Just One Thing by Holly Jacobs

and she wasn’t budging. She stood at the door, where she could watch her sleeping daughter.
    “You have to stop talking about miracles.” Despite his hushed whisper, Lee’s anger was palpable. “Gracie’s made her peace. Our job now is to make it as easy on her—”
    “Easy?” Lexie asked, her whisper strangled with her own anger, which suddenly had a target. “You want me to make it easy on my daughter—my barely sixteen-year-old daughter—to leave me? Hell no. I won’t do it. I’m her mother. I’m here toprotect her, even if that means protecting her from you and everyone else who says there’s no hope. There’s always hope.”
    And just like that, Lee’s anger faded. Lexie had witnessed Lee’s profound sadness in the past, but this was deeper. It was complete.
    “Lex,” he said sadly and moved as if to pull her into an embrace. Or maybe he reached for her to cling to her, like a drowning man grabbing for something to hold on to.
    But Lexie couldn’t prop Lee up. She could barely keep her own head above water. So she yanked herself back from his grasp. “I won’t give up on her.”
    She went back into Gracie’s room and shut the door on Lee. She watched her daughter sleep.
    Gracie. Her baby. Her child.
    Her heart.
    The idea of losing her youngest was so abhorrent, it made her feel physically sick to her stomach.
    She hadn’t been close to God in a long time, but as she sat by Gracie’s bed, she bargained with Him. If He let her daughter get better, she’d go back to church. She’d say a prayer of thanks every day.
    As the days passed, her prayers became more frantic. She begged God to take her and let Gracie live. Anything. She’d do anything, make any deal, if only he’d save her daughter.
    But God wasn’t listening.
    Gracie grew smaller and smaller in that bed. So small that even Chincoteague stories were too big. They didn’t help. Instead, Gracie asked for a few of her favorite storybooks, but rarely could stay awake for something as short as Where the Wild Things Are .
    So small, so tired, so fragile . . .

    “I can’t tell any more tonight,” I said. I could smell that room. Even after so many years I knew that scent. Sam had talked about realizing he was in a hospital because of the smell. That’s how Gracie’s room had smelled at the end. Of medications and antiseptics. Of bodily functions she could no longer control.
    It had smelled of despair. My despair, not Gracie’s. Like her name, Grace had accepted what was coming long before I could.
    “I sat by her bed for a long time and when even the shortest storybook was too long, I talked about going to see the ponies at Chincoteague when she was better.”
    We never went to Chincoteague.
    I choked back my tears and rage at that thought.
    I looked at Sam and tried not to plead as I asked, “Your one-thing?”
    I knew my question sounded desperate. I needed to hear his one-thing, to think about Sam and something other than my daughter.
    “I gave up,” Sam announced.

    Sam sat in the wheelchair, staring out the window at the rolling hills of Pittsburgh.
    It wasn’t that he took note of how picturesque the southwestern Pennsylvanian city was. He didn’t. It was just something to stare at.
    His mother had been in yesterday. She’d talked to him of family news and the small happenings in her life. He thoughtabout responding. Even tried once. But it seemed to take more energy than he had.
    It had been three months since he’d woken up. He’d stopped—stopped talking, stopped being angry and railing against the fates, stopped thinking. He’d stopped it all as completely as when he’d initially arrived at the hospital in a coma.
    The physical therapist came in and manipulated his shattered leg.
    Sam didn’t participate or complain. He complacently accepted the pain as if it were a penance—as if it could somehow help assuage some of the guilt he felt.
    It didn’t work.
    His mother came, day after day, and continued to