If it is serious, why don’t they tell me that?
This went on for hours. Alison continued to update Megan, and get her own updates—they finally got through to Dad and he would be on a flight from Anchorage tomorrow, it was going to take at least eighteen hours to fly him from his fishing lodge, which was out in the middle of nowhere. Reinforcements were on the way, but Megan herself couldn’t get there before five, maybe not even that soon, she still hadn’t landed a babysitter. Lianne was driving down from Chicago sometime tomorrow. The possibilities of even one other sibling showing up any sooner were dicey; everyone was too far away; there were kids, and planes, and problems. Alison spent a lot of time holding Rose’s hand and whispering nice things, it’s okay, Mom, Dad’s on his way back, I love you, you’re doing great, the doctors say you’re fine, it was nothing, undiagnosed diverticulitis! You’ll wake up pretty soon. She kissed her head and stroked her hair. The nurses came and went without report.
At one point, Rose squeezed Alison’s hand. It was not much of a squeeze, but it was real; she didn’t imagine it. She squeezed her mother’s hand back with both of her own, delighted there was finally a sign.
“Hi, Mom. Hey, hey!” she said, cheerful. “I’m here. It’s Alison. Wow, you have so put us through it, hey!” Rose’s eyes were half open, the pupils skittering under delicate lids. Alison felt a rush of adrenaline. Rose was coming back. She reached over and banged the call button for the nurses, which she had finally figured out how to use. “Okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll just get someone in here right now, to take care of you. You’re fine! You’re going to be fine.”
Another ten minutes, but Nurse Patricia did manage to make a pretense that she had hurried over.
“Something going on with our girl?” she inquired.
“She squeezed my hand!” Alison told her. She fucking hated Nurse Patricia by now but she was also desperate to tell anyone good news. “And her eyes are open. She knows I’m here. I think she’s waking up.” Nurse Patricia was predictably unimpressed by this but she went to Rose’s bedside and looked her in the face. “Rose?” she asked, loudly. “Can you see me, Rose? Can you squeeze my hand, Rose?” Having taken Alison’s place at Rose’s bedside, she somehow made the possibility that Rose was actually in there a more distant reality. “Give me a squeeze, Rose,” she ordered. “I really need you to give me a squeeze.”
After a whole thirty seconds of this kind of encouragement Nurse Nightmare stepped back and considered Rose where she lay, the respirator pumping away. “You should ask the doctor when the ischemia set in, and what caused it,” she announced. “It’s usually the sign of something bigger going on.” She started to leave. Alison felt her chest constrict, as if an elephant had decided it was time to finally squash her completely. Nothing in her insanely fucked-up career had ever felt as truthfully bad as what that nurse just said, but at the same time, it felt real, like there were terrible things happening here, but they were real terrible things, that she was responsible and she had to do the best she could.
“Please don’t—please, sorry,” she said. “Sorry. We don’t, my father is out of town and I don’t know even, isn’t there someone we can talk to, about what is going on here?”
“Does she have a GP?” Nurse Patricia asked. “Do you know anybody on staff here? Sometimes it helps to have a doctor with a personal relationship, just to get things sorted.” She didn’t look at her, but Alison got the message. Who do you have on the inside? You better have someone, or we’re just going to let your mother die.
Who knows if that was what was being said? Alison was out of her depth. She made the only phone call that was available to her.
Van picked up.
“Hi—yes, hi, uh, Van? This is Alison Moore, Kyle’s friend?”
A surreal silence bloomed on the line.
“Sure, Alison, I remember you,” Van said. Just as poised and appropriate as ever. Even cheerful. “How have you been? Are you in town?”
That was vastly better than anything Alison could have hoped, aside from Kyle picking up the phone himself. “Yes, I am. My mother’s ill,” she explained.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Could I speak with Kyle? I tried him at his office and they told me he had already left for the day. And I, it’s very complicated here at the hospital, I really don’t know how to get any of these doctors to just tell me what’s going on. And I thought, maybe Kyle, I’m sure he knows someone on staff over here, or at least, because he’s a doctor one of them might talk to him.”
“What hospital is it?”
“Jewish.”
“I don’t think he knows anyone there.”
“Could I just talk to him?”