Blueberry Hill: a Sister's Story(26)

When the day ends, Donna is weary but happy. She has shared in Debi’s joy without ever knowing of Ann’s comments.





Talk to me, Baby




In April the baby is born. It is a boy, and Debi names him Anthony. Once Debi is home from the hospital Donna drives up for a visit. I watch her holding the baby and see the love in her face. It is a strange look, mostly happy but with sad undertones that aren’t visible unless you study her eyes.

As she holds the baby, Donna makes sounds. Nothing understandable, more like a sigh that has somehow forced its way through her useless larynx. In her face there is a restlessness that has been missing for the same amount of time as her voice.



Two months after Donna holds her grandson, I get a call from Mama.

“Can you come down? Donna is having the tracheostomy reversed, and I need you to go to the hospital with me.” Mama sounds annoyed.

“Isn’t this good news?”

“Depends on your point of view,” Mama comments. She doesn’t have to say this thought is stuck in her craw; the tone of her voice says it for her.

“What does Doctor Craig say?”

“He says it can be done, but he’d rather she wait until her emphysema is more controlled.”

When Mama is not in favor of something she loathes to talk about it, so I have to pull the bits and pieces of information from her.

“Why is Donna going against his advice?” I ask.

“Because she’s Donna! She never listens to anybody! She’s damned and determined to do what she wants and doesn’t care about driving me to my grave with worry.”

Now the truth is out. Mama doesn’t want Donna to have the operation because she’s afraid of losing her. Mama doesn’t go at problems head on anymore; she circles the issue and spears it with cryptic barbs.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “I’m sure Donna knows what she’s doing. Doctor Craig wouldn’t—”

“What do you know? You’re up there in New Jersey! You don’t see how bad she is.”

“I saw her when she was at Debi’s, and I saw her again last month—”

“That’s what you’re going by?” Mama asks cynically. “You can’t go by that! She puts on an act when she’s up there.”

“An act?”

“Yes, an act. She pretends she’s fine, but she’s not! She hardly eats a bite and sits in that damned recliner from dawn ’til dark.”

“Well, I know her energy level is low, but that’s to be—”

“That’s not even half of it!”

I know this discussion is not going anywhere, so I say, “Maybe we can talk about it when I come down.”

“It’ll be too late by then, the surgery’s scheduled for day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll come down tomorrow.”

“Well, okay, but get started early.”

~

Of course, nothing Mama or I had to say could convince Donna not to go through with the surgery. On her notepad she wrote, I want this tracheostomy reversed. That was the end of the discussion.

When you’re up against a person who hasn’t been able to speak for almost two years, any argument you make sounds lame by comparison.

~

Two months after Anthony’s birth, Mama and I once again sit in the waiting room at Johns Hopkins Hospital. They have redecorated the room, and now the walls are a pale yellow. The pumpkin seats that were there last time have been replaced by alternating blue and green molded plastic shells. These colors are supposed to be cool and relaxing, but I miss the pumpkin chairs. At least they had a thin layer of padding in the seat.

The center of the room is no longer an expanse of emptiness. It has been filled with two additional rows of blue and green shells. Why, I can’t say. Every time we’ve been here the room is near empty, occupied by only a few unhappy souls who twitch and turn as we do, worrying about a loved one.

Today there is a young boy, a mirror image of the man sitting beside him. Father and son, I think. I find myself hoping they are waiting for another child to come into the world. Yes, that would be something nice; another child, instead of heart failure, cancer, or the dreaded emphysema. The boy shuffles through a handful of books, selects the one with a blue whale on the cover, and passes it to his father. He climbs onto the waiting knee and the man begins to read in a slow toneless drone; eventually his words grow dim to my ear and are lost in the sounds of crackling loudspeakers and footsteps clicking along the marble corridor.

We wait, but time weighs heavily upon us. I want to believe miracles are possible, but I question how the tracheostomy can be reversed when Donna still suctions out huge amounts of ugly green phlegm. I am caught between my fear of the consequences and the desire to hear my sister’s voice again, so I turn away and try to ignore the truth.

Mama has found a matchbook sewing kit in her purse, and she is repairing the small hole that has fingered its way into her jacket pocket. She concentrates on this, weaving her needle back and forth, creating a fabric where there was none. It is something that enables her to escape the here and now.

I flip through several magazines and twist uncomfortably in the plastic shell. Eventually I get up and go to the window in an effort to escape the sadness of this room. The parking lot still stretches across the horizon, but each time the view is different. I have peered from this window when the hot summer sun bubbled the blacktop, when the spring rain slicked the ground with sheets of water, and when drivers had to scrape ice from their windshield before they drove away. Today the air is chilly, but the trees still look festive in their dress of bright orange and yellow. The colors remind me of the pumpkin chairs, and again I miss them.