“I’m her daughter,” Alison announced. Nurse Patricia glanced up at that one but again didn’t have a comment. “I just flew in, my sister was here with her yesterday during the surgery but she had to go home to be with her kids, so I’m really catching up here. I just I don’t know anything about the surgery or or or—I don’t know really anything.”
“Her doctor will be by in about twenty minutes,” Nurse Patricia told her. The machine breathing into Rose reasserted its mechanical rhythm as the unconscious woman’s distress eased itself. The nurse checked her watch to make sure, then nodded: Twenty minutes, that’s how long it would be before the doctor showed up. “He can fill you in.”
“Can’t you fill me in?”
“He’ll have more facts.” And with that she was gone. Alison assumed that Nurse Patricia had adjusted Rose’s pain meds, and it was that which had calmed her mother down. But she didn’t know for sure.
When the doctor didn’t show up after twenty minutes, and then thirty, Alison called Megan.
“The doctor hasn’t shown up yet,” she told her.
“I think they’re pretty understaffed there.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been here an hour and I haven’t spoken to anyone about what happened.”
“I know, it’s frustrating. You should have been there when I brought her in, she was really a mess and no one would even look at her for four hours and then they were all like, rush her to surgery, it was so scary.”
“She doesn’t look good, Megan.” This news fell like bricks tumbling out into the universe. The significance and weight of it floated away as soon as the words were uttered.
Megan sighed. “Well, what do the nurses say?”
“They don’t seem to want to tell me anything.”
“Did you ask?”
“I did, but—”
“You have to ask them really nicely. They’re not supposed to tell you things, but if you are super friendly and polite, usually one or two will let you know a few things, they know a lot.”
“Okay, I’ll try, but—”
“They think that because you’re so young and you’re a girl they don’t have to tell you, they actually think that. When Dad gets home, he’ll be in a better position to take care of things,” Megan promised.
“Have you talked to Dad?”
“They told me they were getting a message to him, up at that fishing lodge, but he hasn’t called yet.”
“Megan, I’m here in the ICU and it doesn’t look good. She looks bad. I think people should come.”
“What people?”
“Everybody,” Alison said. “Jeff and Andrew and, everybody. This is serious.”
Megan was an innate skeptic. Plus, she was exhausted.
“But you haven’t talked to the doctor yet.”
“I can’t find the doctor!”
“Just sit tight. Don’t go to the bathroom. If you miss them, it’s hours before they show up again.”
“YOU CAN’T USE YOUR CELL PHONE IN THE ICU!” Nurse Patricia suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the door behind her, and she was finally worked up.
“I got to go,” Alison muttered, and tapped the phone off.
“You cannot make phone calls in here.” Nurse Patricia was staring at her as if she expected Alison to leave. Alison stared back.
“Yeah, okay, I won’t make any phone calls in here,” she said. She held the phone up and then dropped it into her purse. Pissed, Nurse Patricia went back and checked her mother’s vitals. Alison stepped forward, tentative. “How’s she doing?” she asked. “Is the doctor coming?” Now proving a point, Nurse Patricia silently continued her procedures, checked her watch, and left the room.
I wonder why it’s so easy for me to piss people off, Alison thought. She sat in the chair next to her mom, and reached up and held her hand. Her skin was so fragile, her hand clawed, the knuckles prominent. It was the hand of an old woman.
She had missed seeing her mother growing old. When she started insisting that she couldn’t come to Cincinnati anymore—I don’t have the money, Mom, I have an audition this weekend, I have to be in LA—Rose had done her best to fill in the blanks. She called every week, whether or not Alison called her back. She sent birthday presents, packages full of cookies Alison couldn’t eat and old-fashioned photos of all her kids and grandkids, the ones who actually did make it back to Ohio for Christmas. And Alison had just blocked it all out, let the rift establish itself. Movie stars don’t have families from the Midwest. For a moment Alison had the urge to climb up in that bed and wrap her arms around her mother’s tortured body, give her a hug, hold her, tell her stories, apologize. But she knew that she’d just wreck everything. Nurse Patricia would come in and yell at her. Megan would hear about it and roll her eyes. Besides which, she probably would just yank out Rose’s IVs and kill her. So that was a bad idea. Better just wait for the doctor.
Who, when he did show up, was not reassuring or even clarifying. Young, bespectacled, and Jewish—he wore a yarmulke—he managed to be both serious and evasive.