Say the Word

by Jeannine Garsee

  One half-open eye, a slit of blue, watches nothing. When Fran jumps up, I jump, too. “Shawna! Thank God you’re here.” She steps closer, and I’m terrified she’ll hug me. Something in my face must warn her off.

  “Why is her eye open like that?” I ask uneasily.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Well, I wish someone would close it. I inch closer. The room reeks of disinfectant and the underlying odor of dirty diapers. I inhale through my mouth, but sorry, it’s too late. “Um, I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  Fran turns me smartly toward the adjoining bathroom. I snap the latch and hang my head over the toilet, but nothing happens. This is not good. How can I be so grossed out? I’m going to med school, dammit! I planned it my whole life. Not only because Dad expects it, which of course he does, but because I’m in love with the idea of curing diseases, saving lives. I want to join the Peace Corps so I can teach hygiene in Africa or India, inoculate kids, deliver babies—and now I’m ready to toss my cookies at the sight of a respirator?

  I recover, mop my face, and slither out of the bathroom. The room still stinks. A nurse hovers over Mom with yet another tube in hand.

  Fran picks at my sleeve. “Let’s step out. The nurse has to suction her and, uh, clean her up.”

  My throat convulses at the same time my cell phone goes off. “No cell phones allowed in patient rooms,” the nurse barks, like there’s not a thousand signs around to remind me.

  Sheepishly I follow Fran to the lounge, where Arye and Schmule are waiting. I glance at my phone: Dad, of course. I call him back and he answers abruptly, “Did you make it there all right?”

  “I’m at the hospital now.”

  “How is she?”

  Half-dead? “Not good. She’s on machines and stuff, and—”

  “Okay, I’m on my way. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “You’re coming here? Why?”

  “We’ll talk later.” Dad clicks off.

  Acutely aware of Fran’s and Arye’s stares, I confess, “My dad’s on his way.”

  Fran looks displeased, but refrains from comment. Schmule bounces out of a chair. “Hey, it’s my turn to see Penny.”

  “The nurse is busy with her now, sweetie,” Fran says.

  “Doing what?”

  “Just stuff. We can go back in a few minutes. C’mon, let’s get something to eat.”

  That, right now, is about the last thing I want to do.

  11

  There ought to be a law against hospital food. I’m a healthy eater who avoids grease and preservatives and, except for my chai lattes, as much sugar as possible.

  This doesn’t fly in a hospital cafeteria. I buy a semi-safe Diet Coke, while the Goodmans load up on fat and carbs.

  “How was your flight?” Fran asks as we circle a vacant table.

  “Twenty minutes late,” Arye complains, chomping down on a buttered croissant.

  “Good thing we didn’t crash,” I shoot back. “You’d still be waiting.”

  Schmule pipes up with, “Did you know that only thirty-two percent of all fatal airplane crashes are caused by pilot error? And I think sixteen percent are related to bad weather.”

  “Fatal?” I repeat. “Aren’t all airplane crashes fatal?”

  “Depends.” Schmule pokes a straw into a carton of chocolate milk. “Anyway, the odds of dying in an airplane are only like, um, one in five thousand.”

  Can’t he wait till I’m back in Ohio before spouting this crap? “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “Discovery Channel.”

  Fran sips coffee and nibbles a muffin, her mind in another galaxy. She reminds me of an old hippie in her wrinkled, Indian print tunic and bleached-out jeans. I see she let her crew cut grow out, and it hangs to her shoulders in gray, greasy waves.

  I almost ask for the details about what happened to Mom. Did she simply keel over, or had she been sick for a while? I’d like to know how she ended up a blob in that bed, unable to breathe without that thump, hiss, thump, hiss.

  I decide against asking, because (A) I don’t think Schmule needs to hear it, and (B) it might give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

  “Code Blue, Nine West! Code Blue, Nine West!”

  Fran leaps up so fast, her chair topples backward. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  “It might not be her,” Arye says, face drained of color. Poor Schmule trembles visibly.

  “It’s her,” Fran croaks. “Wait here. I’ll go see.”

  Icicles drip down my spine. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, you won’t. You stay here with the boys.”

  What makes her think she can order me around? I ignore her command and follow anyway. She doesn’t speak in the elevator. She shifts impatiently, watching the buttons as each floor flips by with maddening slowness.

  The hall outside Mom’s room looks like a scene from a reality medical show. Bustling bodies, barked commands, and screeching equipment.

  “Clear!” someone shouts.

  A nurse grabs my elbow and ushers me out of the way. That’s fine with me. I can’t watch anymore! I find the lounge again, and languish there alone, shuddering uncontrollably, trying not to think about that awful scene down the hall.

  12

  I jump when Fran bursts into the lounge. “Shawna, why don’t you go back downstairs and make sure the boys are okay?” Why is she always trying to get rid of me?

  I notice the doctor behind her and bury my butt firmly into the chair. “Are you my mom’s doctor?” Fran, annoyed, repeats her request, and poof! Evil Shawna reappears. “Look, you are not throwing me out. She’s my mother, so leave—me—alone!”

  Fran’s lips part in shock. Then, resigned, she nods at the man.

  “I’m Doctor Felker,” he says after a little ahem. “First of all, I need to know if Ms. Sorenson has a living will.”

  I shrug, not sure what that is. Fran keeps quiet.

  “Well, what about a durable power of attorney? That’s the legal document that names somebody to make any medical decisions in case the patient can’t make them on her own.”

  Fran admits, “I, um, don’t have anything like that.”

  The doctor looks at me. Why would I have it? If Mom and the Frankfurter are supposed to be, you know, married, or whatever you want to call it, why didn’t they take care of this before somebody got deathly sick?

  “Does it matter?” Fran asks weakly.

  “Well, the thing is, this doesn’t look good. We got her back, but it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. It could be days. It could be minutes.” Dr. Felker’s voice sounds gentle, yet strangely impersonal. I can’t imagine giving anyone this news, but I bet he does it every day. Another part of this profession I won’t find very pleasant. “The EEG we did yesterday showed minimal brain activity. This episode didn’t help.”

  The room spins crazily. “Are you saying she’s braindead?”

  “Well, the damage is permanent. If she survives, she’ll never wake up. I’m very sorry.”

  This isn’t happening. His words can’t be real.

  “What are you saying?” Fran demands. “Are you asking us if you can pull the plug? You’re giving up on her?”

  Dr. Felker shakes a weary head. “I’ll be happy to have her neurologist speak to you personally—”

  “I don’t want to speak to her damned neurologist. People come out of comas all the time! I just can’t. . . I just can’t—”

  She stops to suck in a mouthful of oxygen. I stare at my hands, thinking, Mom’s gonna die, Mom’s gonna die as if it’s the first time this idea occurred to me.

  “—let her die,” Fran finishes. Pale and sweaty, she drops into a chair and hides her face.

  The doctor waits a sympathetic moment. “There’s not much else I can say, except I’m sorry.”

  I believe him. I glance helplessly at Fran with her head drooping in her lap, torn between feeling, yes, really sorry for her, and yet more resentful than ever. One of us has to
stay in control. Why does it have to be me?

  I turn back to Dr. Felker. “My dad’s a doctor. He’ll be here tonight, so maybe you should talk to him about this—”

  Fran’s head snaps up, a cobra on high alert. “Shawna’s father has nothing to do with this. He has no say in this at all.”

  “Neither do you,” I say hotly. “You’re not even a relative.”

  The doctor studies Fran with new interest. “You’re not her sister?”

  “Her sister?” I lose it for a second, spluttering giggles into my fingers. Sorry! I know this is serious. Obviously I’m cracking under the stress. But Mom has no living relatives. She has nobody but me.

  Agitated, Fran crosses her heavy legs, then uncrosses them again. One stained leather clog clunks to the floor. She lets it sit there, twitching her toes in her sock. “Penny and I are very close,” she says without looking at me. “She’s divorced. We’ve been together for ten years. I’m the only real family she has.”

  Well, if Fran hadn’t come along and turned her into a lesbian, Mom would have a family. Namely Dad and me. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  The doctor’s pager goes off. He frowns, but I know it’s a fake frown, that he’s secretly ecstatic to be dragged away. “Sorry, I have to run. I’ll keep you posted if there are any changes in”—he aims this at me, not at Fran—“your mother’s condition. Ask one of the nurses to page me when your father shows up.”

  I sense a wisp of steam trailing out of Fran’s ears. She jams a foot into her discarded shoe, pushes herself up, and stalks off without another word. Her clogs flap with each enraged step.

  Not that Fran and I were ever “friends” . . . but something tells me I just made a serious enemy.

  13

  Visiting hours, which come at two-hour intervals, are over. I lurk illegally, peeking at Mom from the door. A nurse flits around, adjusting drips, scribbling on a clipboard. Mom looks no better, no worse. Maybe a shade closer to dead.

  Thump . . . hiss. Thump . . . hiss.

  The nurse notices me. “If you like, you can come back at two.”

  Rules are rules, and I’m not one to break them. But why can’t they make an exception? The next time I see Mom, she might be dead all the way.

  I do an about-face and ride the elevator to the first floor. I wish I’d brought my sketchpad so I could curl up and doodle; I left it at Mom and Fran’s, and I’m in major withdrawal.

  I browse through paperbacks in the gift shop till Arye shows up and catches me with a bodice-ripper romance. “Mom says we should take a break and go home.”

  “I don’t want a break.” Actually, I do. But it seems more appropriate to hang around and suffer.

  “Oh, come on. You can shower and stuff, and eat some real food. We’ll come back later.”

  “What about Schmule?”

  “Mom wants him to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he growls. “Man! Do you have to question everything?”

  Well, yeah! Fran’s throwing me out, but Schmule gets to stay?

  On the other hand, he has a point. If I don’t shower pretty soon, I’ll end up as raggedy-looking as Fran.

  Back at the brownstone, I shower, then pull on jeans, a T-shirt, and a cardigan knitted by Nonny in her few free moments between grinding up Poppy’s pills and hauling him onto the toilet. Hair damp, I wind my way back downstairs and find Arye in an apron, frying pierogies.

  “What?” he asks when sees me stop short.

  “Cute apron.”

  He grins, tugs the hem, and dips his knee in a curtsy. I burst out laughing, and the sound of it stuns me back into silence. My mom is dying. I have no right to laugh. But crabby old Arye in an apron? Too funny!

  I swing open a cupboard. Arye’s grin vanishes. “What’re you doing?”

  “Getting some plates?”

  “I’ll do it. You’ll mix them up.”

  “Mix what up?”

  “The dishes. This is a kosher kitchen. You can’t just mix stuff up.”

  “Since when do you guys keep kosher?”

  Arye smacks my hand from the cupboard door. “Since Penny decided to convert.”

  “My mom converted? When?”

  He seems pleased at my reaction. “Well, she didn’t actually convert. But she started taking classes, and now my mom’s all into it again. So, yeah, we’re kosher. Don’t treyf it up.” Whatever that means.

  “Why would my mom convert to Judaism? She never even went to church.”

  Arye pokes at the steaming pierogies. “Duh. Maybe that’s why.”

  Steaming myself, I plunk down into a chair, too blown away to think straight. Mom wanted to convert to Judaism? Okay, I’ve heard of Jews accepting Christ and converting to Christianity. Maybe I’m naive, or just dumb—but how can a Christian become Jewish? How can you stop believing something you believed your whole life?

  This is unbelievably weird.

  No. It’s Mom.

  I pick at the pierogies Arye passes to me, squishing potato filling through the prongs of my fork. Yes, I know what it means to keep a kosher kitchen. Different dishes for meat and dairy, all of them kept in separate cupboards and drawers. I wonder what happens if a milk glass bumps into a meat platter. Does the kitchen explode? Are you then forced to go to the Jewish equivalent of confession?

  Appetite shot to hell, I finish one mangled pierogi to be polite and wash it down with some cold milk. Whoa, wait’ll Dad hears this one. He’ll shit the proverbial brick.

  14

  Arye dozes on the sofa after the pierogies. I roam the house, looking at the pictures all over the walls and on every available surface. One catches my eye: a heart-shaped portrait in a silver frame of Fran, in a marginally feminized tux, and Mom in a white dress, a single red rose resting in the crook of her arm. Cheek to cheek, hands clasped, glowing with smiles. Their “wedding” picture?

  I don’t know why I’m so shocked that my mom planned to become Jewish. Isn’t this the same woman who was married for ten years, had me for seven more, and then decided she was a lesbian? Nothing she does should surprise me anymore.

  Tired of Arye’s snores, I punch the sofa. “Are we going back to the hospital in this century or the next?”

  Arye mumbles, “What time is it?” and then scrambles up, wide-awake. “Crap. Visiting hours are over at eight. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Um, because I’m not your mother?”

  “Tha-ank you.”

  “Knock it off!” Seriously, how much of this must I take? “You think this is fun for me? Am I having the time of my life? No, I don’t think so. So stop acting like an ass.”

  Arye opens his mouth, then apparently thinks twice about antagonizing Evil Shawna. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Shawna, one. Arye, zero.

  15

  Back at the hospital, Arye and I are barely off the elevator when I hear a familiar boom: “Do you have any idea who I am? Get me your supervisor!”

  Oh, no, Dad’s playing his favorite do-you-have-any-idea-who-I-am card again. Of course the nurse doesn’t realize, or care, that he’s John W. Gallagher, MD, PhD. Nationally renowned expert on primary infertility. Nationally renowned expert on preconception gender determination. Emperor of Petri Dishes. Supreme Ruler of the Bulb Syringe, or whatever they use nowadays.

  “Sir, our visiting hours—,” the flustered nurse begins.

  “Didn’t you hear me just ask for your supervisor? I didn’t fly all the way from California to be jacked around.”

  Arye lags back. “Uh, your dad?”

  “Bull’s-eye, Einstein.”

  “What’s he doing here?” he asks accusingly, as if I invited him.

  Part of me wants to run up and distract Dad so he won’t explode in a way that’ll turn the whole staff against me. The same thing he likes to do at school meetings, for example. But then a lady in a lab coat skittles up—the poor supervisor, no doubt—and edges Dad away from the quaking nurse. “I’
m sorry, Dr. Gallagher, but my staff was instructed—”

  Dad lowers his voice one decibel. “I know what they’ve been instructed to do. It also states clearly in your hospital policy that only immediate family members can visit in your ICU. Ms. Goodman’s been in and out of here for two days. She is not a relative. How do you explain that?”

  As the supervisor stammers, Dr. Felker shows up. Wilted, exhausted, he extends a hand. “Dr. Gallagher? I’m George Felker, the resident on call.”

  Dad turns an evil eye on this intruder. “Resident?” Contempt drips like fresh tar. “Where’s her attending physician?”

  “Home with his family, I imagine. What you see is what you get.” Got to hand it to the guy, he’s not easily intimidated. The nursing supervisor, I notice, has already snuck off.

  I jump when Fran asks behind us, “What’s going on?” Arye jerks a thumb toward Dad. Fran’s eyes almost pop out of their sockets. “Oh, shit.” She straightens her shoulders and marches over. “Hi, John. Fancy meeting you here.”

  Dad nods curtly. Then he spots Arye and me. “Shawna?”

  Oh-h, God. I drag myself over. “Hi, Dad.”

  My dad, tall, massive-shouldered, generates an imposing figure in his gray Armani suit and red power tie, a charcoal coat draped over one arm. Stern, chiseled features. An aura of indisputable authority. When Dr. Felker suggests he accompany him to the lounge, Dad consults his Rolex as if he has a pending appointment. “Fine. Let’s go.” He adds firmly, to Fran and Arye, “You two can wait here.”

  Fran bristles. “Oh, no you don’t. Anything that needs to be discussed, we can do it all together.”

  Dad informs Dr. Felker, “Ms. Goodman isn’t a relative. She’s my wife’s roommate, nothing more—”

  “Ex-wife!” Fran interjects.

  “—and I happen to hold a durable power of attorney.”

  Silence. Fran deflates.

  “So,” Dad continues in that same smooth, icy tone he uses when I careen into the house four seconds past curfew, “as you can see, Ms. Goodman has nothing to do with any decisions that need to be made.”