Chapter Thirty-four
‘It’s Mary Roberts. I’m sorry I missed your call.’
I was standing at the departure gate, trying not to think about the painful goodbye I’d just experienced. This phone call was like ripping off a scab-encrusted band-aid – I’d really rather not, but postponing it wasn’t going to make it any less inevitable.
‘Mary. Thanks for calling. Look I’m sorry to bother you on your day off, but there’s been an incident raised from one of your shifts last week.’
My heart plummeted. This was exactly what I had dreaded, what you always dread when you finish a shift. Did I do everything right? Did I chart the right dose in that busy moment? Did I match the right drug chart with the right patient? Did I miss something critical? Did I make a lethal mistake?
‘Okay,’ I heard myself say.
‘Dale Peterson,’ he went on. Business like. ‘Do you remember him? Sixty-seven.’
‘Yes. I remember him. Hyperkalaemic cardiac arrest, return of spontaneous circulation after the second shock. Went to ICU.’
‘That’s right.’
I waited.
‘Someone who was on shift with you has raised the concern that you might have charted him inappropriate potassium.’
My mind reeled. What?
‘Potassium? No, I don’t think so.’ Did I? Surely, I didn’t. Had I mistaken his chart for someone else’s? Fuck. I couldn’t even recall charting anyone for potassium last week.
‘We’re still digging out the medical records of the patient, but it’s obviously something that would need significant discussion if this person’s concerns are validated.’
‘Of course.’ My thoughts were in overdrive. ‘But I’m really almost positive I didn’t chart him potassium.’ Was I trying to convince myself? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
Dale Peterson was a renal failure patient. He wasn’t able to clear his potassium properly so he was always at risk of high potassium. If I were to have charted him potassium it would literally have been a lethal move. The cause of his cardiac arrest. I felt sick. I felt so fucking sick.
Sick enough to never want to practise medicine again.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe I’d lose my registration. I’d never pass my exam. All my hard work was coming to a cataclysmic close.
‘We’ll have to wait and see, but hopefully you’re right and it’s all a big fuss about nothing,’ Michael was saying.
The functional part of my brain and body went on to explain and apologise for my upcoming absence and my need to take carer’s leave due to my mother being critically ill.
Michael said understanding things and I promised to do the relevant forms. Meanwhile, my dreams were crumbling, along with my heart.
And by the time I boarded the flight, it seemed that everything I had ever cared about was shattering.
Ebony was standing outside the ward when I arrived and when she saw me, she flung herself at me with such force I had to work hard not to fall over.
‘Mary,’ she said, clinging to me.
I was shocked. This wasn’t what I had expected based on the last time we’d seen each other.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry I said all that stuff.’
‘It’s okay, Ebony. I’m here. It’s okay.’
I hadn’t even got my head around seeing Ebony again and how that fitted into where we’d left off only a few days ago. It seemed inconsequential with everything that was going on.
‘How is she?’ I asked, smoothing the hair from my sister’s face.
‘She looks so bad, Mair.’
I nodded and squeezed her hand and we went into the intensive care unit, where Mum was unconscious and intubated.
The sight was simultaneously so ordinary and so shocking.
This was my world, how I saw patients weekly in the emergency department.
Her monitor showed that she was stable from a cardiovascular and respiratory perspective, which as a clinician should have been reassuring.
Yet this was my mother. She was yellow and swollen, and had a plastic tube tied with a little white ribbon coming out of her mouth.
I picked up her hand and felt the tears slide down my cheeks. I cried for her, and I cried for Ebony, and I cried for me. All tangled up in this together.
Ebony found her way into my arms and we clung to one another for some length of time I had no concept of.
Eventually, a nurse came by and I formulated some questions that she answered well, but I was left neither more reassured nor more panicky.
Without grilling the nurse like the anxious medical daughter I was, I established that Mum had alcoholic encephalopathy and a major problem with her blood-clotting abilities.
I knew the mortality rates associated with this degree of fulminant hepatitis were extremely high.
At this point, there was nothing to do except wait and hope.
When we left the hospital, Ebony drove me back to Mum’s house. I needed to see the state in which she had been living. It wasn’t the squalor you might expect from the house of an alcoholic, but it was deeply sad.
‘You’ll stay with us, won’t you?’ Ebony asked.
I hesitated and looked around the space. The compulsion to clean was overwhelming. I desperately wanted to control it, bring it together. ‘I will, but I think I just need to be active right now. I need to feel close to Mum. Feel useful.’
Ebony looked around for a moment, as though trying to work out what to do, but I could see the scene didn’t inspire the same sense of purpose for her. She looked small within it, unsure.
I pulled her to me. ‘Ebony. Go get your kids. Be with them. I just need a bit of time here and then I’ll come over. Okay?’
She didn’t protest.
Once I was alone in the house, I started working with focus and drive, and I found a comfort in the satisfaction of bringing the house together.
A catharsis in finding the bottles and taking them to the recycling bin.
Cleaning the vomit from the edge of the toilet bowel.
Wiping the spilt alcohol from the bench.
Gathering the pungent clothes from the floor, their fruity, alcoholic stench almost enough to make me gag.
As I worked, I realised why I’d become such a clean freak in my adult life, why I took so much comfort in orderliness – because that was how I had always coped when things felt out of control.
When Mum was in a bad way, when I was worried for Ebony, I knew that I could make myself busy and that I could make the world around us look better than it really was.
As I changed my mother’s reeking sheets, I ached for her troubled soul and the addiction that had never loosened its grip on her.
And as I vacuumed and mopped, I ached for Ebony and the fact her older sister had never been the equal she had wanted.
As I scrubbed the kitchen benches and wiped the fridge, I ached for me and the carefree childhood I’d never had.
But I also worked with a sense of hope, just like I always had when I was growing up. Because maybe if everything looked and felt fresh, there could be a change. A new beginning.
And even now, I caught myself imagining that if things worked out, if Mum came home, maybe this would be the start of a different life.
I didn’t try to squash that naive hope. I just let it wash through me, as I knew it needed to, no matter how fanciful it might be.
If my hope died, then something in me would die too.
I hung a load of washing outside and paused and looked around at the neglected yard in the fading daylight.
The grass was high and scraggly, the weeds greedy, the paths covered in rotting leaves.
The daffodils had come out but were wilted now, the flowers long gone and the stems tired and sagging on the dirt.
I scanned the yard, looking for something, anything that might be living, that might be holding the hope I’d always planted.
There in the corner, mostly obscured by long grass, was a yellow and white bearded iris.
A splash of colour, barely anything, but just enough to soothe my heart and carry on with the work.
When I’d done what felt like enough for that day, it was dark outside. I did feel better for it, and the house looked and smelt new. My work was a tangible success; I had made something better and it was gratifying.
I showered, long and hot, and it occurred to me I was washing the last of the traces of Abel off my body. His kisses on my breasts, the slick of my desire dried to my skin. It was hard to comprehend that only that morning, I had woken in his arms in some bright new Eden.
There were messages from him on my phone I hadn’t been able to read.
Missed calls I hadn’t been able to return.
There was no room for Abel in this version of my reality, and to even entertain the idea of him was more painful than my raw heart could take right now.
So I pushed the ache for him aside and tried to focus on the here and now.
Ebony was reading on the couch when I got to her house, Molly asleep on her lap.
‘I didn’t quite get her into bed tonight,’ she said, almost apologetically.
I sat beside her and looped my arm through hers. ‘You’re a wonderful mum. You know that, right?’ I meant it. The way she cared for those three children was incomparable. Beautiful. They were so lucky to have her.
‘Mary?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m really sorry for what I said to you last week.’
‘We can talk about it another time. We’ll work it out.’
‘No. I need to say it now. I’m really sorry for what I said,’ she repeated. ‘It came out wrong and it was really unfair.’
I waited. I was tempted to just brush over it, my impulse to reassure her almost too strong to resist, but I sensed she didn’t want me to do that right now.
‘I think I just feel guilty sometimes, for everything that you’ve sacrificed for me.’
‘Ebony, I haven’t.’
‘Mary, please. Just let me say this. I know you’ve sacrificed stuff for me. Maybe you wanted to. Maybe it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice to you. But I always feel like I owe you so much. And sometimes that makes me feel small and incompetent and—’
‘You’re so competent!’