She begins talking softly to him as she looks over my ID. His eyes flutter open, and a look of confusion momentarily takes over his sleepy eyes. “Sweetheart, your mommy is here to take you home. Can you wake up, honey?”
Rory blinks several times and then looks at me. “Mom?” he questions, as if me standing here is an impossibility. He’s always been the straightforward, outspoken one of the two boys. No doubt this one’s mine. He knows how to push my buttons.
“Yes, Rory. Let’s go.” The last five minutes of motherhood have already exhausted me; I don’t know how Seamus does this shit every day.
“Where’s Daddy?” he asks.
Kai answers, “He’s at the hospital. We need to make sure he’s okay.” There are tears dripping down his cheeks as he says the words.
Rory wiggles in the woman’s arms, and she puts him down. He immediately goes to his brother and hugs him, attaching himself to his side. This need to comfort is Seamus through and through. It’s a good thing he’s the one parenting or these two would likely be stabbing each other in the back instead of hugging it out.
When we get to the car, I open the door of my Mercedes convertible and push the driver’s seat forward so the boys can crawl into the cramped backseat.
“What about our booster seats, Mom?” Kai asks.
“Shit,” I mutter under my breath. I hadn’t thought of that. They’ve never ridden in my car. “We’re not using them tonight. Buckle your brother in,” I instruct.
It’s almost seven o’clock when we walk into the emergency room entrance of Mercy General. It smells like antiseptic, sanitizer, bodily fluids…and suffering. I hate hospitals. They remind me of my grandmother. She died four days after sustaining injuries from a car accident. I was driving the car. The front tire blew out and put us into a ditch. The passenger side hit a tree. A big, solid, centuries-old tree that wins battles against a cage of steel rolling at high speed.
I was fine.
She wasn’t.
Fate is a fickle motherfucker.
Four days I sat by her side in the ICU begging her to stay with me, to fight.
Four days of the rank stench emanating from her mangled body and the room I was trapped in assaulting my nose, a foreboding indicator that death was coming…inescapable and diligent in its duty to claim her.
Four days of watching her suffer while life was forced upon her through tubes and needles and devices, her body rejecting every attempt to save it.
Four days of listening to her cry—my strong, ruthless grandmother weeping in defeat and saying her goodbyes.
I hate hospitals.
I would burn this building to the fucking ground if I could to escape those memories. They haunt me. Every day they haunt me. But here, inside the belly of the beast, makes them insufferable.
Kai is standing beside me holding Rory’s hand.
After talking to the woman at the desk, I discover that Seamus is still undergoing tests with a neurologist. We take a seat and wait to speak to the doctor.
We haven’t been sitting here five minutes before Rory announces he needs to use the bathroom and that he’s hungry.
I make Kai take him to the bathroom while I buy them both a Pepsi, a bag of chips, and a candy bar from the vending machine. Mother of the year I am not.
We wait an hour before a nurse collects us and asks us to follow her. The smells grow stronger as we make our way into the depths of the hospital. I feel nauseous, and I’m not sure if it’s a physical reaction or a psychological reaction driving the bile up my throat. The memory of my grandmother’s cacophonous cries in my ears is so loud that my head starts to pound.
Seamus is propped up in a sitting position under the sheets of a hospital bed. He’s in a cloth gown, and his right arm is exposed, the needle for an IV is inserted and taped to the inside of his forearm, but there’s no tube running to it. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m taking everything else in so closely because I’m scared to look at his face. I’m scared that he’ll look different than the perfect man I’ve been with for years. Because, now that I’m standing in this hospital room being barraged by horrific memories of my grandmother, I know in my gut that something is wrong. He’s not perfect anymore. And he never will be again.
“Hi,” he says quietly. The boys run to him.
I wait until the boys are at his bedside and he’s talking to them before I scan his face. When I do, I ask myself when I did this last…really looked at him. It’s been years. Most days, if I see him, it’s in passing at home. We talk briefly, and my eyes pass over him. I might catch a glimpse of the graphic on his t-shirt, or the scruff on his chin if he hasn’t shaved, or notice that his hair is in need of a trim, but I never really look at him. Not like I am now.