“Hello,” she said. In high school, in that household of millions, she always had seemed to be the one to pick up the phone.
“Alison, yes, hello,” he said. “Hi, it’s Kyle.”
“Kyle,” she said. “Hello, Kyle.”
They could still say hello to each other. The past and the present started to merge.
“I heard you called, that your mother was ill?” he said. “How is she doing?”
“She died,” said Alison.
twenty-seven
YOU COULDN’T BLAME KYLE. He was such a relentlessly decent guy, he had come to the funeral. There he was, at the back of the church, braving his way all the way up to the side of the coffin to say good-bye, expressing his condolences to her thousands of relatives. She managed to avoid talking to him at the visitation and the Mass—there was a lot going on, after all—but when he showed up at the graveside, she knew she wasn’t going to get out of this. And she wanted to get out of it. She didn’t want to talk to him, she really didn’t; having a talk with Kyle at this point in time wasn’t going to help anybody. But there he was.
He was still so good looking. And sad. Why would a successful doctor with three beautiful children look so sad? Well, it was a funeral, so everyone looked pretty sad. Except for Alison, who was just pissed off. They had all somehow managed to move through the shock of Rose’s sudden illness and death with courage and humility, but Alison was the one who had been there, that long horrible day, and she still hadn’t released the terrible sense that more could have been done, that people weren’t paying attention, mistakes were being made not because those doctors and nurses were incompetent, but because they didn’t understand that Rose was young, it wasn’t time for her to die.
Of course by now her death was inevitable, that was all that anyone could see. You couldn’t go back in time and say, put her on a different antibiotic, that infection should have been brought under control faster. Or, the surgery didn’t have to be done on an emergency basis, it released too much bacteria into the body from the cutting, which is why the sepsis set in, if they had waited they could have prepared her, made sure her intestines were empty. Or, maybe they could have been more cautious in how much of the intestine they took out. There was too little prep time and yes of course the doctor didn’t want to leave dead tissue in there but taking out as much as he did undermined her whole system. If they had just waited a day.
That last bit she couldn’t say out loud because Megan had been there, she was the one who had told Rose she should go ahead with this. It wasn’t Megan’s fault, there was no way she could have known that there were other ways to approach this situation and Mom might not be dead now. And no one of course would even whisper that Alison hadn’t been proactive enough, she should have gotten more attention faster from the hospital staff and maybe she could have stopped Mom’s whole system from going into arrest. No one would ever ever suggest the hospital had been incompetent and Alison hadn’t done enough. People would do that in New York. In Cincinnati it would be rude, to accuse a hospital of laziness or ineptitude or anything, those people worked hard, death is a part of life, you accept that and don’t blame anybody. But Alison felt the full weight of it. Her mother was dead, and nobody had really done anything to stop it. It was her fault. She couldn’t get them to save her. And now there they were, on a cool wet day, standing around a hole in the ground, listening to yet another priest read exhausted verses out of the Bible, reassuring them that Rose’s spirit had drifted upward and crossed some sea and now was sitting at the right hand of God.
“It’s not your fault,” Megan informed her.
“I know,” Alison said.
“Nobody thinks it’s your fault.”
“She’s dead, though, she died and now she’s dead and I didn’t stop it.”
“Alison.” Everybody knew she thought it was her fault and it gave them an excuse, for once, to stop teasing her and to just take care of her. Jeff, back from Hong Kong with a Chinese wife, cornered her in the kitchen and explained in no uncertain terms that the hospital did what it could but that Rose’s colon had been compromised far too thoroughly and far too quickly, even before Alison arrived. Andrew hugged her in passing and handed her a beer. Lianne ignored her, which was as close as she could get to asking how she was doing. Paul smiled at her sadly and asked if she wanted to ride to the funeral in his car.
And now here they were, a sea of Moores, everywhere the eye could see. Dad up front, looking completely lost. “I don’t know what he’s going to do without her.” Megan sighed.
“I could never tell what he did with her,” Alison observed. “Even when he was retired he was never there.”
“Well, he’s going to miss her now,” Megan said.