I'm Glad About You(100)
“I’m coming home.”
“I’m not sure that’s, the doctor said she came through the operation pretty good and they think she’ll come off the respirator today—”
“She’s on a respirator? Sorry sorry I’m not yelling, sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t know if you have the money? But if you want to come home for a few days, that would be good.”
“Who’s at the hospital now?”
“Well—no one,” Megan admitted. “But she’s anaesthetized. They said they’d call when she wakes up.”
Of course there were more specifics than that, but they didn’t seem relevant. Alison took a cab out to LaGuardia and got herself on the first plane home.
It was six in the morning. The flight was fluid, effortless, and before she knew it the air around her dinged and the two tired attendants started to sweep the plane for empty water bottles. Alison was so used to the five-and six-hour flights between New York and Los Angeles, it was startling to hear that they were making their descent after little more than an hour in the air. It was nothing, really, to fly to Cincinnati. By the time she climbed into the rental car she found herself focused and increasingly secure. The highways were open, featureless, easy to drive. Thirty minutes later as she turned into the virtually empty hospital parking lot her brain started to unfreeze. Megan hadn’t really been all that upset on the phone, and no one else seemed to think this situation was serious. It was good that somebody came home to help out until Dad was back, but Mom was surely going to be fine.
Her completely fabricated self-confidence hit a roadblock at the front desk, where hospital ambiance hit her like a ton of bricks. It was like a third-rate casting office—the furniture was lousy, the light a horrible shade of green, the assistants peculiarly unhelpful. Rose had come in with Megan to the emergency room, and then gone to surgery, after which she was admitted to the hospital proper. Now, apparently, no one knew where she was. The name of her doctor was also not clear. There was a surgeon and an anesthesiologist, but one was off site and the other was making his rounds and was unavailable for consultation. Alison felt a kind of sick panic rise up in her. After months and years of playing the role of a Hollywood starlet, she knew how to smile her way through bullshit and pretend it was all fine. Smile and gush. Smile and be humble. Smile and listen. But the cruel dismissal of a studio exec who thinks you’re nothing and wants you to make sure you know that you’re nothing paled next to this automaton who didn’t seem to care that her mother was lost somewhere in this grimy fluorescent hospital.
The answer to the mystery was finally solved by a call to Megan.
“She’s in the ICU,” Megan announced. “Tell them she’s in the ICU.”
“She’s in the ICU,” Alison told her nemesis, a severe Indian woman in teal scrubs.
“Ohhh, the ICUuuuuuuu.” The nurse—for that is clearly what she was, a middle-aged nurse just doing her best in fatal circumstances—resumed typing. “She is in room B-two, that is on the seventh floor of the Leugers Pavilion.”
The shock of finding your mother alone on a respirator in the intensive care unit of an understaffed Midwest hospital would be significant no matter who you are or what your history with your mother might be. And now Alison was fried. It had taken her twenty minutes to find the room, because the Leugers Pavilion, as it turned out, was inaccessible from the elevators in the main building; you had to take the elevator down the hallway from the front desk to the fourth floor and then walk down another hallway, take a left, and then enter a second elevator bank on the right. The whole complex had clearly been constructed by some sociopath with a complete axe to grind on sick people and their pathetic relatives. Finally she located the ICU on the seventh floor after going down the hallway to the left of the elevator bank and then taking the first right, where you went through multiple sets of doors and found yourself in a giant room with little pods of people full of mysterious and dire purposes, pushing giant machines around.
Rose was indeed on a respirator; she was hooked up to several machines that were beeping and flickering peacefully over the rasp of the machine that was breathing into her. Her hair was matted and her face so distorted around the mouthpiece of the ventilator that there was a terrible moment when Alison wasn’t sure that this was her mom after all. But on approaching the bed, she saw Rose’s hand, the tiny gold engagement ring and wedding ring she had let her children play with so often, never taking it off no matter how many times they begged, but letting them twirl it around her slender fingers. You’ll have one of your own one day, she had promised her daughters. That dream had evaporated for Alison by the time she was ten and had already been so fully identified as the family’s rebel. Rebels don’t get married. They turn into spinsters, or Hollywood starlets. It didn’t matter. Her mother’s hand was shriveled and claw-like, clutching at the institutional bedsheets, without thought or consciousness or even memory. Where was Dad? Did he even know yet, that Mom was here?
Something was going on. Rose started to move, her body contorting and kicking. Alison, now at the bedside, could see that her mother’s arms were held down by restraints.
“Mom, I’m here. It’s Alison. Do you need something? What do you need, Mom?” Asking Rose anything whatsoever was of course absurd, as she could hardly be expected to speak with a huge ventilator shoved in her mouth. “You want me to call the nurse, Mom?” Rose’s struggling body became angular and unpredictable. The too-thin hospital gown which had been tossed over her bare limbs had ridden up one hip and for a moment Alison could see her mother’s exposed pudenda, white, flaccid, old. She covered her quickly and looked around the bed, desperately trying to figure out where the stupid button was to call the nurse. She had only been there thirty seconds and already she was failing. “Nurse! I need a nurse!” she finally yelled. It was what they did on hospital shows; eventually everyone just started shouting.