On the third day of visits, Junie conducted an inspection of the hospital room and returned a verdict of boring, but fixable, and the room was accordingly fixed: the bear-in-bed drawing on the bulletin board; a balloon from the gift shop shaped like a banana, chosen for reasons she declined to defend; a paper chain she and the day nurse had made during Everett's nap, looped from the IV stand to the window latch, which made the room, as the nurse said, look like it was throwing itself a small parade. Claire observed that the parade decorations did what the medicine was also doing — they made the place look intended to be left, someday soon, by a man walking out of it — and she observed, further, that Everett had begun asking about discharge dates with the focused interest of an inmate studying a fence, which the staff assured her was the best prognostic sign in the whole building.
Junie visited the hospital the way she did everything: with an agenda, supplies, and total confidence in her welcome. She brought a coloring book for the boring parts, a juice box for Everett (rejected by the nursing staff on grounds of tubing, replaced under protest with ice chips, which she administered with the gravity of communion), and a new drawing, executed that morning at Claire's kitchen table in a fever of composition: a large brown bear in a hospital bed — the bed identifiable by wheels — holding a balloon, attended by a small figure in pink shoes whose label, in Claire's handwriting at Junie's dictation, read BEAR COUSIN, ON DUTY.
"This one's for your wall," Junie informed him, supervising its placement on the bulletin board by the bed, next to a get-well card from the club that featured a motorcycle and a sentiment Del had written and three men had signed and none of them would admit to. "The other one was for remembering. This one's for getting better. They're different jobs."
Everett looked at the two drawings — the new one in crayon on the board, and beside his bed on the tray table, under guard of a water cup, the original, which a nurse had retrieved from his vest and ironed flat with her palm, as one professional to another. "You've got it all organized," he said.
"Somebody has to," Junie said, with a significant look at the room in general, which contained a seven-hundred-dollar-an-hour medical system. "You're just the bear. Bears don't organize. Bears nap and be brave." She climbed, with a nurse's collusion, onto the stool by the bed, and pointed one finger at him. "Growl practice. Quiet one. Hospital rules."
He growled — a hospital growl, scaled to the equipment, barely a rumble in the cave of his chest — and Junie rated it aloud, for the benefit of the corridor: "Four. Out of ten. The sound is right but you're not doing the face." She demonstrated the face. Two nurses at the station lost a professional battle with their own expressions. "You have to think bear thoughts. Think about honey. Think about nobody touching your cave."
Claire watched all this from the chair she had pulled to the window side, where she could see her daughter being a small, competent sun in the room, and see Everett — propped on pillows, gray-threaded, huge and hurt and lit from inside in a way she could date precisely to a forecourt — learning to be orbited. She thought about her rule, the one she had sworn over a sleeping baby six years ago: we stop. She thought about the accounting of that afternoon, the circle of it, his hands in the rain and her daughter's hand on his beard, and she felt the strangeness of being a person to whom the universe had returned a receipt.
She had brought him coffee from the good place by the highway, having extracted the intelligence from Del that the hospital's was an insult to a man who'd been shot for the public. She had brought the newspaper, and a paperback Western from the rack by the cafeteria, because Del had also reported, with the air of a man betraying state secrets, that Everett read Westerns and denied it. She set them out on the tray table with the drawing, arranging the small altar of an ordinary visit, and Everett watched her hands do it and his eyes went bright in a way he didn't bother to hide anymore — from her, anyway — because the hiding had begun to seem, in the light of recent events, like a waste of the time he had left.
"Claire," he said, "you don't have to—"
"I know," she said. "That's how you can tell it's not a debt." She sat back down. "Eat your ice chips, Knox. Bear cousin's orders."
From the stool, without looking up from the coloring book she had appropriated, Junie said, "She's nice, isn't she," in the tone of a woman presenting a house she is selling. "She makes good soup. She knows all the words to the radio. She can't growl at all, but she's practicing too."
"Out of the mouths," Everett said gravely, to the ceiling, and Claire laughed, and the machines beeped on, keeping time, and outside the window the hospital lot filled with the ordinary afternoon traffic of the living — which was, he was beginning to understand, the only country he had ever actually been exiled from, and the door to it had been standing open the whole time, six inches tall, with pink shoes.