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call it in the old days.
    She seems ready to resume her clock staring when the callback squawks, “Sorry. We’ll send someone right away.”
    That’s when the girl bolts up from the seat only to run straight into the wall of Nurse Betten in the doorway.
    “What’d you need, Miss Lyn—” Then, looking at the girl, she places her hands on her hips. “And just who are you?”
    The girl doesn’t hesitate. “Charlotte Hill.” Her voice is as small as she is, and husky, as if it has carried her for miles and miles.
    “And just what are you doing here, Miss Charlotte Hill?”
    “They told me to come here.”
    “Who told you to come here?”
    Charlotte Hill shrugs, but Nurse Betten reinforces her stance, having none of it.
    The girl starts to chew her thumb again but lets it down. “The judge.”
    “The judge? This your community service?”
    Some hesitation. “Yeah.”
    “Who are you supposed to report to?”
    A shrug. “I just came in here cuz I saw there was a buncha people.”
    Nurse Betten looks at the clock on the wall, then at her watch as if to confirm the time, and sighs. “I was supposed to be off ten minutes ago. You need to go to the front desk, downstairs in the lobby, and have a talk with Mrs. Buford.”
    “That’s where I went first, and nobody was there. Someone said come back at nine. So I came up here.”
    “Is it nine o’clock?”
    “Almost,” Charlotte says. She seems to have aged five years and gained one hundred and fifty pounds over the course of this exchange, as Nurse Betten takes the slightest step backward.
    “Hm. Must be board meetin’ time. All right then, Miss Charlotte Hill.” She turns the girl around. “Have you introduced yourself?”
    Charlotte looks straight into Lynnie’s eyes for about half a second, then twists her head to look up at Nurse Betten.
    “Can she hear me?”
    Nurse Betten chuckles. “Oh yes, ma’am. She can hear you just fine. Understands everything that’s going on. She just can’t talk.” She lowers her voice and brings Charlotte close to her, bending to whisper in the girl’s multiple-pierced ear. “Strokes do that sometimes—pick and choose what they gonna take away. She’s had three; beat them all.”
    Go on, tell her the rest.
    “First one, just minor, she lost use of one of her hands. But the second? That one nearly took her.” She looks at Lynnie, as if just realizing she’s in the room. “You don’t mind if I tell all this, do you?”
    Lynnie waves her on with the hand God didn’t take.
    “Well, the second one, they lost her for a while.”
    “What do you mean, lost her?”
    “She died. ” Nurse Betten mouths the last word.
    “No way.”
    “The way she told it, she saw the light, walked right into it, saw everyone she loved waiting right there for her.”
    Ma, Pa, Darlene . . .
    “And came right back.”
    “Awesome.”
    As if she could possibly know.
    “Then that’s all she could talk about. How she felt so at peace, how she couldn’t wait to go back and be free of all this pain. She’d say things like, ‘Please, Lord Jesus, take me today.’ Didn’t you, Miss Lynnie?”
    Nurse Betten makes it sound like some kind of joke. How can she know the longing that pierced Lynnie’s heart with every breath? Or the urgency she’d felt? She even tried to get on the Today show, but they hadn’t returned her letters. She’d had a chance, once, to inform the world, and then . . .
    “So when the third stroke came, naturally nobody thought she’d come out of it. But she did.”
    Most of me.
    “Except her voice?” Charlotte sounds disappointed.
    “It’s a shame, too. I hear she used to sing every Sunday in her churchchoir. And now—you don’t mind me saying so, do you, Miss Lynnie? Her face, somewhat. She don’t really smile much. You gotta watch her real close in her eyes.”
    Charlotte does just that, though keeping her distance.
    “So,” Nurse Betten says, patting the girl’s shoulder, “since you have to