Phoebe winced, imagining the bowl protecting her mother’s innards shattered. “Are they operating?”
“We don’t know yet. They’re stabilizing her. She has an acetabulum fracture: a fracture of the socket of the hip. They manipulated it in the emergency room to get it back in place. Hopefully the procedure worked.” Ben nodded at a passing nurse. “Meanwhile, she needs to be carefully watched.”
“Should we transfer her?” Phoebe pressed her hand against her chest.
“Moving her in any way is dangerous. Right now they’re stabilizing her enough to evaluate whether to operate. She’s swollen. Contusions, you saw, cover her body. She lost three teeth. Her knees are three times their size.”
“Has she spoken? Did anyone tell her about Daddy?”
“She was in shock when she came into the trauma center,” Ben said. “So, no.”
Deb came out of the room, her eyes red, wearing a wrinkled green cotton sweater and jeans. An orange elastic band held her thick waves in a messy bun. “Noah’s watching Mom.”
“What happened to Daddy?” Phoebe asked.
“He was already gone when they got here. A heart attack. He lost control of the car.” Deb’s words sounded dredged in a layer of Valium. A profusion of jewelry pressed against her skin when she took her sister’s hand—her mother’s engagement and wedding rings along with the oversized emerald ring Lola wore for special occasions. On her middle finger, Deb wore their father’s gold wedding band.
“They were on the FDR. Your mother got tickets for a play,” Ben said. “For his birthday. The Phantom of the Opera.”
Numbness left. Phoebe’s chest ripped open. Visions of her parents—dressing for a night out, slipping into the Buick Regal that her father kept spotless, probably eating dinner out before the show—piled like photographs. She held on to the vision of her father alive.
Phoebe hugged her sister. “I’ll sit with her. You and Ben get coffee. Or get outside for a few minutes.” Bellevue’s air surrounded them like a soup of infection and bleach.
? ? ?
Deep purple and black bruises covered her mother’s face. Her hair, pushed away from the shiny unguents slicked over cuts and scrapes, frizzed in a brown halo. Grey roots that her mother would have covered with brown mascara peeked out.
Terror and grief fought for primacy as Phoebe sat watching her mother for the signs of danger the nurse had listed. Labored breathing. Hot skin. Swelling—though how could she see swelling through already swollen limbs? Noah fidgeted beside her, his healthy youthfulness no match for the claustrophobic atmosphere, the profusion of wires and tubes. He jumped on any request Phoebe concocted: a sandwich she’d never eat, magazines never to be read.
Jake appeared, late, apologetic, but lacking a clear reason for why he’d been out of touch. He wore a fresh shirt and smelled of a recent shampoo. Phoebe didn’t care if he’d been at the gym or sleeping with every woman in Manhattan. He held her and murmured all the right things, but within thirty minutes of his pacing in and out of the room, repeatedly asking if he should arrange to transport her mother to Mount Sinai Hospital, she asked him to check on the likely towed car and take Noah home. Jake’s already oversized energy had reached epic proportions since Black Monday six weeks ago. Being around him was unbearable now.
Phoebe turned her parents’ rings round and round on her own thinner fingers until she asked for medical tape and wound it around the metal until the bands hugged her flesh. Deb had transferred the rings to Phoebe when she left, both of them eager to slip them back on their mother.
She stood, stretched, and tiptoed out, desperate for caffeine. It took but a few hours of her vigil to move from confused visitor to experienced member of the ward. The compassionate Jamaican nurse had showed her the coffee pot next to the head nurse’s office. The Irish resident, brogue intact, pointed her to custard and gelatin tucked in a hidden corner of the fridge. An intern slipped her packets of saltines. Over the course of a few hours, the petri dish of medical horror became a bubbling cauldron of kindnesses, staffed by overworked people, mainly women, swimming through waves of broken patients.
Phoebe poured coffee, lightened it with chemical cream, and then carried the Styrofoam cup to her mother’s room, where she leaned back into the rigid orange chair.
Time lagged. Everyone waited for something in hospitals: a doctor’s visit, a bedpan, a wound to heal. She rummaged deep into her pocketbook until reaching a stash of striped white-and-red peppermints. After unwrapping one and then sucking hard to rid her mouth of the flavor of hospital coffee, her mother’s eyes opened.
“Wahta,” Lola croaked.
Phoebe found the cup filled with crushed ice, mostly melted, and then held the straw to her mother’s lips.
“How do you feel?” She worked to keep tears from her voice.
“Where Daddy?” Tears fell down her mother’s bruised cheeks. “Hurt? Worse than me?”
Phoebe hesitated.
Her mother tried to turn her head, winced, and then remained still. “He die, right? I feel it.”
Phoebe’s tears matched her mother’s. “I’m so sorry, Mommy. I’ll call Deb to come.”
“Let Deb rest. You here.” Her words revealed missing teeth, gaps her father would have made perfect. She gestured for more water. Tears ran in an unstopped stream. Phoebe didn’t know whether to wipe them away.
After three sips, her mother pushed away the cup. “Hurts. Red. My sweet Red. Always.”
“I know,” Phoebe said.
“No life without him.” Her mother touched the wetness on her face without wiping it away, almost caressing this proof of love.
“You have us,” Phoebe said. “We need you.”
Her mother ignored her words. “Where rings?”
“Here.” She held up her right hand. “Deb and I take turns wearing them.”
“And Daddy’s?”
“Left hand,” she said, lifting it.
“Good.” She tried to raise her neck but couldn’t. “Take off my necklace.”
“Keep it on, Mom. If they have to operate, then I will.”
“Want to see how it looks on you. Please.”
Phoebe, trying to see through the tears, worked the worn gold chain clasp around to the front and undid it. She inched the necklace off carefully and held it in her hand. Her great-grandmother and then her grandmother had worn it before her mother.
“Put it on.”
Phoebe fastened the locket. The chain was thin, the pendant warm.
“Take good care of that.” Her mother gasped in pain as she fell back.
? ? ?
Phoebe laced fingers with Deb as the limo sped them toward the final good-bye. Their parents were dead. They were orphans.
Mount Lebanon. New Montefiore. St. Charles.
Cemetery signs lining the Southern State Parkway out on Long Island chronicled the future of all passing by. Phoebe wanted to blindfold Kate and Noah, keep them walled off from jealous ghosts hovering overhead, seeking company.