There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Thirty-seven


As Evie’s taxi drove up the East Side on the way to the hospital, meter ticking, Evie called Ginger to tell her that their mother was in intensive care; then she scrolled through her calendar of meetings for that day and the next and sent out regrets that she’d be unable to attend.

“Ma’am?” the taxi driver said. Evie looked up. The driver was looking back at her. The taxi had pulled up in front of the hospital. “That’s fifty-six dollars even.”

Moments later she was inside, following the signs to intensive care.

The glass double doors of the intensive care unit were locked. Hanging on the door was a clipboard with a sign-in sheet. Evie wrote her mother’s name and her own. Then she pressed the nearby buzzer. A nurse came to the door. She looked tired, her eyelids puffy and sagging.

“I’m Sandra Ferrante’s daughter,” Evie said.

The nurse led her to one of the beds in the back where Evie’s mother lay completely still. An IV tube was attached to her arm, and what looked like an oversize clothespin was clipped to her index finger.

Evie pulled up a chair to her mother’s bedside. “Mom?” she said. Her mother’s closed eyelids quivered. “Can she hear me?” Evie asked the nurse.

“Maybe. It’s always a good idea to assume they can.”

Evie looked at one of the monitors to which her mother was attached. There were numbers—85 and 72—on the readout. Evie had no idea if that was bad or good, but the steady iridescent-green wave pattern that laid itself out over and over again on the screen was reassuring.

“That’s showing us her oxygen levels and her heart rate,” the nurse said. “Right now she’s good. Much better than when they brought her in a few hours ago. An alarm will sound if—”

A high-pitched alarm sounded from a monitor several beds away. “That’s my cue,” the nurse said, hurrying off.

Evie turned back to her mother. “Mom? It’s me, Evie. I’m right here. And Ginger is on her way.” She touched her mother’s arm and gently brushed hair off her forehead. Her mother’s eyelids didn’t even flicker.

Evie had never been in an intensive care unit before. She glanced at the bed closest to her mother’s. A very old woman lay there, her cheeks and eyes sunken into her skull. She was hooked up to a ventilator that wheezed and hissed and thumped as she breathed in and out, along with an entire bank of additional monitors. No one was by her side except a nurse, bending over her and raising her eyelid.

Evie looked away, then around at the rest of the unit. Every other bed was occupied, every patient connected to devices in what felt like some kind of purgatory. How long did the hospital keep patients here before giving up? she wondered. How many of these people would bounce back?