"He actually waved at me, and it was the first time I had seen him all semester. I seriously couldn't stop smiling, I was that relieved we were okay. Then, while I was walking with this goofy grin on my face, I totally forgot what my room number was. I felt like a dork."
"Relief is all you need sometimes," I said, looking up from the potato I was peeling, and Risa laughed before rolling her eyes.
"Very true, until your professor gives you a dirty look for being three minutes late."
"You really forgot where you were going?" I thought she had meant it as an expression, emphasizing the dream world she so often lived in and told her stories through.
Risa nodded, throwing a piece of cabbage at me. "Yep, I did. I sure did."
It was a nice day for a picnic, the sky completely covered by wispy clouds but not enough to completely block out the sunlight. Risa was lying down on the grass towards the edge of the field, laughing and repeatedly insisting the six-year-olds around her to listen up. Lock was helping Mary carry food out from the cafeteria inside the building, the squeaky back door propped open by Walker, the janitor. Parents were just starting to arrive, and the ones who were already here whispered quietly to each other a few feet away from the big tent and field where their kids were running around or already eating.
A little girl came up to me, asking if I could help her open her juice bottle. As I took off the cap and handed over the bottle, I couldn't help but realize the days were starting to get chilly; summer was slowly coming to an end and college was crawling in just around the corner. I immediately felt alarmed, wondering if I still had time to buy school supplies, if my dormmate and I were going to get along okay, if classes were going to be overwhelming. One of the staff workers came then, running with a cell phone in her hands, looking alarmed.
"Emma!" she called. "Is Emma here? I have a doctor on the line."
My mind rapidly returning to the present, I stood up slowly while Lock and Mary both turned around to stare at me from the food table. The little girl's juice cap fell from my lap, and she reached under the table to retrieve it.
The staff worker sprinted over, running her hands through her tangled hair. "It's the doctor, it's your grandfather, he's in the hospital," she whispered, her words tumbling out so fast I could hardly catch up. "They said it wasn't an emergency but they needed for you--"
"I got it," I said as she pressed the phone into my hand, even more worried than I was. "Thanks."
* * *
By the time I got back from the hospital, two and a half hours later, there were still three or four children sitting around, their parents absorbed in a deep conversation. Risa was cleaning up the arts&crafts table but she noticed me just standing there and strode over. "How do you feel?" she asked, putting down a bucket of sanitizer, and I gazed across the field, emptied of the children we had worked with all summer and instead littered with juice boxes and aluminum foil. Coy robins flew down from nowhere, timidly poking at bread crust and fluttering off when the squirrels came.I considered how to answer this, because the past three hours had been a huge blur.
"Are you still worried? A little tired?"
"I guess I'm relieved," I said simply, and she broke into a satisfied smile, her arms coming around my shoulder. I didn't say anything and she didn't either. She sat us down and we stayed like that for a while, and when Lock looked on from sweeping the sidewalks, a little anxious, she smiled at him too to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. After a few minutes, I said, "I feel like if I nodded off now, I could sleep forever. There's just too much to think about." And there was. But if anything, I did know that the world wasn't going to end right away, with this summer slowly coming full circle to completion. Everything was returning back to the way it had been, the changes that had come leaving without a trace, noted only in our new smiles and memories.
"I'm glad, though," Risa said, and then she winked at me. She tousled my hair as if she were my mother, or an older sister, letting me know she was going back to work, and then leaned over to retrieve her bucket. "Relief is all you need sometimes, after all."
