Jo answered on the second ring, already mid-shift-change. "Tess? You sound terrible."
"I need the night off. I've got a β a family thing." The word family felt foreign in her mouth.
"You never call out. Is Maya okay?"
"Maya's fine. It's β my mother turned up. In Bed Six."
A pause. Tess could hear Jo doing the math. "The collapse at the bus stop."
"Yes."
"Jesus. Tess." Jo's voice dropped. "You want me to move her? I can have her transferred to another nurse, no questions."
Tess stared at the rain stippling her windshield. "No. Keep me off her assignment, though. I can't be objective and I'm not going to pretend I can."
"Done. And Tess?" Jo hesitated. "Whatever you decide about her β decide it off the clock. Don't do your grieving in Bed Six. I've watched nurses try. It never ends well."
"I'm not grieving," Tess said. "I'm processing."
"That's what grieving people say. Go home. Sleep."
Tess didn't sleep. She drove home through the wet streets of the Alberta Arts District, past the coffee shops opening and the bus stops filling with commuters, and let herself into the quiet house. Maya was already gone β Rob had picked her up for his weekend the night before, a small mercy, because Tess was not fit company for a ten-year-old right now.
She stood in the kitchen and made coffee she didn't drink. Then she did what she'd told herself all night she wouldn't do: she called the neurology floor.
Dr. Susan Lim came on the line ten minutes later. Her voice was calm and precise, the voice of a woman who delivered bad news for a living and had made peace with that.
"You're Diana Marlowe's daughter," Dr. Lim said. It wasn't a question.
"Apparently."
"I admitted her for observation this morning. The fall was minor β no bleed on the CT, no fracture. But Tess, her cognitive picture is what concerns me. Early-stage Alzheimer's, confirmed by imaging and testing over the last eight months. Right now she's lucid, oriented, high-functioning. That window is closing. I can't give you an exact timeline β nobody can β but the rate of decline she's shown suggests months, not years, before the lucid periods become unreliable."
"Months."
"I'm sorry. She listed you as next of kin." A hesitation. "She said you'd need time."
Tess's hand tightened on the phone. "She doesn't get to decide what I need."
"No," Dr. Lim said gently. "She doesn't. But the disease doesn't care about either of you."
Tess was quiet a moment. "Did she say anything β about why she came to Portland? She lived in California. Sacramento, last I heard."
"She didn't tell me much. But Tess β people in her stage sometimes relocate toward the thing they're afraid of losing. A place. A person." Dr. Lim paused. "She chose a hospital where her daughter works the night shift. That doesn't strike me as an accident."
After she hung up, Tess stood in the kitchen with the dead phone in her hand. A bus stop on Hawthorne. Three miles from St. Vincent. Her mother had come to Portland β come back to the city she'd fled under a warrant β and collapsed practically on Tess's doorstep. Accident or design, it amounted to the same thing: she was here now, and the forgetting had a schedule.
She climbed the stairs to the attic.
The suitcase sat in the far corner under the eave, exactly where she'd put it when she bought this house eight years ago. Brown leather, brass corners gone green, the handle cracked. The Portland Greyhound station tag was still tied to the strap, the string frayed to a thread. Tess had carried it out of foster care at eighteen, moved it from apartment to apartment, and finally exiled it to the attic, where it waited like something that knew she'd come back.
She knelt in the dust and put her hand on the lid. She didn't open it.
Her phone buzzed. Maya, from Rob's: dad says i have to practice violin before dinner but i already did can u tell him
Tess smiled despite herself and typed back: Tell him Dr. Suzuki says one practice is plenty. Love you.
is the grandma at the hospital ur mom
Tess stared at the screen. Of course Jo had said something, or Maya had overheard β hospitals were small towns, and ten-year-olds heard everything.
It's complicated, baby. I'll explain when I see you.
ok. love u
Love you more.
She set the phone down and looked at the suitcase. Twenty-seven years. A bus station. A nine-year-old girl with a paper bag of sandwiches and a suitcase she was told not to open until she got to Bend, to Aunt Beth, who would come at noon.
Beth had never come.
Tess thought about what she would tell Maya, eventually. The sanitized version she'd rehearsed for years β your grandmother died β had been a kindness to a small child and a lie to a growing one. Maya was ten now, old enough to notice evasions, young enough to still believe her mother had answers. Tess had spent a decade being the mother she wished she'd had: present, fierce, honest. Honest. The word sat in her chest like a stone. She owed her daughter the truth, or as much of it as a ten-year-old could hold β but first she needed to know what the truth was. Her mother's version, anyway. Thirty days of it.
Tess stood up, her knees cracking, and went back downstairs. She stood at the kitchen window a long time, watching the rain. In her head she heard Diana's voice from Bed Six: Thirty days, Tessie. However much of it you want.
She didn't believe her mother deserved a hearing. She believed, with a nurse's cold clarity, that a dying mind was a closing door, and that whatever was behind it β the truth, or her mother's version of it β would be gone soon either way. Curiosity was not forgiveness. It was triage.
She picked up her phone and texted Jo: I'll come by tomorrow. Tell Dr. Lim I'll talk to her β on my terms. Thirty days. Not a day more.
Then she added, because it mattered: She doesn't get to call me Tessie.
Chapter 3
The Suitcase