Chapter Twenty-Six
Jo
“You didn’t have to come with me, really,” I told Ezra, when we arrived at the lobby of Featherstone General. I looked out
of place enough in my floor-length gown, but with a six-foot-two, TV-handsome Prince Eric look-alike trailing behind me, I
had no chance at blending in. When we approached the hospital registration desk, the woman behind it took one look at Ezra
and gaped.
“I know this is strange, but has anyone ever told you that you look like an actor?” she asked him as we checked in.
“No,” Ezra said, reaching for a mask from across her desk. When we made it up the elevators to the fourth floor, where my
mother was apparently admitted, he looked down at me. “I’m not going anywhere, so stop saying that.”
“Okay,” I said.
I didn’t have the energy nor the desire to fight. In truth, I was glad Ezra was here. His presence made the experience less surreal. With Ezra walking down the long hospital halls by my side, I couldn’t pretend that this was all a dream. My mother really was on this hospital floor, only yards and minutes away. I really was going from an opulent ballroom to her sickbed within an hour. Dr. Hos seini had filled me in on her condition during the drive up to Featherstone, and I’d found myself slipping back into the skin that I’d worn as a resident, the one that allowed me to take a step back and see my patients as cases and not people. When Dr. Hosseini told me that my mother had initially come in with a “myocardial infarction” and was “in cardiogenic shock,” I’d questioned her like she was my intern, asking her things like whether she’d required mechanical support and what inotropes they’d put her on. When she told me about the blood clot that had formed in her heart and shot into her brain, about the neurology procedure to extract it that had not succeeded in bringing back her voice, I asked questions about whether they could safely start blood thinners.
“I know this must be hard for you,” Dr.Hosseini had said, attempting to interject some humanity into my interrogation. I
could hear the pity in her voice, and, even knowing it was appropriate, I resented it. Don’t try to guess what I’m feeling , I wanted to snap, but instead I apologized for my truancy and told her that I would see her soon.
It had been five years since I’d last come to Featherstone, but muscle memory guided me to the locked double doors of the
cardiac intensive care unit. I hit the intercom, gave my name, then stepped back as the doors opened for us. It being after
midnight, the hospital lights were dimmed. The memories of my old ICU night shifts hit me like a wave: the churning in my
stomach as I awaited pages, the way my ears were attuned to the cranks and beeps and honks of the various ventilators and
dialysis machines and BiPAP units distributed throughout the floor. A nurse shivered at her station, wrapped in a blanket
I imagined she snuck from the warmer, while another carted an armful of supplies into a patient’s room. She gave Ezra and
me a curious look.
“Who’re you here for?” she asked.
“Boateng,” I said. “Room 4016?”
“Ah! Karen’s her nurse, but she’s on break right now. I’ll take you,” she said, taking off in a direction. She looked back
at us, her eyes narrowing, and I saw, in real time, as a gear clicked into place in her head.
“I’m Whitney, by the way. And um... I’m so sorry to ask this. But by any chance, are you Dr.Jojobee?”
I winced. I’d been so preoccupied by my thoughts that I’d forgotten that young women in health care were my target demographic.
“Yes,” I said flatly, hoping my tone would invite no further speculation.
“Oh, cool. Um... I follow you. I really like all the things you have to say about working in health care. Also that you’re,
like, so girlie while doing it.” Whitney’s cheeks reddened, and she ducked her head, embarrassed. “Anyway, I’m really sorry
you’re here right now. But I just had to let you know that I think what you’re doing is really important.” We arrived in front
of 4016, and she bit back a smile. “I’ll page the team, let them know you’re here.”
“Thank you, Whitney,” I managed, unexpectedly moved.
“It’s no problem,” Whitney said, then scampered away.
“That was cute,” Ezra said when she was out of sight.
I nodded, staring at the silver door handle before me. Every hospital I’d been to had the same wood laminate doors, the same
steel handle that I’d nudge open with my hips and elbows when my hands were too full of supplies or notes or ultrasound machine.
To think that my mother was behind this door, that all I had to do was push, and she would be there.
The knot in my throat pulled tight. I could feel the ghosts of old anxieties creeping into my head, long-resolved insecurities. I’d been rejected by Prudence so many times as a child that I’d grown numb to her indifference, but now, as an adult, I felt raw, nervous. What if she didn’t actually want to see me again? What if Dr. Hosseini had only called me because I was her next of kin, her living adult child and therefore her legal surrogate decision maker, and because chasing me down was simpler than assigning a legal guardian? What if I opened the door and Prudence pushed me out?
Ezra reached for my hand to squeeze.
“You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to,” he said. “It’s not too late to walk away.”
I shook my head. No. I’d come this far. I had to see this through.
“I’ll do it,” I said softly. “I just need a minute.”
But I was denied even that, because in the next second, the door opened from the inside, and a man slid out.
I could tell he was Ghanaian from one glance. Stout and square-jawed, with a bald head that folded on itself in the back,
he looked like a stereotypical Ghanaian uncle, though I was quite sure we had never met. By the way he was staring at me,
like he’d known me my whole life, I wondered if I was wrong. I’d met so few of my relatives, and Prudence hadn’t exactly had
many friends—
“You must be Josephine,” the man said, and I watched, stunned, as he lowered his wire-framed glasses to wipe away tears. “Excuse
me. But you look just like her.”
For all of her faults, Prudence Boateng had never brought a man into our home.
“Do not open your legs for any man,” she’d told me. “Give them something one time, and the next time, they will think they can take. And who knows what they will leave you with after.”
It was one of the only times she’d ever troubled herself to advise me. The other first gen kids complained that their parents
were always trying to dictate their lives, but Prudence had always seemed to regard me more like a small, unwelcome guest
that she was forced to harbor. We rarely spoke outside of her directives: clean the bathroom, do the laundry, wash the plates.
But that day was special. Hours earlier, I’d lowered my pants in the bathroom during third period science to find them soaked
in dark, sticky discharge. I had known my period was coming soon; I was thirteen, after all, and a cover-to-cover read of
my library’s copy of Girl’s Body Book had provided me with the baseline knowledge of the wonders of puberty. When I informed Prudence that evening, it was not to
celebrate my development so much as it was to warn her that she would now need to consider me when stocking up on her menstrual
products.
But instead of grumbling about having to spend more money on me, Prudence imparted her wisdom: Do not listen to men. Do not
trust them. They will say anything to get between your legs, and you can get pregnant now. Don’t let one ruin your life (the
thinly veiled implication: like you ruined mine).
And yet, so many years later, here I was, speaking to a man who called himself my mother’s partner.
His name was Kweku. He was a CPA. He and Prudence had met at church eight years ago, and they shared a small three-bedroom
home in Bolingbrook.
I took in the new information numbly.
“The doctors said they had a hard time reaching you,” Kweku said. He had a gentle manner of speaking, soothing, like a voice actor for the sleep meditation podcasts I often listened to at night. He gave Ezra and me a look over. “I suppose they must have only just succeeded.”
“Yes,” I said, suddenly incapable of speaking more than one word at a time.
“Thank you for coming,” Kweku said. Then: “What do you know?”
“Heart attack, then stroke,” I said plainly. “Was really sick at first, getting better now.”
Kweku nodded solemnly. I wondered what his story was. How he fell for my mother. What he knew about me, her prodigal daughter.
He told me none of this. Instead, he said something even more mystifying.
“Thank you,” he said. “She didn’t think you would come, but she prayed that you might. Every day, she prayed. Until she...”
He cleared his throat, choking on his new reality.
“Until she couldn’t,” I finished, and Kweku gave me a bleary look.
“She was proud of you,” he said.
I winced. “Well, she had a strange way of showing it,” I said.
Kweku didn’t respond to that. Instead, abruptly, he turned to Ezra.
“I was going to the vending machine. Come. Let me get you a drink,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder. When Ezra didn’t
budge, he added, gently, “Give them a little time alone.”
Ezra’s eyes flickered to me in a question that I couldn’t answer. Then he sagged, nodded, and they walked away, leaving me
alone at the door.
Now or never. I pushed down on the handle with the heel of my hand, sure that beyond the door I would find a vortex, a black hole, a glitch in space.
The first thing I noticed about my mother’s hospital room was that it was nice. She’d scored a corner bed, which bought her
not only solitude but also tall windows that probably let in a lot of light in the daytime. The couch against the back wall
was covered in plush, colorful blankets: Kweku’s station, I assumed. The IV pumps next to her bed whirred, and I scanned over
them. She was still on a few drips, but judging by the low doses, they were close to weaning her off them. I looked up at
her monitor, took note of her heart rate (ninety-three, normal sinus rhythm), blood pressure (low, but serviceable), the waveform
of her pulse oximeter (shockingly good).
Don’t just look at the data , I could hear my old senior resident saying in my head. Look at the patient.
I looked down at the bed to find my reflection staring back. When I was young, I’d dreamed of someday looking like my mother,
of inheriting her long, curling eyelashes and round, high cheeks. Even ill, she looked well cared for, her skin greased and
smelling of cocoa butter, her lips smooth and uncracked. I could see myself in the reflection of her large, wet eyes: her
mirror image.
She lifted a hand, reaching for me.
I felt the gesture like a bludgeon to my chest, memories pummeling at the levy of my hardened heart. How many times had I reached out to her just like this? How often had I begged for her affection, or at least her recognition, only to be met with disdain, to be told that I wasn’t wanted? That by existing, I’d ruined her? I tore my gaze away to face her monitors, heading back to safe shores of data. Data didn’t lie. The data said that she was on the mend. That she’d had a brush with death, but that it hadn’t caught her, and wouldn’t, at least not today. By hanging up on her and changing my number, I hadn’t left her to die.
A soft coo interrupted my thoughts, and it took me a moment to realize that it had come from my mother. The hand she’d extended
still hovered, shaking, in the air, and when I looked at her face, she stared back with resolve.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” I said to her, my nails digging into the side of her bed. “All this time, I’ve wanted to actually
speak to you. Every time you called, I thought, maybe this is it. We’ll finally have a real conversation, and I can gain some
understanding. And now you can’t even give me that.”
Broca’s aphasia, I knew, affected the left frontal cortex. Patients with it have no problem understanding language but struggle
to produce it. I could see the effect my words had on her, but when Prudence opened her mouth to respond, the words were lost
to her. She searched for them, grunting and groaning, her tongue twisting uselessly in her mouth, before, finally, she gave
up. A tear leaked out from the corner of her eye, and she kicked the foot of her bed, frustrated.
I watched her.
“You may never get an apology from your mother,” my therapist, Rochelle, had said during one of our first sessions. “And that’s
okay. You can’t control who she is, or what she does. But you can control yourself. So I want you to use your imagination.
I want you to not think of her as your mother, but as your contemporary. Who was she? What ailed her? What and how did she
survive? Find closure within yourself.”
Prudence Boateng was a single mother in a foreign land, with no papers, keeping a household afloat by scrubbing other people’s toilets, caring for other people’s children. The man who’d left me with her was nowhere to be found, his existence a blight, the child he created only a reminder of the damage he’d wrought. And now she was in a hospital bed, her heart weakened, her brain damaged, her voice stolen. She should have been easy for me to empathize with. I’d lectured many an intern on showing grace to patients just like her.
And yet.
“I’m loved, you know,” I told her. “I found a family. One of them is out there right now, waiting on me. And a partner too.
A man who tells me he loves me and shows it too.” Her monitor began to beep, and my gaze reflexively jumped to it: her heart
rate, easing into the low one hundreds. Fast, but a normal rhythm. Physiologic. “Do you get it? I didn’t need you in the end . I did just fine on my own.”
Prudence’s eyes turned glassy. I could tell I’d hurt her, and I was glad for it.
“G-guh,” she tried. Then she cleared her throat, the corners of her mouth turning up into a small smile. “ Good. ”
The levy broke.
My hand moved on its own to clasp hers, tears streaming down her face, even more coming down mine. She said it again and again
and again, her small body wracked with sobs, her grip on me so tight that she kinked her IV tubing and her pump began to beep.
“Good,” she said, and then later, with much effort: “Sorry.” Once, when I released her hand to find tissues, she reached out
for me in alarm and added, “Please.”
I sat with her, sobbing, for hours. Karen came in, quietly checked her vitals and found me a chair. Dr. Hosseini dropped by to give me an update, and we talked softly at my mother’s bedside about her impending transfer out of the intensive care unit and the input from the neurology team. Outside, the sky lightened from pitch black to a soft, periwinkle blue, and I held her hand all the while, marveling at how, despite our similarities, it was so much smaller than mine.
Eventually, Prudence drifted off to sleep. I let her go, knowing that she would be woken soon for a full day of tests.
I found Ezra and Kweku in the waiting room, napping on the sofas. They looked a strange pair—Ezra’s long legs stretched across
the tile floor, Kweku’s short ones crossed on his lap. I touched Ezra, very lightly, on the arm, and he jolted awake.
“Hey,” I said. Next to him, Kweku stirred and stretched. “Sorry I was gone so long.”
Ezra yawned, then smiled at me through his mask.
“It’s no problem,” he said. “You ready to go? I can tell Harold to circle back for us.”
“Please,” I said.
I exchanged emails with Kweku and offered my help with choosing Prudence’s eventual rehabilitation center. Before we left,
he hugged me and then Ezra, and the sincerity in his hold would have brought me to tears if I had any left.
When Ezra and I finally made it outside the hospital lobby to wait for Harold, the sun was cresting the horizon. I was no
stranger to all-nighters, but Ezra hadn’t done a medical residency, and I could feel him lagging behind me.
“I ruined your night,” I said when he caught up.
Ezra rolled his eyes. “You didn’t ruin anything. I took a nap in the waiting room. I’m good,” he said. He paused, and I could
sense he wanted to say something else. “You know. The last time I was in an intensive care unit, I think I was the one in
the bed.”
I gasped, stepping around him to get a better look at his face. I hadn’t considered that Ezra might have found today’s trip traumatic, a reminder of his own brush with death.
“I’m so sorry, Ez,” I confessed. “Was this too much? Are you okay?”
Ezra rubbed his temples, shaking his head.
“You’re something else,” he said. “How are you asking me if I’m okay right now? After everything you’ve gone through today?”
“Well, are you?” I said, and he laughed.
“Of course I am,” he said. “What about you? Are you seriously going to figure out rehab stuff for your mom with Kweku? I feel
like you did your part already by showing up. Why do more?”
I rolled my bottom lip into my mouth. It had long lost its layer of lipstick, but I’d replaced it with Mal’s lip balm in my
bag, and his vanilla mint taste was vaguely comforting. I couldn’t wait for my bed, for Mal to join me in it. Maybe we would
talk about today, or maybe we wouldn’t. By the time mark on his most recent text ( Let me know when you want me over. Thinking of you. ) sent at 1:32 this morning, he had had a late night too. We could probably both use the nap.
“Right now? Because it feels right,” I said, folding my arms around myself. “So I’ll keep helping out until it doesn’t.”
It was really that simple, at the end of the day. When I put aside my old hurts, when I looked at Prudence as who she might
be now instead of who she’d been when I was a child, I realized that I wanted to know her. See if she’d been transformed by
love, the way I had.
Ezra looked down at me through his straight, dark lashes, his expression made more unreadable by the mask covering the lower
half of his face.
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, but before I could lodge a com plaint, he draped his arms over my shoulders. “And compassionate. And kind. The strongest person I know. And, as messed up as it might be for me to say this right now, I’m glad I got to be here for you today.”
He sounded so earnest that I had to blink away, disarmed by this serious, sincere Ezra.
“Yeah? Well, you’re heavy,” I said, but I didn’t push him away. “And I’m glad you’re with me too. I missed you.”
Ezra huffed, then pulled me fully against him. I hugged him back, feeling many things at once: relief, exhaustion, hope. Ezra
and I had been through so much together, and now we had this under our belt too. As always, we would be okay.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, listening to the whirr of stalling engines as they pulled in front of the hospital, the
mating calls of early morning songbirds.
Ezra was the one to break our silence.
“Don’t push me away again, Jo,” he said. “I won’t be respectful about it next time. I’ll show up outside your apartment with
a boombox. Playing baby-come-back songs at top volume and pissing off all your neighbors.”
“Acht acht,” I teased. “You’re flirting again. Don’t play with me unless you mean it, Ez.”
I expected him to laugh. We’d just made another inside joke for ourselves, after all, taken a habit of his that had once hurt
me and neutralized it.
But he didn’t. Instead, Ezra pulled back, lowered his mask. His hold on my shoulders tightened, and I examined his face, taking
apart the minutiae of his expressions. The jump in his left cheek meant nerves. His lowered chin meant determination.
“And what if I do?” he said.