After the bloody woman passed out, she was finally moved inside, so at least one question was answered for us. How much blood do you need to lose to get through Cedars’ double doors? Answer: enough to lose consciousness, apparently.

My dad storms over to the desk, while my mom runs to Isla and me and gathers us into a hug. I ignore the looks of the other people in the waiting room, who clearly recognize my mother, despite the fact that she’s wearing a brand-new Red Sox baseball cap obviously bought at an airport gift shop. She has door-to-door VIP service when she travels, so I assume this was a futile attempt at anonymity for the plane ride itself.

“We don’t know anything yet,” she says, which is not new information but feels like it anyway, because it’s coming from them and not from us. From the real adults.

“We keep asking to see him and they keep telling us to wait,” I say. I don’t tell her that in the meantime I learned how to make taco chicken or that the seat she takes used to be covered in blood and was wiped down with Lysol less than ten minutes ago.

I don’t scream: Is Hudson dead?

I want to, though. I want to yell until my voice gives way.

—

“Come on,” my dad calls, and he signals us to follow him and a nurse, who uses a magnetic pass to let us through the double doors. I have no idea how he managed to do in twenty seconds what I couldn’t do in two hours, but that’s so like my dad. To show up in a white button-down shirt rolled to his elbows—a tall, white, middle-aged well-off man whose clothes look professionally laundered and who sports an outrageously expensive watch—and make people listen at the mere sight of him. This nurse, a tall woman with long, thin legs and a long, thin face, like a greyhound, leads us to a room, and with an unnecessary flourish pulls open the curtains. She doesn’t say ta-da, but I bet she thinks it, and then with her matching creepy, long, thin-fingered spider hands, she waves us in.

Hudson is lying in a bed, an oxygen tube hooked up to his nose, and though he has an IV, I can’t bring myself to look at his arms, which are no doubt mottled with track marks and bruises.

He’s unmistakably alive.

I feel a relief so palpable, my legs quiver. Isla bursts into tears.

“Come on, guys. It’s not so bad. It’s not like I’m going to jail or anything,” Hudson says.

“Not funny,” my dad says.