On the third trip, the generator made a cousin of the sound we’d heard before the bus lights went out. The nurse with the frizzed hair put both hands on the counter and breathed like Zoe had been teaching: in for two, out for two.
“We have three more,” she said.
“Then we have exactly three,” the captain said.
In Room 208, a woman named Lila had polished her nails for a Tuesday that had not gone to plan. “I have a plant,” she told me, eyes on a stubborn philodendron in a chipped blue pot. “He’s been with me longer than some of my husbands.”
I looked at the pot, at her hands, at the water line creeping under the bed frame. “He’s a fighter,” I said. “I’ve got a box on my dolly. He can ride in style.”
We put the plant in a bin beside the oxygen tanks and strapped him like a passenger who knew how to sit still. Lila watched the buckle click and nodded once, grade given, passing.
