The Cover Age, Chapter 22

Georgia took Cover grocery shopping with her. That’s the memory that will torture her the rest of her life. She didn’t have a choice, right? But one of the things that will bother her are the many options she’d still had available to her...

Cover came down with a cold. That’s what Georgia thought. It was about a week after getting her back. She was able to get Cover admitted to the ER, and after waiting for what seemed an eternity, the doctor explained that there could be a problem.

Cover suffered from low-grade asthma, not something that needed to be treated, but it left her less able to run around all the time, the way toddlers do. Georgia had never thought anything of it. It would never have been a problem. But she began to worry now.

It took a few days to get the results back on the virus. They never left the hospital. Cover just kept getting worse. Georgia found herself on a first name basis with the nursing staff. It got to the point where Cover couldn’t breathe on her own at all. She was put on a ventilator. She never went off it.

Georgia never left her side. She sat and cried, and forgot everything else. She pleaded with God. She hadn’t been to church in years, wasn’t even sure she believed any of that anymore, but it no longer mattered. She didn’t have a choice. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. And Cover only got worse.

Four years old...and every second of those four years, even the moments Georgia wasn’t there for, it came flooding back on her. Regret became her companion, sitting next to her at Cover’s bedside. She talked constantly, babbling. It didn’t matter if Cover understood any of it. Georgia imagined she did, believed she took in everything, and if her throat had been unobstructed, would have made a conversation of it. Georgia imagined every sound to mean Cover was trying to do just that, but most of the time, the sound came from elsewhere, often from her own stomach gurgling. But she pretended otherwise, adamantly.

“Sweety, my darling, my baby...”

She kept kept chanting these terms, in the end, at the end.

And then she was alone.