Chapter 12: Since April

Maisie held the microphone in both hands and looked out at the hall.

Nobody coughed or shifted a chair.

"Thank you, Shanna," she said.

Her voice shook, but it carried.

"She's right about all of it. I'm the one who's sick."

My mother moaned somewhere in the crowd.

"I want everybody to hear one thing before anything else happens tonight."

She turned her head and found our father.

"I'm not angry at you, Dad. I'm going to ask you a question later, and I want you to think about it until then."

My father stared at her, gray-faced, with his mouth open.

"Maisie," he said. "Baby, put that down."

"I'm not done."

She took a breath, and I saw her ribs lift and stall.

"Shanna has been..."

The microphone dropped out of her hand and hit the stage with a crack that went through the speakers.

Her knees folded.

I caught her before her head touched the boards.

She was burning hot and weighed nothing, and her eyes had rolled halfway up.

The hall exploded.

"Call somebody!"

"Maisie!"

My father came up the steps in two strides and reached for her.

"Don't touch her," I said.

I had never used that voice on him.

It was the voice I used at work, flat and fast, the one that makes drunk men and screaming mothers shut up and listen.

He stopped with his hands in the air.

"Joyce, stay in your seat. Someone call nine-one-one and give them the Elks hall on Mill Street."

I kept my hands on my sister.

"Tell them a twenty-two-year-old woman with end-stage liver failure has collapsed."

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