“Doctor,” she said. “We’d like to be alone with our daughter.”
“Ms. Gilchrist is my patient,” he said.
“She is on medication,” my father said. “She isn’t herself.”
He took out a single page and a pen and laid them on my tray table, the way my mother had once laid down a folder.
“Sign this,” he said. “Then we’ll take you home.”
The page was thick and cream-colored, with a gold seal in the corner.
A woman I half recognized stood behind them, clutching a leather bag to her chest and a notary stamp inside it.
My cousin Sherry.
My mother leaned down until her pearls swung over my face.
Her perfume was sharp and sweet and exactly the same as it had been thirty-one years earlier.
“Sign it,” she said softly. “Or don’t come home.”
PART 2
Nobody in that hospital room moved.
The monitor beeped.
I looked at the page on my tray table.
