MAGGIE AND CHIP
For what seems like the hundredth time, she reads the last word and looks at him. She can’t tell at this angle if his eyes are open or closed. She stays in her chair and waits and then eats a couple of the chocolates their grandfather left here today. He always brings candy.
“You think that’s how it is?” Chip says after a while, and his voice echoes. “The rabbit getting his legs? The boy forgetting about him mostly but realizing deep down that their time meant something?”
Chip sits up a little bit, and she can tell he’s struggling.
She feels frozen and just stays in her chair and watches him.
“I like when the kid thinks there’s something familiar about the bunny.
You know, Tiger? Like sometimes those hints we get in life—the impulses, the quick flashes from a dream.
I feel like they count for more than we know. ”
Maggie stands. She hears her mother’s polite laugh from the hallway, responding to something one of the doctors is saying.
She walks over to his bed and grabs his hand.
She realizes she hasn’t really held his hand since they were kids.
“I think it’ll be just like that,” she says, and it hurts to talk.
He looks so small lying in that bed. The person who was always taller, always louder, more confident; the person who always had a year’s more knowledge than she did.
She sees one of her tears fall, and it stains his light blanket. But he doesn’t seem to notice. He sinks his head back and he might be falling asleep.
“Except the boy never, ever forgets,” Maggie says.