Will continued to sit, unmoving, his eyes fixed on Ronnie.
“Give me a second, okay?” she called to Jonah.
Will stood up from the table, looking frightened for her. He knows, she suddenly thought. Somehow he already knows.
“Can you wait for us?” Ronnie began. “I know you probably—”
“Of course I’ll wait,” he said quietly. “I’ll be right here for as long as you need me.”
Relief rushed through her, and she gave him a grateful look, then turned and followed Jonah. They pushed open the door and headed into the otherwise empty corridor, toward the hustle and bustle of the emergency room.
No one close to her had ever died. Though her dad’s parents had died and she remembered attending the funerals, she’d never known them well. They weren’t the kind of grandparents that visited. They were strangers in a way, and even after they’d passed away, she’d never remembered missing them.
About the closest she’d ever come to something like this was when Amy Childress, her seventh-grade history teacher, was killed in a traffic accident the summer after Ronnie had finished taking her class. She’d heard about it first from Kayla, and she remembered feeling less sad than shocked, if only because Amy was so young. Ms. Childress was still in her twenties and had been teaching only a few years, and Ronnie remembered how surreal it had felt. She was always so friendly; she was one of the few teachers Ronnie ever had that used to laugh aloud in class. When she returned to school in the fall, she wasn’t sure what to expect. How did people react to something like this? What did the other teachers think? She walked the halls that day, searching for signs of anything different, but aside from a small plaque that had been mounted on the wall near the principal’s office, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Teachers taught their classes and socialized in the lounge; she saw Mrs. Taylor and Mr. Burns—two of the teachers Ms. Childress often ate lunch with—smiling and laughing as they walked down the halls.
She remembered that it bothered her. Granted, the accident had occurred over the summer and people had already mourned, but when she went by Ms. Childress’s classroom and saw that it was now being used to teach science, she realized she was angry, not only that Ms. Childress had died, but that her memory had been erased so entirely in such a short period of time.
She didn’t want that to happen to her dad. She didn’t want him forgotten in a matter of weeks—he was good man, a good father, and he deserved more than that.
Thinking along those lines made her realize something else, too: She’d never really known her dad when he was healthy. She’d last spent time with him when she was a freshman in high school. Now, she was technically an adult, old enough to vote or join the army, and over the summer, he’d harbored his secret. Who would he have been had he not known what was happening to him? Who was he, really?
She had nothing to judge him by, other than memories of him as her piano teacher. She knew little about him. She didn’t know the novelists he liked to read, she didn’t know his favorite animal, and if pressed, she couldn’t begin to guess his favorite color. They weren’t important things and she knew they didn’t really matter, but somehow she was troubled by the thought that she would probably never learn the answers.
Behind the door, she heard the sounds of Jonah crying, and she knew he’d learned the truth. She heard her brother’s frantic denials and the answering murmurs of her father. She leaned against the wall, aching for Jonah and for herself.
She wanted to do something to make this nightmare go away. She wanted to turn back the clock to the moment the turtles had hatched, when all was right with the world. She wanted to stand beside the boy she loved, her happy family by her side. She suddenly remembered Megan’s radiant expression when she’d danced with her father at the wedding, and she felt a piercing ache at the knowledge that she and her dad would never share that special moment.
She closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears, trying to block out the sound of Jonah’s cries. He sounded so helpless, so young… so scared. There was no way he could understand what was happening, there was no way he would ever really recover. She knew he’d never forget this awful day.
“Can I get you a glass of water?”
She barely heard the words but somehow knew they were directed at her. Looking up through her tears, she saw Pastor Harris standing before her.
She couldn’t answer, but she was somehow able to shake her head. His expression was kind, but she could see his anguish in the stoop of his shoulders, in the way he gripped the cane.