Chapter 16
“If Maeve gets sick then you’re the one who has to do the thinking,” Jocelyn told me in the little apartment where Maeve and I lived after our father died.
“Don’t let yourself get upset. People who get upset only make more work.
” Funny what sticks. There wasn’t a week that went by, and probably not even a day, when her instruction didn’t come back to me.
I equated my ability to be effective with my ability to stay calm, and time and again it proved to be the case.
When Mr. Otterson called me from the hospital to tell me that Maeve had had a heart attack, I called Celeste and asked her to pack me a bag and bring up the car.
“Should I come with you?” she asked.
I appreciated that but told her no. “Call Jocelyn,” I said, because Jocelyn was on my mind.
My father was on my mind. He had been fifty-three, Maeve was fifty-two.
I thought less about his dying and more about the deal I’d struck with God when I walked out of my high school geometry class that day at Bishop McDevitt: He would spare Maeve, and in return could take anything else. Anyone else.
The small waiting room for the coronary care unit was hidden past the restrooms and water fountains.
Mr. Otterson was there, looking like he’d been sitting in that same gray chair for a week, his elbows resting on his knees, his hair thinning and gray.
Sandy and Jocelyn were with him. They had heard the story about what had happened but they asked him to tell it again. Otterson had saved Maeve’s life.
“We were meeting with an advertiser and Maeve stood up and said she needed to go home,” Mr. Otterson began in his quiet voice.
He was wearing gray suit pants and a white shirt.
He’d taken off his jacket and tie. “No doubt she’d ignored whatever it was she was feeling for as long as possible. You know Maeve.”
We all agreed.
They had left the meeting right away. He asked if her blood sugar was low and she told him no, this was something else, maybe the flu. “When I told her I was going to drive her home she didn’t say a word about it,” Mr. Otterson said. “That’s how bad it was.”
They were two blocks from her house when he turned the car around and drove her to the hospital in Abington. He said it was intuition as much as anything. She had put her head against the window of the car door. “She was melting,” he said. “I can’t explain it.”
Had Mr. Otterson let her off at her house, walked her to the front door and told her to get some rest, that would have been that.
It was Maeve who told me the rest of the story when I saw her in recovery.
She was still swimming up from the anesthesia and kept trying to laugh.
She told me Mr. Otterson had raised his voice to the young woman at the desk in the emergency room.
Otterson raising his voice was like another man pointing a gun.
Maeve heard him say diabetic. She heard him say coronary, though she thought he was only throwing the word around so someone would come and help them.
It had never occurred to toher that it was her heart.
Then finally she could feel it, the pressure creeping up into her jaw, the room swirling back, our father climbing the last flight of concrete stairs in the terrible heat.
“Stop making that face,” she whispered. “I’m going back to sleep.
” They kept those rooms so bright, and I wanted to shade her eyes with my hand, but I held her hand instead, watching her heart monitor scaling slowly up and down until a nurse came and guided me away.
I was calm through the night I spent in the waiting room, Mr. Otterson staying past midnight no matter how many times I told him he should go.
I was calm the next afternoon when the cardiologist told me she’d had a malignant arrhythmia during the placement of the stent and they would need to keep her in the unit longer than had been expected.
I went to Maeve’s house to take a shower and a nap.
I was calm, going back and forth from the waiting room to her house, receiving the visitors who were not allowed in to see her, waiting for the three times a day I could go and sit by her bed.
I stayed calm until the fourth morning when I came into the waiting room and found another person there—an old woman, very thin, with short gray hair.
I nodded at her and took my regular seat.
I was just about to ask her if she was a friend of Maeve’s because I was certain I knew her. Then I realized she was my mother.
Maeve’s heart attack had lured her out from beneath the floorboards.
She had not been there for graduations or our father’s funeral.
She had not been there when we were told to leave the house.
She wasn’t at my wedding or at the births of my children or at Thanksgiving or Easter or any of the countless Saturdays when there had been nothing but time and energy to talk everything through, but she was there now, at Abington Memorial Hospital, like the Angel of Death.
I said nothing to her because one should never initiate a conversation with Death.
“Oh, Danny,” she said. She was crying. She covered her eyes with her hand. Her wrist looked like ten pencils bundled together.
I knew what happened when people explored their anger in hospitals. The hospitals got rid of those people. It didn’t matter if their anger was justified. Jocelyn had told me that people who got upset weren’t helpful, and it was my job to take care of Maeve.
“You were the doctor,” she said at last.
“That was me.”
If Maeve was fifty-two that would make her what? Seventy-three? She looked a decade older.
“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.