70. Nothing Gets Worse
Nothing Gets Worse
Kiri
After that night, one day bleeds into the next.
Morning becomes whatever time a nurse switches on the light above Ma’s bed.
Night is when the windows turn black and Natalia starts asking whether either of us has eaten anything that didn’t come from a vending machine.
I sleep in fragments, twenty minutes with my head against the wall, an hour folded into a chair, once with my face pressed into Natalia’s stomach while she sits beside me and runs her fingers through my hair.
Ma's alive.
That becomes the only measurement of time that matters.
Her condition is stable, but for the first two days, stable feels like another word for suspended.
The monitors keep making the same sounds.
The ventilator keeps breathing for her. Her face remains swollen beneath the bruising, dark fingerprints rising around her throat no matter how many times I look away and look back.
Nothing gets worse.
Nothing gets better.
Stefan calls before sunrise the first morning with Elise already on the line.
Someone has seen police outside the house.
A grainy picture of Rithy’s car at Harborview is circulating in a private fan group, and a reporter has emailed the label asking whether there has been a death in the family. They send us a statement to approve.
PRIVATE FAMILY TRAGEDY.
I stare at the words until they blur.
“Ma isn’t dead,” I say.
Stefan goes quiet.
“So don’t write it like she fucking is.”
Rithy takes the phone from me before I throw it through the window.
By the time the statement goes out, tragedy has become emergency.
It says Rithy and I are stepping away from professional commitments while our mother remains hospitalized.
It asks for privacy and confirms nothing about Dad beyond the fact that authorities are investigating an incident at a private residence.
It takes six people and fourteen emails to say almost nothing.
Detective Alvarez returns.
He interviews us separately this time. Me first, then Rithy, then Natalia.
I tell him again about pinning James against the wall.
Where my arm was. How hard I shoved him.
That he was standing when we left and still had enough breath to insult us on the way out.
Alvarez asks whether Dad had ever threatened to kill Ma.
I tell him that man didn’t need to say things out loud for us to know he was capable of them.
That answer earns me a long look and another note in his book.
They recover the gun from the living room. It was registered to him. The photographs in the bathtub belong to the albums Ma showed us. Some were burned down to blackened corners. Others had been soaked when she tried to put the fire out. The police believe the fight started there.
Believe.
Preliminary.
Consistent with.
Every answer arrives wrapped in language designed to keep it from becoming one.
Kasia visits during her lunch breaks and again when she finishes work.
She keeps Nat stocked in magazines and snacks.
Rafe and Ronan trade shifts so one of them is almost always in the waiting room with us.
They bring clothes, chargers, food, and the kind of conversation that doesn’t require us to answer.
After three days, Stefan sends them back to Los Angeles to get ahead on the album work while Rithy and I stay in Seattle. Rafe argues until I tell him there's no point in all four of us sitting around pretending we understand brain scans. He grips the back of my neck before he leaves.
“One call,” he says. “Anything changes, one call.”
Ronan points between Rithy and me. “Eat something with a vegetable in it.”
Rithy flips him off.
“Hey, I'd offer but my dick isn’t a vegetable.”
“If it were, I’m sure Freja would get her five-a-day easily,” Rithy mumbles, already laughing at his own joke.
“Oi, the sad boy has jokes all of a sudden,” Ronan says, backing through the waiting-room doors and blowing him a kiss.
Then they’re gone, and the waiting room feels emptier without them.
Natalia is still here every day. She learns that Rithy will eat the breakfast sandwich from the cafeteria only if she removes the slice of rubber they call egg.
She discovers I can tolerate the chicken noodle soup if she dumps enough pepper into it and brings me two packages of crackers instead of one.
I don’t remember telling her either thing.
Food simply starts appearing beside me exactly the way I’ll eat it.
She keeps lip balm in her purse for Rithy because the hospital air dries his mouth out.
She brings me clean shirts and makes me change when I start smelling like antiseptic and sweat.
At night, she wedges herself against me in the waiting-room chair and lets me hold her until my hands stop shaking.
The ICU enforces a two-person limit until one of the nurses, Marisol, takes pity on us. She speaks to the charge nurse and gets an exception approved as long as the three of us stay quiet and move out of the way when anyone needs access to Ma.
It makes everything easier. Rithy sits on one side of the bed. I take the other. Natalia uses me as her personal couch and I'm more than happy with the arrangement.
We talk to Ma because the nurses tell us hearing may return before anything else.
Rithy fills the room with enough nonsense for all of us.
He tells her Ronan wore mismatched shoes to the hospital.
He complains about the coffee and promises to replace her ruined albums with new ones, even though we all know there were photographs destroyed that no one can replace.
I don’t know what to say.
Most of the time, I hold her hand and tell her I’m there.
On the fourth day, Dr. Reynolds shows us the newest scans.
“The bleeding has stabilized,” he says, pointing to a pale area on the screen. “It’s beginning to resolve, which is encouraging. The swelling around her airway has also decreased.”
“Then why isn’t she awake?” I ask.
“We’ve kept her sedated while her airway and brain recovered. We’re reducing those medications now, but it can take time for them to clear, particularly after severe trauma.”
“How much time?”
“I can’t give you an exact answer.”
I hate him a little every time he says that, even though I know it isn’t his fault.
He tells us Ma is beginning to initiate more breaths over the ventilator.
She moves both sides of her body when they stimulate her, and her pupils react normally.
They are all encouraging signs, but none of them tells us what she will be like when she wakes.
If she wakes.
He doesn’t say that part anymore. He doesn’t have to.
Later that day, Marisol orders us out of the room.
“All three of you,” she says. “Twenty minutes. Fresh air.”
“We’re fine,” Rithy tells her.
Natalia stands and stretches. “She has a point.”
They walk around the hospital grounds while I run. I don’t change clothes. I don’t stretch. I step outside and start moving because if I don’t put the pressure somewhere, it’s going to tear through my chest. I circle the building until my lungs burn.
Every time I pass Natalia and Rithy, they’re walking slowly beside each other, shoulders nearly touching.
Once, Natalia reaches out as I go by and brushes her fingers across my arm.
On the next lap, Rithy holds up the bottle of water she brought and tells me I’m too famous to collapse dramatically in public and to drink something. I grab it and keep running.
They keep walking.
For twenty minutes, none of us are trapped in the room with the machines.
By the fifth day, Ma is breathing more on her own.
The ventilator still supports her, but it no longer does all the work.
Her throat has healed enough that they begin talking about removing the tube once she is awake enough to protect her airway.
Sometimes her fingers twitch. Her face tightens when they suction the tube.
Once, when Rithy speaks close to her ear, her head turns weakly toward him.
The nurse calls it encouraging. Rithy and I spend the next six hours trying to make her do it again.
That afternoon, exhaustion finally catches him.
He stretches out in the only chair capable of reclining and falls asleep with his mouth open, one hand still resting against the edge of Ma’s mattress.
Natalia sits across my lap in the other chair, turned sideways so she can fit against my chest. Her fingers move lazily through the hair at my temple.
“You need a shower,” she whispers.
“So do you.”
She presses her nose against mine. “You’re very rude to the woman keeping you alive.”
“I thought the soup was doing that.”
“The soup has been working under my direct instructions.”
Her mouth brushes mine, soft enough not to wake up all the things under the surface that we don't have time for anymore. Then she kisses the tip of my nose.
Something moves in the bed. At first, I think it’s another reflex. A small twitch beneath the blanket. The kind we’ve spent days assigning meaning to because the alternative is admitting we have no control over anything. Then Ma’s fingers curl.
They close around Rithy’s hand.
I forget how to move.
“Natalia.”
She turns. Ma’s brow pulls tight. Her head moves against the pillow, and a faint sound catches around the tube in her throat. I lift Natalia off my lap and set her gently on her feet as I surge out of the chair.
“Ma?”
Rithy jerks awake.
“What?”
“Ma.” I lean over the bed and take her other hand. “Ma, it’s Kiri. Can you hear me?”
Her eyelids flutter.