The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney Page A

groceries and fast food.
    â€œJust remember what Bronwyn saw,” Carol told their mother. Bronwyn was the psychic’s name. Carol reached over and squeezed their mother’s hand. “Hold on to that, Eileen.”
    Their mother remained expressionless. The detectives left. Julianna remembered the rain, the rain, the rain. It seemed like it rained every day for weeks that autumn. In November they watched the Oklahoma-­Nebraska football game on TV. The players slipped and slid all over the muddy field.
    After Genevieve disappeared, Julianna’s relationship with her mother changed. How could it not? They’d lost not only Genevieve but also an essential part of who they themselves were. The simplest conversation at the dinner table was exhausting, too heavy to carry far.
    How was school.
    Okay.
    Maybe they would have drifted apart anyway, as parents and children often did. Julianna turned thirteen and became a teenager. Her mother studied for her real-­estate license. Julianna left for college. Her mother met a man who liked to fix things, who thought he could fix anything, and a year or so after Julianna started nursing school, her mother and the man moved to California. Julianna’s mother called to tell her about the move, a polite courtesy. Julianna wished her the best. The conversation, thirty seconds, was exhausting.
    Her mother passed away in 2004. Julianna had flown out for the funeral, a small ser­vice at a suburban cemetery on the fringes of the Inland Empire. She laid flowers on the gravestone and felt only what had already been missing for a long time.
    J ULIANNA WAS THINKING about the psychic today because the new anesthesiologist, the one from Russia, wore a silver ring on her thumb.
    â€œI think we are all okay here, then,” she told Julianna. She handed the chart back and noticed Julianna looking at her ring. “You like? It is antique. My grandmother.”
    â€œIt’s very nice,” Julianna said. The anesthesiologist walked away, her sneakers squeaking, and Julianna thought how much she disliked that sound. She disliked the bright, cold lights overhead and the saline bags hanging like organs, fat and glistening, from the skeleton spines of IV stands. The greasy feel of hand-­sanitizer foam and the boxes of latex gloves in different sizes. Small, medium, large, extra-­large, 2XX.
    Julianna, a nurse, basically disliked hospitals. How was that for irony?
    She especially disliked the parts of the hospital that were designed to make you forget you were in a hospital. The blond wood, the framed prints of flowery meadows. As in, Isn’t this a warm, cheerful place? A place where you have nothing to be afraid of?
    Julianna supposed that in the old days hospitals didn’t try so hard to disguise what they were: places where you suffered and died.
    She worked downstairs in Recovery. That was another irony. For Julianna. And for a lot of the patients who ended up there.
    Genevieve would have come up with something funny to say about all the different sizes of latex gloves. Julianna could hear her.
    Poor fella, goes in for a prostate exam and the doctor snaps on a pair of those 2XX’s.
    â€œOh, Nurse!” The elderly woman in number nine. She had summoned Julianna four times in the past thirty minutes.
    â€œHow are you feeling, Mrs. Bender?” Julianna said.
    â€œI’m such a pest, aren’t I? But it’s so chilly in here.”
    â€œYou’re not a pest. I’m glad you buzzed me.”
    Julianna pulled another blanket from the cabinet and fanned it over Mrs. Bender. The surgeon had removed most of the rest of her colon, but her blue eyes were bright and fierce.
    â€œIs my son back?”
    â€œNot yet,” Julianna said. The son: balding without grace, good suit worn poorly, an expression like he’d just swallowed a burp. He’d stepped out forty-­five minutes ago to make a quick call. He’d treated Julianna like