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“Bring me back a Caesar salad with chicken?”

Bree nodded, then looked at Sampson. “John?”

“I’ll come along, see what they’ve got.”

They left with promises to be back soon, and I settled into the chair next to Nana Mama’s bed. I reached through the railing and took her hand again.

“I hope you can hear me, Nana,” I said, choking up at just how small and insubstantial her hand felt in mine. “I hope you can feel all the love here for you and for your life, everything you’ve meant to people and stood for. We’re praying for you. We’re—”

The monitor tracking her heart began to beep wildly.

“Nurse!” I yelled, jumping up. “Nurse!”

But before I even got to the door, the beeping stopped, and by the time the nurse on duty reached the bedside, her heartbeat had returned to normal.

“She’s a fighter,” the nurse said and patted my arm before leaving.

I gazed down at my tiny grandmother and felt wonder at her spirit.

“How many times in your life have you beaten the odds?” I asked her fondly. “How many times have you cheated death, old woman?”

Would she do it again?

28

REGINA HOPE CROSS’S WORLD turned from total blackness to murky shadows to bubbling pale gray; she felt as if she were weakly swimming up out of the depths of a winter sea, tugged this way and that by the tides.

She rose close to but did not break the surface. And she did not open her eyes. But she began to smell things. Cleansers and then something that was more familiar, though she could not identify it.

She began to hear things too. Muffled sounds from above the surface of the foaming ocean in which she swam.

A voice. A male voice that went with the smell. Though his words came to her garbled and slurred, she felt the love in his voice, and she understood at some deep level what he was saying.

How many times have you cheated death, old woman?

The current stirred by his question overtook her, but instead of rushing her forward, it pulled her back through time.

On a sweltering-hot afternoon in June, eight-year-old Regina Hope sat near the back of a Greyhound bus. She was wearing her Sunday best and clutching a cardboard box that held everything she owned.

Her little brother, Wayne, had recently died. And her mother was having “nervous issues” that left her unable to care for Regina and her four-year-old sister, Tia.

Tia went to stay with one of their neighbors in Starksville, North Carolina, but Regina’s relatives put her on a bus and sent her off to live with Bessie Hope, her father’s cousin, who had agreed to let Regina live at her place while her mother recovered.

Bessie would take care of her. Everyone told her that.

But when Regina got off the bus, there was no one waiting for her. So she went inside the bus station and sat and waited.

After two hours, Regina realized no one was coming. She almost cried, but a voice in her head said, Be strong, girl. You’ll get nowhere by falling apart.

Regina had Bessie Hope’s address in her purse along with two Hershey bars. She ate one of them, then found a police officer and asked for directions.

It turned out that the apartment was less than two miles from the station, straight north. Regina walked as the sun began to sink and throw shadows off the tenement stairs she passed.

She reached the address and found number 4 on the first floor. She could hear music playing inside, so she knocked. She had to knock again before the door swung open.

A muscular man wearing shorts but no shirt answered. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a beer in his hand. “What you want?” he asked.

“I’m Regina Hope,” she told him. “I’m looking for my dad’s cousin Bessie.”