I didn’t get to say goodbye to my parents. There was just a hospital room and a bed that I woke up in, and Aunt Lynette sitting beside me, weeping. I reached up and felt my face; instead of skin I touched bandage. I kept thinking my parents were going to walk through that hospital room door, worried sick, sorry they had been away so long. They never came. Five days later I went home, to Lynette’s home, that is. Every day I waited for their car to pull into Lynette’s driveway. It never did.