Chapter 18: Same Page

I walked out into the light with the first notebook in my hand.

It was thin and brown, and the cover was cracked down the spine.

The audience clapped, because Kasper had told them to.

He stood and pulled out the second chair beside him, and I did not sit in it.

I stopped at the front of the stage, next to the water pitcher.

"Thank you," I said. "I'll stand."

"Anja," Kasper said into his mic, gently. "Take your time. This is a safe room."

"That's what the show says."

"It's what I believe."

"Then here's something I believe."

I opened the notebook to its first page.

"Six hundred of you have heard a story about a hospice. Episode twelve. A man talking about the night his mother died."

Murmurs moved through the rows.

"A lot of you wrote to him about it. Some of you cried in your cars."

"They did," Kasper said, smiling with his teeth. "It's why we do this."

"I'd like to read you the same page."

"Anja, we have a format."

"It's a short page."

A man in the front row said, loudly, "Let her read!"

I looked at Kasper.

He looked at the room, and he smiled again, because he could not afford not to.

"Go ahead," he said.

I read.

"The hospice smelled like lemon cleaner, and I will never be able to stand lemons again."

My voice came out steady, and I noticed that.

"She was asleep when I got there, and a nurse told me not to expect her to wake."

"I sat on the plastic chair by the window and counted the ceiling tiles. There were forty."

"At three in the morning she opened her eyes and said my name once."

The room had gone very quiet.

"I held her hand until the nurse looked at the clock and wrote down a time."

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