I wish you were here, I write again. Which is half true. I wish that he’d been with us all along. Then nothing out of the ordinary would have happened. And maybe then Nick Kelly would be the most exciting thing I ever discovered in Hawaii.

Chapter 22

22

When I was eight, Mom brought me to Take Your Daughter to Work Day at Stanford Hospital. I remember being glad that Mom wasn’t also bringing Afton, and I could simply be myself without any comparison between us. I also remember being thrilled that I’d get an entire day to spend with Mom. And when we were riding the bullet train into Palo Alto, Mom tried to fix my hair, make it lie flat, but she had no experience fixing hair and soon gave up. Instead, she sat down across from me and gave me the back of a piece of paper to draw on.

“Are you excited?” she asked as I tried to capture the inside of the train car in a few lines of the pencil, although I was also looking at Mom, memorizing the angles of her face, for a portrait I wanted to do of her later.

I nodded. I wasn’t sure how this was going to work. I knew she was a heart surgeon, which meant that she cut into people’s chests and worked on their hearts, and my own heart beat fast if I tried to imagine myself watching her do that. All week I’d been trying to prepare myself by watching medical dramas. I’d pictured myself scrubbing in with her, capped and gowned by her side.

“Scalpel,” she’d say, and I would hand her the slender silver blade. I’d peer over her shoulder as she made the cut.

The cut. Whoa. It felt like a test. Would I be tough enough to witness it? Would I puke or faint at the sight of all the blood?

Honestly, I didn’t know.

The train screeched to a stop. “This is us,” Mom said. “Come on.”

At the hospital she took me straight to her office, where Ruthie was waiting.

“Oh, thank god, Ruthie,” Mom said. “Can you do something with her hair?”

Then she disappeared down the hall, a flurry of movement in a white coat.

I sat in Mom’s office in the chair behind her desk as Ruthie worked my hair into a French braid. “Did you know,” Ruthie said as she tugged and smoothed, “that you were born in this hospital? Your mom was so funny. Here she was in labor, but she could not stay still. She ended up waddling over here from the maternity wing, wearing her hospital gown, to check on her critical patients.”