I grabbed my keys and my purse and a sweater off the hook by the door. I didn’t pack anything. I didn’t even turn off the kitchen light.
Emily was twenty-one. A junior at Halston University, four hours north. She was studying environmental science. She wanted to work for the park service someday, and I’d spent most of her childhood driving her to nature centers and pretending to be interested in salamanders.
She’d been feeling sick for weeks. She’d mentioned it on the phone. Tired. Headaches. Not sleeping well. I’d told her to drink more water and go to bed earlier, the way mothers do.
Now I drove up the dark highway with both hands gripping the wheel and that sentence going around and around in my head.
Drink more water and go to bed earlier.
What kind of mother says that when her daughter has a heart problem?
My name is Diane Walsh. I’m fifty-two years old. I’ve been a dental hygienist for twenty-six years.
I raised Emily mostly on my own. Her father, Greg, left when she was five. He moved to Arizona with a woman from his office and sends a birthday card most years, usually late. Emily stopped expecting much from him a long time ago.
So it was the two of us.
For sixteen years, I worked extra Saturdays and took every overtime shift the practice offered, and I put money into a college account every single month. Even the months when the car broke down. Even the year my mother got sick and I was driving back and forth to her nursing home three times a week.
Fifty dollars. A hundred. Two hundred, when I could.
When Emily got into Halston, the account covered most of her first two years. Scholarships covered part of the rest. Emily worked at the campus library ten hours a week and saved everything she made for rent and groceries.
She was careful with money. She’d always been careful. She once returned a sweater because she found the same one eight dollars cheaper online.
That’s why the number didn’t make sense later. When I finally had time to think about it.
But at midnight on that highway, I wasn’t thinking about money.
I was thinking about the day she was born. How tiny she was. How the nurse put her on my chest, and she grabbed my finger with her whole hand.
I was thinking that I couldn’t lose her.
I stopped once for gas, a little after one in the morning.
While the pump was running, I called the clinic. A sleepy receptionist answered.
“I’m Emily Walsh’s mother. She’s having heart surgery in the morning. I’m on my way. Can you tell me anything?”
There was a pause on the other end. A long one.
“Ma’am, I’m not able to share patient information over the phone. You’ll have to speak with her or her care team when you arrive.”
“But she’s okay? She’s stable?”
“She’s resting comfortably.”
Resting comfortably. I held on to those two words for the rest of the drive.