“I’m not sure,” Margo says. “She called and told me she brought you here and you were going into surgery. I got in my car so fast I didn’t stop to put on real shoes.” Margo points to her feet. She’s wearing fuzzy pink slippers. “I didn’t guess you were going to Ithaca, sweets. I thought maybe you were headed back to Florida.” She sniffles.

“I was going to call you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t get to disappear anymore. You can’t go running off into the woods like a wounded deer. You lean on me when it hurts. That’s what we’re here for—to lean on each other.” Margo nods like we’ve made a pact.

I nod too.

It is so warm, the three of us, huddled on the bed. The room smells like summer. There are flowers. Lots of them. On the nightstand, on the windowsill.

“Did you go crazy in the gift shop?” I ask.

“Carly and I called all your friends in your notebook to tell them you had the baby. I thought they’d want to know. And then these started showing up.”

There are daisies from Arnie and roses from Cole. All the girls on staff at Ollie’s in Florida sent lilies. Slim sent a basket of violets. And there’s a big vase of sunflowers. I wonder where anyone gets sunflowers like that in November. Margo tells me they’re from Irene and David and July. She says July wants to meet her nephew and they’re all coming to visit me tomorrow. For once, the idea of seeing Irene doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.

— Chapter 71 —

Margo is out getting us lunch because she says no one ever enjoyed a hospital meal before and she doesn’t expect it to happen now. She left me her slippers and wore my boots. She looked hysterical.

Carly is still asleep, and I don’t know how she’s comfortable all wound around the arms of the chair, her hand hanging over the side and I know her fingers will have pins and needles.

The sound of Max’s breath and then Carly’s then Max’s makes me feel like all the air I’m breathing is coming from their lungs. I imagine it making me strong, healing the ache in my guts. It seems like some kind of miracle that a doctor could excavate Max from the depths of me and introduce him to the world—that I am still here to see him after being taken apart and stitched back together.

Max was stuck, Margo said, turned upside down. They were worried about the cord, and my head was bleeding pretty bad and the doctors couldn’t wait on any of it.