I don’t say anything about this to Michael on the ride home until we’ve crossed the Sagamore Bridge in his BMW convertible and he checks his messages at home. Pretending to be thoroughly fascinated with a map I’ve picked up in Plymouth describing the various Pilgrim house sites, I can’t help but overhear Carol’s purring tones asking him to stop by on his way home from the Cape.
He clicks off and smiles. Nothing else. No “That was my old girlfriend, Carol. Boy, is she annoying.” No “I’m so glad we had this weekend together because I realize‚ now‚ you are my true love and I’ll never look at anyone else.”
Just a smile. And a hum. He’s humming!
“I got the job,” I tell him.
He stops humming. “The one in Washington doing the national election team?”
“Your apology to Kirk Bledsoe worked, I guess. Only . . .”
“That’s fantastic!” He puts up his hand to high-five me and I’m crestfallen.
“I thought Washington was a big mistake, that no one’s your friend and they only invite you to parties to get you to return favors,” I say. “That’s what you told me.”
“Yeah, I thought about what you said, about being a big girl, and I realized my lecture there was fairly insulting. You definitely should go. It’s a presidential election, Julie. Who knows . . . it might get you on the network.”
It might get me on the network?
“But that would mean I’d have to work in New York.”
He shrugs. “So?”
“What about . . . Em?”
“Well, I don’t know about kids, never having had one. But having been a kid, I can tell you that at seventeen your first priority is not your mother’s address. Can’t she stay up here and stay with Donald to finish her senior year?”
“Uh, yes. I’m sure I could talk him into that.”
“Then problem solved. You’re going to D.C. to join the national election team and at night I’ll turn on the television and there you’ll be, right in Katie Couric’s spot. Congratulations.”
I’ve been seduced! And hoodwinked and . . . used! This rat bastard just wanted to get me into bed. That was his goal when we were having lobsters and that was his goal when he invited me to the Cape on the spur of the moment so I couldn’t back down.
You know, I wouldn’t put it past him to have planned this . . . as revenge for the FitzWilliams debacle. Forget what I ever said about him being an idealist. He’s a disillusioned idealist, in other words—a cynic.
Were I twenty years younger, I might have brought this up, verbalized the incendiary accusations darting around my mind. But I’m older and wiser now. I’ve learned the hard way that those types of confrontations only diminish the accuser and provide an upper hand to the scum.
No, if he wants to play that game, fine. I can be as cool and sophisticated as his other girlfriends, though inside I’m positively seething.
I’m so angry even when we turn up the road to my house that when the cell phone rings, I snap it open and bark, “Hello.”
“Sorry,” says an older man’s voice. “I was looking for Julie Mueller.”
Who is this? Turning the phone I see it’s Mt. Olive Hospital. Oh, crap. The results!
“This is she,” I say, my heart fluttering faster than a bird’s. “Is this Dr. Spitzer?”
Michael parks the car and puts his hand on my knee, squeezing it slightly in comfort. I’m tempted to bat it off, but having it there helps me focus on anger instead of fear.
What Dr. Spitzer says next, I’m not quite sure. Something about “calcifications” and “checking back in six months.” All I hear is the magical, wonderful word: “benign.” No cancer.
“I told you,” he says. “Ninety percent.”
Yes! As soon as I hang up the phone, I shout it from the top of my lungs. “Yes! Yes!”
Michael’s smiling and he might want to give me a hug and a kiss, but I don’t let him. Instead I open the car, get my bag, and thank him for a terrific time.
“We should celebrate,” he says. “You up for it?”
When
, I think,
after you stop by Carol’s?
“How about I call you?” I make the universal sign of the telephone, slam the door, say thanks again, and tell him I’ll be in touch.
Clearly a bit confused, he shifts into reverse, waves good-bye, and drives off, looking so magnificent in that car with those shades and that hair I scold myself for being so naïve as to think a man like him could want to keep a tired old horse like me.
“Is it good news?” Teenie asks, tottering across the street in lime-green capris and sneakers. “If you’re here, it must be good.”
Mom must have told her about my lump and subsequent tests. Oh, well. Can’t stuff that genie back in the bottle.
“Good news, absolutely. Everything’s clear.”
“That’s such a relief.” Teenie clasps her hand across her tiny, sunken chest. “I’ve been worrying all day. I told Lois I wanted to go to the hospital, too, but she said I should stay here in case you got home.”
There have been times when I’ve known or felt awful events before actually hearing the words. Like when the Watertown Preschool called to say that Em had had an accident and I knew, instinctively, that it wasn’t any old accident like a scraped knee or a black eye and I was right. She’d broken her collarbone.
Or then, when she was older, with a stomachache that the doctor on the other end of the line assured me was the flu and a nagging voice inside disagreed. So I rushed her to the hospital feeling foolish and determined to get her to Mt. Olive, where Em’s appendix was removed an hour from bursting.
This is one of those times.
Dad has had a heart attack.
“Teenie,” I say, dropping my suitcase. “Where’s Dad?”
“At the hospital, of course,” she says, “with Lois.”
With Lois? But why would he be with Lois when. . . . All of a sudden, my whole body begins to shake. I can barely say the word. Surely, they would have found a way to get in touch with me. “Em?”
“Frank told Emmaline to stay in Maine. What’s wrong with you, Julie? You said it was good news.” Teenie is coming toward me, her bright orange hair with its gray roots silly, clown silly. “It’s the shock of it, isn’t it? I remember when my own mother passed on . . .”
My hands have somehow landed on Teenie’s tiny shoulders and Teenie’s mouth is open in horror. Mom couldn’t have died. She couldn’t have. I just saw her Friday when I breezed past her to go to the limo . . . and I never got to tell her about the test results.
“My mother . . . she’s not . . .”
“Oh, no!” Teenie lets out a gasp. “Your mother collapsed in the garden this morning. The paramedics came. I talked to your father an hour ago and he says it probably was a stroke.”
“A stroke!” I know nothing about strokes. People survive them, don’t they? “Is it bad?”
“They don’t know. It’s still early.” Then Teenie reaches up and with her withered little hands removes mine from her shoulders. “This is not where you should be, Julie. Go to Mt. Olive. Go take care of your mother.”
Chapter Twenty-three
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
—RICHARD II, ACT V, SCENE 5
She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s alive.
That’s my mantra as I (finally!) get to Mt. Olive and (finally!) find a parking space. Something in the universe has shifted. I sense it, that the blissful era I took for granted in which my mother was resilient and healthy is forever gone.
More than ever I need to be in control and calm. I need to show everyone—including Dad and especially Mom—that this is no big deal. People recover from strokes all the time and go on to lead productive lives.
“Betty Mueller. I’m not seeing her on my sheet.” An ancient volunteer at the patient inquiry desk runs a finger down a list of names. Don’t they have computers for this? “Are you sure she’s been admitted?”
A dart of panic surges through me. Nonsense. There’ll be none of that mom-is-dying thinking, I tell myself, asking the snow white-haired man if perhaps my mother is under Elizabeth Mueller, only to find that he thought I’d said Nooler. (A first. Never have I or anyone in my family been confused for “Noolers.”)
“Intensive care,” he says, patting the sheets on his clipboard. “Third floor.”
Intensive care? Somehow, I’d have expected her to be in recovery. Blindly, I follow the signs to intensive care, through the artificial normalcy of the lower lobby to the more intimate upper lobby where patients wearing light blue cotton robes hobble with the aid of loved ones and new mothers practice walking again at the insistence of taskmaster nurses.
“You’re Mrs. Mueller’s daughter?” a nurse asks, flipping through her checklists.
“Yes. Julie Mueller.”
The nurse’s name tag says A. ARONSON, RN, MS, ICU. I want to know her first name. I want her to tell me Mom’s going to be just fine as she leads me down the circular hallway, past the other rooms with high metal beds and blinking machines, past other sagas and family tragedies in the making.
“Your mother came to us only an hour ago and she’s scheduled for another MRI, so I’m not fully up to speed on her condition. She’s asleep right now. Your father’s with her.”
“Is she going to be okay?” What a child I sound like. What an idiotic baby.
“It’s a bleeding stroke, what we call a hemorrhagic—”
“Excuse me.” I stop her outside the door. “It
is
or it
was
a bleeding stroke?”
A. Aronson looks up at me. She is tiny, but wise. Like every other nurse I’ve met, she’s learned how to deliver bad news with the minimum necessary information and emotion, yet with steely compassion. “Is. Your mother’s brain is still bleeding. That’s why the doctor ordered another MRI, to see where the leak is, if you will.”
“Ah.”
Her brain is bleeding
. This is incomprehensible, that my mother could be here, right around the corner, with a bleeding brain.
We turn into the room and I ready myself for whatever may come— which happens to be quite a lot.
There are so many machines beeping and blinking, so many tubes around the high metal bed that it’s hard to see my mother in the middle of it, lost in the maze of technology. She looks smaller, shrunken, gray, and fragile, though the smile on her sleeping face is that of a child’s.
This is what she must have looked like as a little girl.
The window to her right opens onto the green trees that line the Charles and, beyond them, the Boston skyline. A room with a view.
“Now‚ that’s odd,” A. Aronson is saying. “Your father was here a minute ago. He must have stepped out.”
Not so odd. Though I’d have thought he’d have the decency to be here in the beginning.
“He knew you were on the way,” A. Aronson is saying. “He told me.”
Of course. That’s why he left. I was on the way. He figured there’d be someone to relieve him.
This is when I’ll have to set the groundwork, as A. Aronson checks Mom’s vitals and waits a few minutes for Dad, who will never come.
I ask, “Do you know if the doctor’s going to stop by?”
“Evening rounds start at seven, but if you want I can see if he can stop here first.” She pauses and adds awkwardly, “We don’t have you authorized as a primary caregiver, so the doctor won’t be able to tell you anything without your father signing a waiver. Now‚ if your father were to sign off . . .”
“Nurse Aronson?” I begin, the rhythmic in, out of Mom’s respirator suddenly noticeable.
She doesn’t correct me or say “Amy” or “Alice” or “Arlene.”
“My father won’t be around until tomorrow. In fact, I’ll be completely upfront and tell you that he won’t be around much at all. He can’t stand sickness.”
Tucking in Mom’s sheet, Aronson says, “I see. Well, I’m afraid those are the hospital rules and if your father won’t be in any shape to care for your mother, then we should know now because we like to start physical therapy as soon as possible. Her primary caregiver is going to have a huge responsibility. It’s not an easy job.”
"I can do it!” Suddenly, I have a revelation: This is why the D.C. job won’t work out. Not because of Michael, but because I need to take care of Mom. “I can cook for her and do her wash. Help her up and down stairs.”
“I’m not sure your mother will ever go up and down stairs again.”
Another icy shot of panic. “What do you mean? People recover from strokes all the time.”
“Some do and some don’t. It depends on the brain damage.”
The hideous words “brain damage” hang in the air as A. Aronson goes to the door and closes it so we have privacy. “Look. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think I have the picture of the family dynamic here. Your mother is very, very ill. The intracerebral hemorrhage she suffered was massive and probably not the first. Likely, she’s been suffering minor strokes all along.”
Didn’t she see the doctor for a follow-up after her dizzy spell on the day I took her to the mall? I don’t know. I was so wrapped up in my breast cancer
nothingness
that I didn’t stop to make sure. If I had, she might not be here now. How could I have let her down like that?
“Her CAT scan and MRI show a significant portion of the right side of her brain has been, in laymen’s terms, drowned by blood.”
“What? I’m not sure I caught that.”
She takes a breath. “The blood is cutting off oxygen to your mother’s brain.”
Nurse Aronson’s nuggets of crucial information for which I hunger feel like bullets being fired at me from all sides.
Right side drowned. Intracerebral hemorrhage. Very, very ill
.
There is no hopeful “however.” No “on the bright side,” or even a mention of recovery. I feel not quite steady, though an inner voice—my mother’s, I know it—urges me to stand still and act unfazed if I want Aronson to keep talking.
“This is a lot of information coming at you at once,” Aronson says. “And I realize you might not be able to comprehend it. I admire you for not getting hysterical. Believe me, many people in your situation have before.”