Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(95)

Once the nurse was gone, she hissed at me, “Don’t you talk to her!”

“She’s all right, Mom. She’s just taking care of you.”

“No, they’re the killers.”

That night they had to put her in restraints. The next night, they loaded her to the gills on antipsychotic drugs. The following day, they inserted a chest tube because her thrashing and struggling in the midst of her paranoid delusions had caused her broken ribs to lacerate her lung, which subsequently collapsed. By Saturday, a week after her accident, she was under heavy sedation once more and her temperature was climbing with another infection, the source of which the doctors were having a hard time pinpointing.

I wasn’t really in a frame of mind to appreciate how supportive Jace was that week, though he was absolutely amazing. He had to spend some of his time at the hotel working, but he tried to do it as quickly as possible so that he could keep me company at the hospital.

“Why don’t you sing something for her?” he suggested one afternoon. “She’d like that.”

“I can’t.” My throat tightened. I couldn’t have found a song in that moment if my life depended on it.

Aside from him, I was alone with Mom a large portion of each day, though I sometimes had interesting conversations with the nurses, including Dominick, who was assigned to her on a couple more shifts. I became the hub of information dissemination, because I was the one who got the status reports from her doctors and nurses and conveyed them to the rest of the family in an endless cycle of phone calls. Colleen could only visit for a few hours in the evening because she worked all day. Tonya and Aunt Blythe tried to make the long drive from Grand Rapids as often as they could, but they couldn’t do it every day with their work schedules. So it was Jace I had to lean on.

Thank God I’d accepted his gift of the money from those paintings, because there was no way I could go back to work myself. I was missing income opportunity for nearly the entire month of August, and I wouldn’t have had enough to go back to school without him.

But it wasn’t only the money. He brought me meals, shuffled me out of the ICU when I was clearly about to lose my mind if I didn’t see something else for a while, and simply sat with me silently when I was too lost in my own head for conversation. One night I got back to the hotel to find that during the day, he’d made the nearly five-hour round trip drive to and from Saugatuck to collect more of my clothes, as well as my laptop and keyboard. That evening I sat fingering melancholy tunes on the keys, trying to find joy in it.

“Where do you go when you play?” he asked softly, lying on the bed behind me.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I go anyplace so much as I just try to shut everything else out. I always have, even since I was a kid.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t have any friends, so when I was sad, I’d wander around alone—the backyard, neighborhood, playground, woods, whatever—and I’d sing, because singing always made me happy. Except that sometimes I was too sad for it to work, so I’d just end up crying while I sang.”

His hand brushed down my back. “Play something happy now. Can you do that?”

I tried, but then the tears were too close, so I turned away from the keyboard and curled up in his arms instead.

Jace had also collected my mail, which contained the results of the test I’d had done at the beginning of August. The next night he managed to get my attention long enough to keep the promise he’d made to me that weekend after the Fourth of July. He was totally not exaggerating about sucking me dry, either. Afterward was the best night’s sleep I got the entire time I was in Flint.

Sometimes, when I’d been quiet too long, he started asking leading questions to get me to talk and to remind me that I wasn’t alone.

“Tell me a happy memory about your mom,” he’d say.

“Um. One of my earliest memories—I was about three, I think—is when I’d been staying at Grandma’s while Mom was away for some reason. It seemed like weeks or months. And . . . God, I can barely remember it, it must have been after Christmas, but in my mind I think it was Christmas, you know? Anyway, one night I woke up in the middle of the night and she was there. She’d just arrived. And she lay down with me in the spare bedroom at Grandma’s house and held me and I was just so happy to have Momma back.”

Or I’d tell him about the times Mom, her late husband Clay, Clay’s daughter, and I would sit around the dining room table and play euchre for hours on end. The next time Colleen and Tonya were both at the hospital with us, Jace hauled out a pack of cards and demanded we all sit around the table in the waiting room and teach him to play euchre.

As the second week of her stay in ICU aged, they put Mom on heparin because blood clots were beginning to form throughout her body.

Two days later, she stopped digesting the food they were giving her by means of an NG tube.

“Her organs are shutting down,” her doctor told us gravely as we all sat together in a consultation room, which was considerably more comfortable than the waiting rooms. It looked like it was designed to be soothing, and I thought, This is where they deliver the bad news.

Grandma had arrived the day before, after the cruise ship she’d been on had finally made port someplace where she could book an emergency flight home. So we were all there, the whole dysfunctional clan plus one. I clung to Jace’s hand, crushing it.