Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle Page B

hurt, too. I’ve seldom
seen your mother as upset as she was last night. You were a pretty horrible sight staggering down that lane. You scared John half out of his wits.”
    â€œWill you tell John I’m sorry?” I whispered.
    â€œI think John knows that. He asked me to tell the same thing to you.”
    â€œDid Rob pray for me last night?” I asked, hugging Elephant’s Child.
    â€œKnowing Rob, can you doubt that he did?”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    Daddy grinned. “He demanded very severely of God to make you get well quickly and come home and die of old age. Lie back, Vicky, and relax. You’re going to need—and want—a good deal of sleep and rest for the next couple of days. Remember when Rob was about two? And we were all out in the orchard, and I was going on about something, a long speech about how the trees should be sprayed and pruned, and all about various kinds of sprays, and I paused to catch my breath, and Rob remarked loudly, ‘Amen’? We all laughed, and it was one of his very first words.”
    I smiled, as Daddy had intended me to, though sort of weakly, sort of with my eyes and nose, if you know what I mean, because it hurt so to move my lips.
    â€œMother’ll be down to see you during visiting hours this afternoon,” Daddy said. “I’ve got to go now, Vic; I have other patients to see. Try to rest. Try to be good.”
    â€œI am trying,” I said.
    He held my hand firmly in his. “Yes. The nurses have all said that you’ve been a good girl, brave and not complaining. I
like to be proud of you, Vicky, and not ashamed.” He bent down and kissed me, and left.
    The funny thing was that I went to sleep almost as soon as he left. I woke up when lunch was brought in, and one of the nurses tried to feed me some soup, but I couldn’t eat that, either. Some of the other doctors, friends of Daddy’s and Mother’s, stuck their heads in the door to say hello to me, but I didn’t feel much like talking. I felt all kind of knocked out. I closed my eyes and kept going to sleep, not really a proper, good sleep, just kind of a gray doze, but while I was dozing I didn’t hurt so much. Then I woke up and found Mother sitting by the bed. She’d brought down a book John had sent me, and cards the little ones had made me, and another book from Nanny, but I didn’t want to read or even be read to. I just lay there holding Mother’s hand and I kept wanting to cry, but I didn’t. And I wanted again, as I’d wanted the night before, to be young and small enough so that Mother could pick me up and hold me in her arms and rock me the way sometimes she still rocks Rob because he enjoys so much being a baby.
    She sat there and the snow kept on falling outside the windows, and I knew that as soon as the others came home from school they’d be out with the sled, and John would be furious because he couldn’t get out on his skis.
    And I was homesick.
    After Mother left, it snowed harder. There was a light outdoors and I could see the snow falling against it, whirling and swirling wildly from both poles at once, and every once in a while I could hear a sharp crack as a weakened branch snapped off and fell to the ground. I knew that at home the ground in
front of the house would be littered with twigs and branches from the elms; it always is when there’s much wind. And the snow would sift in through the upstairs bathroom window right through the storm window. And in the morning the snow would be swirled into drifts and there would be patches of lawn blown bare. And I wouldn’t be there.
    One of the nurses brought me in some more soup then, and I thought of everybody getting ready for dinner at home and Suzy helping Mother fix a tray for John and trying to get John to pretend he was in a hospital and she was a doctor. But I was in the hospital, and Suzy, being under twelve, couldn’t come