her to forget us."
Sam put his arm around her and pulled her close.
"I don't think she's going to forget us," he said. "I don't think she's the forgetting kind."
June was discharged eight days later, two days before Thanksgiving, to the home of Walt and Maureen Brennan in Coplay.
Sam drove her there himself, with Gloria's permission and Gloria in the passenger seat. Nora sat in the back beside June's booster seat and held her hand the whole way. The Brennans' house was a white farmhouse at the end of a long gravel lane, with a red door and