Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jannifer Chiaverini Page B

something more we can do,” she said to Lars, falling behind the girls as they led the way downstairs. “I can’t bear to delay a week if there’s a treatment that could help them now.” Miguel was so light in her arms. Sometimes she felt that if she did not cling fiercely to him, he would drift free of her embrace, float away, and disappear.
    Lars looked as if he were about to reply, but when they reached the lobby, he suddenly stopped short. “Girls,” he calledin an urgent undertone, and when they turned to look at him, he beckoned them to hurry back. Quickly he steered them down an adjacent corridor and around a corner. “Wait here.” He ducked back the way they had come and returned a moment later. “We have to find another way out.”
    “Why?” Rosa imagined John pacing in front of the nurses’ station. “Who’s out there?”
    “My brother, his wife, and Elizabeth.” Quickly Lars looked up and down the branching corridor and led them off down the right-hand passage. “This must be where they brought Henry after he was shot.”
    “How did Elizabeth look?” Rosa asked, hastening after him, placing a hand on Lupita’s shoulder to urge her forward more quickly.
    “Upset, dazed—I only caught a glimpse of her, not enough for me to guess how Henry might be doing.” Lars glanced down a hallway branching off to the left, and after a moment’s hesitation, he led them down it. “Mary Katherine had her arm around her. She might have been crying. Oscar was speaking with a doctor.”
    Rosa held Miguel more tightly and quickened her pace. At the end of the corridor, she spotted a door with a small window through which bright sunlight streamed. Lars and the children saw it too, and as they raced toward it they narrowly avoided running into a man in a wheelchair emerging unexpectedly from a doorway. The nurse attending him shouted warnings after them, but they took no heed, and moments later, Lars shoved open the door and closed it behind them, silencing the scolding voice.
    “Why,” asked Lupita, catching her breath, “are we running from Mrs. Nelson? I like her.”
    “I should have thought of this,” Lars berated himself as they hurried around the back of the hospital to the street corner, where they followed the sidewalk to the front parking lot. “I knew they’d taken Henry to the hospital, and of course St. John’s was the best choice for them just as it was for us.”
    “It’s all right,” Rosa said. They reached Lars’s car, climbed in, and drove off as soon as everyone was seated. “They didn’t see us.”
    “They didn’t this time,” said Lars. “Next week we might not be so lucky. It’s a miracle Henry survived that gunshot wound at all, and thank God he did, but we have to assume he won’t be well enough to be discharged before we return to start the children’s treatment. It won’t be easy to sneak in and out of the hospital unnoticed.”
    You don’t have to
, Rosa almost said as he turned the car south onto F Street. Rosa must; she was their mother. Lars could—and should—return home to his family. He had seen Rosa and the children safely from the Salto Canyon to Oxnard, but she could not impose upon his kindness much longer.
    When they turned east on Fifth Street, Rosa spotted a Chinese restaurant and asked Lars to stop. She had never eaten Chinese food before, but she knew they served plain white rice with their meals and that was good enough for her. While she puzzled over the menu, Lars stepped up to the counter and ordered two chicken dishes and one beef as if they were old favorites, but when or how he might have acquired a taste for it, she had no idea. There was so much about the man he had become that she did not know.
    After a brief wait, the order came served in white cartons with wire handles. Rosa was glad to discover that the rice had been packaged separately. She intended to follow the doctor’sinstructions to the letter, and she didn’t want a single drop