“Family are the worst,” he warned. “They’ll want to talk about it. They’ll want to try and make you feel better, but it will end up making you feel worse.”
“So, like, the only thing I can do for the next three days is hide in my apartment and drink water,” she noted. “That’s great. Five years of starvation and acting like a Barbie doll and and and being nice to the stupid reporters following me everywhere and wearing all those tight dresses and not acting, none of any of that was real acting, and and and now, now nothing. The only thing I can do is nothing. Because it doesn’t matter that I didn’t do anything wrong. I just I just—fuck it. Fuck all of it. I mean seriously, cheers. Cheers, it’s so much fun being a movie star, seriously, it’s a fucking blast.” She picked up her plain little glass of water and toasted him.
On the side table, her cell started buzzing.
“Don’t answer it,” he warned.
“It’s my sister Megan,” she sighed. “It’s fine. I’m just going to get this over with.”
twenty-five
MOM WAS SICK. Dad was out of town, off fishing somewhere in Alaska of all places; all the kids had chipped in and given him this stupid fishing trip for his seventieth birthday. So they were still trying to get ahold of Dad. And Mom was sick. They were operating.
Alison couldn’t tell how sick Mom was—she was only sixty-eight, her health had always been excellent—but the story that Megan told was not so great.
“It’s something in her colon.”
“Something like what kind of something? Like cancer?”
“No, it’s not cancer. It’s, the whole colon shut down.”
“What do you mean, shut down?”
“I don’t know, Alison, it apparently shut down. She was having like a bad stomachache, and she called last night and we took her to the hospital and they did a bunch of tests and then they said they had to operate because there was a blockage.”
“A blockage is cancer.”
“The surgeon said it wasn’t cancer.”
“Who’s the surgeon?”
“Dr. Webster. Weathers. Wiggans. I’m sorry. I’ve been up for thirty-six hours.” You couldn’t get mad at Megan; she sounded exhausted and there was some baby screaming in the background. At a time like this, you couldn’t get mad.
“I’m coming home.”
“I’m not sure that’s, the doctor said she came through the operation pretty good and they think she’ll come off the respirator today—”
“She’s on a respirator? Sorry sorry I’m not yelling, sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t know if you have the money? But if you want to come home for a few days, that would be good.”
“Who’s at the hospital now?”
“Well—no one,” Megan admitted. “But she’s anaesthetized. They said they’d call when she wakes up.”
Of course there were more specifics than that, but they didn’t seem relevant. Alison took a cab out to LaGuardia and got herself on the first plane home.
It was six in the morning. The flight was fluid, effortless, and before she knew it the air around her dinged and the two tired attendants started to sweep the plane for empty water bottles. Alison was so used to the five-and six-hour flights between New York and Los Angeles, it was startling to hear that they were making their descent after little more than an hour in the air. It was nothing, really, to fly to Cincinnati. By the time she climbed into the rental car she found herself focused and increasingly secure. The highways were open, featureless, easy to drive. Thirty minutes later as she turned into the virtually empty hospital parking lot her brain started to unfreeze. Megan hadn’t really been all that upset on the phone, and no one else seemed to think this situation was serious. It was good that somebody came home to help out until Dad was back, but Mom was surely going to be fine.
Her completely fabricated self-confidence hit a roadblock at the front desk, where hospital ambiance hit her like a ton of bricks. It was like a third-rate casting office—the furniture was lousy, the light a horrible shade of green, the assistants peculiarly unhelpful. Rose had come in with Megan to the emergency room, and then gone to surgery, after which she was admitted to the hospital proper. Now, apparently, no one knew where she was. The name of her doctor was also not clear. There was a surgeon and an anesthesiologist, but one was off site and the other was making his rounds and was unavailable for consultation. Alison felt a kind of sick panic rise up in her. After months and years of playing the role of a Hollywood starlet, she knew how to smile her way through bullshit and pretend it was all fine. Smile and gush. Smile and be humble. Smile and listen. But the cruel dismissal of a studio exec who thinks you’re nothing and wants you to make sure you know that you’re nothing paled next to this automaton who didn’t seem to care that her mother was lost somewhere in this grimy fluorescent hospital.
The answer to the mystery was finally solved by a call to Megan.
“She’s in the ICU,” Megan announced. “Tell them she’s in the ICU.”