“She’s in the ICU,” Alison told her nemesis, a severe Indian woman in teal scrubs.
“Ohhh, the ICUuuuuuuu.” The nurse—for that is clearly what she was, a middle-aged nurse just doing her best in fatal circumstances—resumed typing. “She is in room B-two, that is on the seventh floor of the Leugers Pavilion.”
The shock of finding your mother alone on a respirator in the intensive care unit of an understaffed Midwest hospital would be significant no matter who you are or what your history with your mother might be. And now Alison was fried. It had taken her twenty minutes to find the room, because the Leugers Pavilion, as it turned out, was inaccessible from the elevators in the main building; you had to take the elevator down the hallway from the front desk to the fourth floor and then walk down another hallway, take a left, and then enter a second elevator bank on the right. The whole complex had clearly been constructed by some sociopath with a complete axe to grind on sick people and their pathetic relatives. Finally she located the ICU on the seventh floor after going down the hallway to the left of the elevator bank and then taking the first right, where you went through multiple sets of doors and found yourself in a giant room with little pods of people full of mysterious and dire purposes, pushing giant machines around.
Rose was indeed on a respirator; she was hooked up to several machines that were beeping and flickering peacefully over the rasp of the machine that was breathing into her. Her hair was matted and her face so distorted around the mouthpiece of the ventilator that there was a terrible moment when Alison wasn’t sure that this was her mom after all. But on approaching the bed, she saw Rose’s hand, the tiny gold engagement ring and wedding ring she had let her children play with so often, never taking it off no matter how many times they begged, but letting them twirl it around her slender fingers. You’ll have one of your own one day, she had promised her daughters. That dream had evaporated for Alison by the time she was ten and had already been so fully identified as the family’s rebel. Rebels don’t get married. They turn into spinsters, or Hollywood starlets. It didn’t matter. Her mother’s hand was shriveled and claw-like, clutching at the institutional bedsheets, without thought or consciousness or even memory. Where was Dad? Did he even know yet, that Mom was here?
Something was going on. Rose started to move, her body contorting and kicking. Alison, now at the bedside, could see that her mother’s arms were held down by restraints.
“Mom, I’m here. It’s Alison. Do you need something? What do you need, Mom?” Asking Rose anything whatsoever was of course absurd, as she could hardly be expected to speak with a huge ventilator shoved in her mouth. “You want me to call the nurse, Mom?” Rose’s struggling body became angular and unpredictable. The too-thin hospital gown which had been tossed over her bare limbs had ridden up one hip and for a moment Alison could see her mother’s exposed pudenda, white, flaccid, old. She covered her quickly and looked around the bed, desperately trying to figure out where the stupid button was to call the nurse. She had only been there thirty seconds and already she was failing. “Nurse! I need a nurse!” she finally yelled. It was what they did on hospital shows; eventually everyone just started shouting.
And of course no nurse came. Alison had to run out to the nurses’ station, where there were the people pods and the machines, and then it took her forever to find someone to help. The one unoccupied nurse she finally located was named Patricia. Patricia was sort of both young and middle-aged, impossible to tell how old she was, actually, a little stocky, with a bouffant hairdo—an actual bouffant, in a hospital!—and she wore a white uniform, as opposed to the colorful scrubs everyone else had on. But her attitude was exactly the same as the Indian nurse at the front desk. That was another way actual hospitals were different from the ones on television. On television, everyone raced around and tried to help. In a real hospital, none of the nurses got all that jacked up about anything at all.
Patricia was nice enough, but she wasn’t giving out any extra information. She messed with Rose’s machines until she stopped thrashing about, and then talked to her like she was six years old. “What are you fussing about, Mrs. Moore? You’re being a bad girl now, if you manage to tear your sutures I’m going to be very upset with you.”
“What is the matter with her?” Alison asked.
“She just had major surgery, for one.”