this moment in a thousand different ways. In none of them had my mother seemed so small. Evelyn Mercer lay beneath a white blanket, her face pale and thin, an IV taped to her hand.
Her eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t wake.
But it was her.
“Mom?”
Her eyelids fluttered, but she didn’t wake.
My knees weakened. I caught the bedrail to keep myself standing.
“Who are you?” I demanded. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” Tears filled the woman’s eyes. “We found her.”
Her name was Margaret, and the man was her husband, Thomas. Several weeks earlier, they had been driving home when they spotted my mother wandering beside a road outside town.
“We found her.”
She was barefoot, disoriented, and unable to say where she lived. She had no purse, phone, or identification.
They called an ambulance and followed it to the hospital.
“She wouldn’t let go
