The Dutch House(76)

“You remember?” she asked.

I gave a slow nod, wondering if I should acknowledge even this much. “You had a braid.”

She ran her hand over her short hair. “I had lice. I’d had them before but this last time, I don’t know, it bothered me.”

I asked her what she wanted.

She dropped her eyes again. She could have been a ghost. “To see you,” she said, not looking at me. “To tell you I’m sorry.” She rubbed the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes. She was like any old woman in a hospital waiting room, only taller and thinner. She was wearing jeans and blue canvas tennis shoes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s done.”

“I came to see Maeve,” she said, rolling the small gold band on her finger.

I made a mental note to kill Fluffy. “Maeve is very sick,” I said, thinking I needed to get her out of there before Fluffy showed up to defend her, before Sandy and Jocelyn and Mr. Otterson and all the rest of them arrived to cast their vote on whether she should stay or go. “Come back when she’s better. She needs to focus on getting well now. You can wait, can’t you? After all this time?”

My mother’s head tipped down like a sunflower at the end of the day, down and down until her chin hovered just above the bony dip of her chest. The tears hung for a moment on her jaw and then fell. She told me she had already been in to see Maeve that morning.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock. While I had eaten my eggs in Maeve’s kitchen, our mother sat by Maeve’s bed in the glass fishbowl of the coronary care unit, holding her hand and crying, laying the tremendous burden of her grief and shame directly on my sister’s heart. She had gotten into the unit by the most direct means possible: she told the truth, or she told some of it. She went to the charge nurse and said her daughter Maeve Conroy had had a heart attack, and now she was here, the mother, just arrived. The mother looked like she was a minute away from coding herself, so when the nurse waived the rules and let my mother in for a visit that was both too long and not in keeping with the unit’s schedule, she did so to benefit the mother, not the daughter. I know this because I spoke to the nurse myself. I spoke to her later, when I could speak again.

“She was happy,” my mother said, her voice as quiet as a page turned. She looked at me with such tremendous need, and I didn’t know if she was asking me to make this right, or telling me that she had returned to make this right.

I stood up quickly and left her in the waiting room, skipping the elevator in favor of the five flights of stairs. It was April and starting to rain. For the first time in my life I wondered if my father might have loved my sister, beyond the abstract and inattentive way I had always imagined he loved her. Was it possible that he believed Maeve to be in danger and so thought to keep her safe from our mother? I walked manically up and down the rows of cars. If someone were to look out the window of his hospital room and see me, he would say, Look at that poor man. He doesn’t remember where he parked. I wanted to keep my sister safe from our mother, to keep her safe from anyone who could leave her so carelessly and then reappear at the worst time imaginable. I wanted to attest to my commitment, to reassure my sister that I was watching now and no harm would come again, but she was sleeping.

There is no story of the prodigal mother. The rich man didn’t call for a banquet to celebrate the return of his erstwhile wife. The sons, having stuck it out for all those years at home, did not hang garlands on the doorways, kill the sheep, bring forth the wine. When she left them she killed them all, each in his own way, and now, decades later, they didn’t want her back. They hurried down the road to lock the gate, the father and his sons together, the wind whipping at their coats. A friend had tipped them off. They knew she was coming and the gate must be locked.

A patient in the coronary care unit was allowed three fifteen-minute visits a day, one visitor at a time. My mother went to Maeve’s bedside for the next two visits: the regular morning visit and the mid-afternoon. The nurse came into the waiting room and told us Maeve was asking for her mother. I was allowed in at seven that evening, and I understood that it was not a moment for petulance, confrontation or discussion. No wrongs would be righted, no injustices examined. I would go in and see my sister, that was all. Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick.

Maybe it was because a full twenty-four hours had passed since I had last seen her, and maybe it was because our mother’s arrival had thrilled her, but Maeve looked better than she had. She was sitting in the single chair beside her bed, her monitors all beeping in accordance with her improved heart function. “Look at you!” I said, and leaned down to kiss her.

Maeve gave me one of her rare Christmas-morning smiles, no guile, all teeth. She looked like she might pop straight up and throw her arms around me. “Can you believe it?”

And I didn’t say, What? And I didn’t say, I know! You’re doing so much better! because I knew what she was talking about and this wasn’t the time to be coy. I said, “It was a big surprise.”

“She told me Fluffy found her and told her I was sick.” Maeve’s eyes were shining in the dim light. “She said she came right away.”

And I didn’t say, Right away plus forty-two years. “I know she’s been worried about you. Everyone’s been worried about you. I think that everyone you’ve ever known has come by.”