Adopted

Chapter 100

We brought Jess home Friday morning. She had to come home by ambulance - well, patient transport, not an emergency ambulance - because she was too unstable to come home by car. She couldn't sit up on her own really, anyway.

The bed had been delivered on Thursday afternoon and Kathleen, the day nurse had arrived at 9 am on Friday to get herself set up and go over a few things with Sarah while I waited for the patient transport and came home and with Jessica.

She was still able to speak to some extent, but would lose words. Or her train of thought. I could see she would get frustrated sometimes that she couldn't get a word out.

We introduced her to Kathleen, who spoke to her as if she were a normal 16 year old. She didn't talk in a condescending tone or dumb down her language. If she thought Jessica didn't quite catch or understand what she was saying, she'd just reword it or ask Jess if she understood.

My parents came Friday night. They beeline to Jessica's bedside. Her eyes widened and lit up when she saw them.

"Papa!! Ganny!" She said.

"Hello my angel," my dad said, sitting on the bed beside her and hugging her. "Did you read a newspaper this week?"

She frowned at him.

"No papa. I sick," she said.

"How about we read the paper together?" He asked.

"Yeh. Okay," Jess said.

My dad got our copy of the LA Times, picked Jess up out of her bed and settled her beside him on the couch. She leaned on him, my mom took her hand, and they read the paper together. My dad would ask Jess questions about the article he'd read, and she'd answer as best she could. Her speech was slurred and stilted, but she was still speaking and answering coherently enough.

Pete came by on Saturday.

"Hey little Urie," he said, as he hugged her from her place in the couch with my dad. "How's it going?"

"Unka Pee!" She exclaimed, hugging him.

"Well, that's a new one," Pete smiled. "You causing trouble for your old man?"

Jess smiled an impish smile.

"I tubble," she laughed.

Jessica's friends all came over on Saturday and we'd invited them to come enjoy the pool, even though Jess couldn't. She sat bundled up in blankets, cuddled into my dad, on the lounge chair outside talking and laughing with her friends.

At some point, I noticed I didn't see Astrid sitting with the group. I went into the house, thinking maybe she'd gone to the bathroom. I heard a noise from Jessica's room and went upstairs.

Astrid was sitting on the floor against Jess's bed, her arms around her knees, her head down, crying.

"Hey kid, what're you doing up here?"

She looked up and wiped her eyes, trying to hide the evidence that she'd just been crying

"Sorry. I, got lost?"

"Right," I said, sitting on the floor beside Astrid, "You don't have to hide up here and cry. We try to hide it from Jess, although she knows what's happening. You can always come to us. Believe me. We do enough crying, sometimes it's nice to have someone different to cry with."

"I'm really gonna miss her," Astrid said. "I kinda gave her a hard time when we were kids because, well, she could take it. She never backed down. At first I thought 'great. Celebrity kid in my class. That's what we need. Another spoiled brat.' But she wasn't. She was nice, and so normal. Wicked smart but humble, you know? You could tell her stuff and she wouldn't tell anyone else. And she always remembered stuff. Birthdays, if someone had something coming up that was important, she'd always remember to ask after that person. Like when Joshua broke his arm in ninth grade, she asked him to call her after his doctor's appointment ti see if he got his cast off. How did she remember that stuff?"