The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(15)
the base of the feet
calves, when they aren’t in the squeezers
spreading and folding the fingers
and I remembered to do all these things one, two, maybe four days, and then the new nurse has the new set of mouth-opening stretches, her jaw between my thumb and fingers the lemon-flavored sponge to rub along the gums
inside the lips when I can pry them open
to wet the teeth
see if the synapses connected to taste still work
new knee bends
new holding her hand in my own hand
rotating: thumbs up
thumbs down
thumbs up
thumbs down
thumbs up
thumbs down
singing
humming
staying silent
telling old stories
making up new stories
reading books out loud
except I skipped parts that were sexual or scary or violent or dangerous or that involved medicine or death, or that were particularly sad or extra happy, so I read mostly descriptions of desert plants, the diet of a trumpeter swan, the cycle of power generation at a nearby windmill.
What else can I be doing to help?
She smelled like plastic and disinfectant, and beneath all that she smelled like a human mother, my own human mother.
What, exactly, had been lost? There she was, still, in front of me, alive. The only human being who would ever walk up behind me, rest her cheek on my shoulder—her surprisingly tall daughter—and hug my waist from behind, saying softly as she laughed: I birthed you.
*
“There’s nothing else you can do right now, Tess,” Tommy says.
A clean-shaven man in a visor and polo shirt strides over to us with a clipboard in hand. He calls to Tommy. “That’s a boss,” whispers Sunshine. “Just look at him. You’ll know who they are because they’ll have showered, they’ll have most of their teeth, or they’ll be riding around in a golf cart with one leg off the side so they can jump down to solve a crisis while the cart’s still running.”
“And kick lazy carnies as they pass,” Spif adds.
“Listen up,” Tommy says as he walks back over to us. “Boss just told me there’s a new policy. We’re getting drug tested at this fair.” All eyes that had been vaguely distracted by something else are now glued to Tommy’s face. “This carnival company is doing a major push to be family friendly and move away from their reputation, so everyone’s gotta pass a drug test to get their ID before we open.”
“Oh fuck,” Spif says.
“You have to pass or you can’t be in the show. Boss’s orders. We’re heading to Walmart tomorrow night so that everyone can buy whatever they need to make sure they pass. All of you,” he says, slower, quieter now, “have to pass. We have no extra people. The show won’t run if you don’t.”
Spif and Sunshine grasp one another by the arm as Tommy walks away. “You have four days,” Tommy calls over his shoulder.
It is time to make the individual bodies perform feats once thought impossible.
“Vitamin B3 makes you sweat,” Spif says.
“Cranberry juice clears you out,” Sunshine adds.
“B vitamins,” Pipscy says.
Everyone starts moving very quickly.
*
After five days in the induced coma, the doctors gave her some sort of wake up! drug. They wanted to test her level of brain function, to measure what she could respond to, how she could move.
We hovered around her bed.
I thought ICUs would be full of people moving very quickly, but much of the time, there was stillness. Quiet. Like the woman I sat with in the waiting room when I couldn’t handle being in my mom’s room or when they were doing something to her they thought we might not want to see. The woman was waiting to see if her boyfriend would wake up from a motorcycle accident. He’d been in a coma two weeks. We waited near each other. She sat cross-legged in the upholstered chair, smiled a lot. Put on lip gloss. Together, we picked up magazines, set them down.
The magic drug went in through my mom’s IV. We waited in a semicircle around her bed. Davy, my brother, Sam, my aunt, and my uncle. She would open her eyes, see us there, and smile that smile we all knew so well, the smile of the boss of our lives, the queen, and we’d know that this minor disaster was just another hurdle we’d applaud her for overcoming.
We waited. She would yawn and stretch, say, “What happened?” or “Where am I?” and we’d smile sad, grateful smiles, wipe little warm tears from the corners of our eyes and say, “Never you mind, because everything’s going to be just fine.”
Two hours, four, twenty-four.
And then, genius, miracle, angels-on-high-or-something, whoever, thank you, her left hand gave a squeeze. Just a little. Just a small squeeze, a hello someone’s here.
It was the first sign that she wasn’t vegetative.
She would open her eyes.
She would open her eyes, and then she did.
We crowded around the end of the bed. “Hi! Hi! Hello! Hi, beautiful!” we said. But the bright, bright green of her eyes wasn’t there. Instead, there was a slug-gray cover over her iris. Like a cartoon of illness or evil or warning. But this was no cartoon. This was a real fucking sick person whose eyes had changed color and all I could think was Who is this new person inside her?, and then hated myself for thinking it. Of course it was her.