Free Lost by Gary; Devon

didn’t know. She had come to Graylie to spend time with her ailing sister; she could only rejoice that the illness she imagined did not exist, but her purpose had never been to make Emma’s friends her friends, or to be jealous of the time Emma spent with them. It was a delicate, difficult balance: to go along with Emma on her excursions often enough to keep from hurting her feelings, and to not go often enough to remain uninvolved.
    By the end of summer, she had turned Emma down so many times she was beginning to feel self-conscious and guilty. To make amends, she reluctantly agreed to accompany her sister to the hospital to visit a neighbor Leona hardly knew, Rosie Caldwell, who was recovering from surgery.
    They asked for Mrs. Caldwell’s room number at the nurses’ station and had started down the hall past the intensive-care unit when Mamie Abbott wandered out of a room, her bandages coming loose, getting dirty, and Leona veered from Emma’s side to go to her. She took the child’s unbandaged hand and said, “I believe you’re going the wrong way,” and guided her back into the room as nurses darted toward them. Listening to the nurses’ chatter, she realized this was the little girl who had survived that awful fire. A few minutes later, with Mamie safely tucked in bed and the intravenous tube re-attached to her bandaged arm, Leona leaned down to say good night and the little girl grasped her thumb. Leona motioned for Emma to go on without her.
    She kept promising herself she wouldn’t go back to the hospital, but in the middle of the morning or late in the afternoon she would go out for bread or a bottle of milk, or with some other excuse, and drive up the hill to the hospital, looking at the windows, wondering which one was Mamie’s. Late in the night, lying awake, she listened for the spongy whir of the paperboy’s bicycle tires and the wallop of the newspaper on the front porch to mark the time she could leave her hot, disheveled bed without disturbing anyone. She felt reborn.
    More than once in the preceding months when she thought her welcome might be wearing thin, Leona had attempted to leave, but since she really had nowhere specific to go, each time she allowed herself to be talked out of it. The last time—some weeks back—Emma’s appeal had been “Why don’t you stay and help me put up my garden? I always have more than I can do.” Now she waited for the town gossip to inform her of Mamie’s release from intensive care. When word finally came, five days later, she told Emma she wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help, and she went to the hospital.
    In the narrow private room, Mamie lay huddled in bandages beside the covers she had kicked away, her shadowed eyes fixed on some point in the air. An odor rose from the bed—a mixture of disinfectant, scorched ironing, and urine. Leona, sitting in the wing-backed bedside chair, lost her cheerful composure.
    She found a lipstick-smudged teacup on a cleanup tray in the hall. In the bathroom adjoining Mamie’s room, she washed the cup with hand soap and filled it with cold water. The only washcloth in the room had been used and left to dry in rigid folds on a wall hook. With a twinge of regret, she took her lace-edged handkerchief from her purse, dunked it into the cup of water, and wrung it out over the cup. Then she wiped the child’s forehead and cheeks and gently washed the dried milk from her upper lip. “You needn’t worry any more,” she said, her voice sounding as strange and swallowed as a ventriloquist’s. “I’ll stay with you.”
    She dunked the handkerchief again, wrung it out, and folded it twice into a pad, which she held against the small forehead until the cloth felt as feverish as the skin beneath it. Then she did it again. And again. And the blank, staring eyes gradually fell shut. “That’s right,”