Page 99 of Dear Henry, Love Edith
Mama Peace smiled. The expression transformed her face so much she almost looked friendly. Maybe Kaya hadn’t been joking about Mama Peace sneaking in at night in her pajamas to pray over Edith.
But the next moment the smile disappeared, replaced by Mama Peace’s typical frown.“Uyanuka,”she muttered.
Edith was far from being fluent in Xhosa, but... “Did you just tell me I stink?” Not that Edith could argue. Shedidstink.
Mama Peace clucked her tongue. “You can’t go out like that.”
Before Edith knew what was happening, Mama Peace was stripping her down and scrubbing her clean. Edith’s grimy undergarments somehow got exchanged for clean ones. And from somewhere—the woman must be part magician—she retrieved a dress and slid it over Edith’s head.
Edith gazed down at the colorful embroidered designson the ivory material. “Is this how you discharge all your patients?”
Mama Peace stepped back, looking Edith over from head to toe, then back up again. She shook her head. “That won’t do.”
“What won’t—?Ouch.”
Mama Peace had grabbed hold of Edith’s hair, working with deft fingers to transform the tangled mess of knots into some sort of braid. “There,” she said after she finished sometime a quarter of a century later. She stepped in front of Edith to assess her work. “Hmmm... no.”
“Whathmmm no? Mama Peace, I have to go.”
Mama Peace held up a finger, plucked the flower someone had left in a jar next to the bed, then, using a pin from her own hair, attached the flower to the braid in Edith’s hair.
Finally Mama Peace nodded approvingly. “Now you are ready.”
Sure. Henry’s plane was probably two minutes shy of touching down on American soil at this point, but so long as Edith met Mama Peace’s standard for discharge, great. Perfect.
Edith used her last shred of patience listening to her discharge instructions.Never take medications in the dark. Got it.Then leapt from the bed and rushed down the hallway, pausing briefly when she realized she’d forgotten her shoes.
Oh, well. Who needed shoes? She took two more steps before deciding she did. In a world full of spiders, Edith needed shoes.
Unfortunately South African hospitals were apparently as adept at losing patient belongings as American hospitals.It took several staff members and an in-depth investigation worthy of an entireLaw& Orderepisode before Edith’s missing shoes were located in the exact spot she told them to look in the first place.
If she didn’t know any better, she’d think they were stalling her on purpose.
Lacing her shoes tight, Edith refused to let any further delays keep her from getting to Henry. Wherever he was.
She hustled toward the orange-yellow glow of sunset beckoning her down the length of the shadowed hallway. This area must not have gotten its power back from the outage. Good thing she waited for her shoes. Otherwise, this walk might have been creepy.
Who was she kidding? Even with shoes, it was creepy. And dark. And long. Much too long. She’d run if she had the strength.
When Edith burst outside, she sucked in a giant breath, never so glad to step into the light in all her life.
Except the sight in front of her had clutching her stomach as if all her air had been knocked right back out of her again.
What?
An arch, constructed out of broken hospital equipment from the looks of it, stood lopsided and perfect outside the entrance beneath the setting sun.
And beyond the arch, people. Hospital workers. Villagers. Children. All of them together. All of them...singing?
Their smiling faces began to blur as Edith’s eyes filled with tears. “What’s going on?”
“It’s the closest I could get to a softly singing choir of angels.”
Edith hadn’t noticed Henry standing off to the side of thehospital doors. He stepped toward her with that wonderful, beautiful, uneven gait of his.
“Henry.” The tears spilled and ran down Edith’s cheeks. “You’re still here.”
“Of course I’m still here.”
