Who, when he did show up, was not reassuring or even clarifying. Young, bespectacled, and Jewish—he wore a yarmulke—he managed to be both serious and evasive.
“How are we doing in here?” he asked semiconsciously. He was looking at a clipboard in his hand. “How are we doing, Rose?” This a little more loudly, as if the unconscious woman on a respirator in the hospital bed hadn’t immediately answered the first time because she was hard of hearing.
“Well, you tell us,” Alison began. “I’m her daughter, I just flew in this morning. My sister was here with her all day yesterday and a lot of last night.”
“Yeah, we had a little bit of an emergency, didn’t we?” Why did they all sound like they thought everybody was in kindergarten?
“A little bit, yeah.” Alison offered up a sardonic laugh, trying to put them back on equal footing. The doctor ignored her. There was a black metal box on a pole right by Rose’s head, with lots of blinking lights and numbers, which the doctor seemed to think was a little worrisome. Or maybe that was the look that was always on his face when he was thinking.
“Are you Doctor Wiggans?” she finally asked. He glanced over at this with a distant surprise.
“Oh no, Doctor Wiggans is your mother’s surgeon. I’m Doctor Frankel, I’m the attending,” he said.
“I’m sorry, what does that mean?” Alison asked. “I’m a little confused.”
“These are confusing situations,” Frankel admitted. “Your mother came in yesterday with a blockage in her small intestine, which Doctor Wiggans felt needed to come out immediately.”
“What kind of a blockage?”
“A tumor.”
“What kind of tumor?”
“I don’t have the epidemiology in front of me.”
“Is it cancer?”
“As I said, we don’t have the epidemiology. When Doctor Wiggans makes his rounds, he can fill you in on the status of the cultures.”
“My sister said, when she called me this morning, she said that they told her it wasn’t cancer.”
“That is probably true, then. I don’t know why the surgeon would tell her that, without the follow-up from the lab, but doubtless he has other information that I’m sure he’ll be happy to share with you.”
“So how is she doing? How long does she have to stay on this respirator?”
“Well, her system has been through a shock and her blood oxygen levels are not great.”
“They just came in and gave her some painkiller.”
“Yes, that’s here on the chart,” he acknowledged. “We’ll know more in a couple hours.”
“More what?”
“We’ll just have more details.” He looked at her with a sudden, earnest concern, and took a step forward. He paused, as if considering whether or not he should just tell her the truth. “Are you on television?” he finally asked.
“I was—yes,” she admitted, surprised. “Sometimes. Yes.”
“I thought I recognized you,” he said. “My daughter watches your show.”
“I’m not on that anymore,” she told him. It surprised her how embarrassing this felt, and she tumbled on like an idiot. “I still do guest spots on different things and I was in a movie that just came out a little while ago, Last Stop, it’s called Last Stop.” It’s not like he’s a casting agent. You don’t have to feed him your résumé.
The doctor was charmed. He beamed at her with a stupefying appreciation for her achievements. “What’s your name again?”
“Alison Moore.”
“Alison Moore. Alison Moore! She is going to be so excited to hear that I met you. Alison Moore,” he repeated, so as to be sure that he didn’t forget it.
The surgeon, when he finally showed up, was little better. He was tall and slender, a silver fox. He didn’t say much, but he also didn’t mince words.
“Your mother had a blood clot,” he said. “It was lodged in the second quadrant of the small intestine, where it gathered a mass of cells around it. Unfortunately, there was also a series of perforations, she’s probably been suffering from undiagnosed diverticulitis for a number of years, and peritonitis is acute.”
“Diverticulitis?”
“Has she had a colonoscopy, ever?”
“Has my mother ever had a colonoscopy? I have no idea.”
“Well, there’s significant infection. We need to get that under control before we can take her off the respirator.”
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t woken up yet.”
“When patients come out of the anesthesia, they generally try to rip that respirator right off, so we’ve got to keep her sedated for a little while. As soon as her system indicates that it can transition into breathing on its own, we’ll take it off.”
Having spent the last five years in show business, Alison was more or less used to people talking at you without really saying anything. But the things directors and producers and studio execs and agents said were often lies, and these nurses and doctors were clearly not lying. They were obfuscating, but without a purpose that Alison could intuit. She couldn’t even tell, from the things they said, if her mother was all that sick. She’s on a respirator, and she hasn’t regained consciousness, her brain reminded her. She’s sick.
But then why won’t anyone admit that? The other, more pathetically hopeful side of her brain was clutching at straws.
What do you want them to admit?
Megan said she’s fine.
Megan’s not here.
Nobody’s here—it’s clearly not serious, or wouldn’t they be here?
If it’s not serious, why don’t the doctors tell you that?
If it is serious, why don’t they tell me that?
This went on for hours. Alison continued to update Megan, and get her own updates—they finally got through to Dad and he would be on a flight from Anchorage tomorrow, it was going to take at least eighteen hours to fly him from his fishing lodge, which was out in the middle of nowhere. Reinforcements were on the way, but Megan herself couldn’t get there before five, maybe not even that soon, she still hadn’t landed a babysitter. Lianne was driving down from Chicago sometime tomorrow. The possibilities of even one other sibling showing up any sooner were dicey; everyone was too far away; there were kids, and planes, and problems. Alison spent a lot of time holding Rose’s hand and whispering nice things, it’s okay, Mom, Dad’s on his way back, I love you, you’re doing great, the doctors say you’re fine, it was nothing, undiagnosed diverticulitis! You’ll wake up pretty soon. She kissed her head and stroked her hair. The nurses came and went without report.
At one point, Rose squeezed Alison’s hand. It was not much of a squeeze, but it was real; she didn’t imagine it. She squeezed her mother’s hand back with both of her own, delighted there was finally a sign.
“Hi, Mom. Hey, hey!” she said, cheerful. “I’m here. It’s Alison. Wow, you have so put us through it, hey!” Rose’s eyes were half open, the pupils skittering under delicate lids. Alison felt a rush of adrenaline. Rose was coming back. She reached over and banged the call button for the nurses, which she had finally figured out how to use. “Okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll just get someone in here right now, to take care of you. You’re fine! You’re going to be fine.”
Another ten minutes, but Nurse Patricia did manage to make a pretense that she had hurried over.
“Something going on with our girl?” she inquired.
“She squeezed my hand!” Alison told her. She fucking hated Nurse Patricia by now but she was also desperate to tell anyone good news. “And her eyes are open. She knows I’m here. I think she’s waking up.” Nurse Patricia was predictably unimpressed by this but she went to Rose’s bedside and looked her in the face. “Rose?” she asked, loudly. “Can you see me, Rose? Can you squeeze my hand, Rose?” Having taken Alison’s place at Rose’s bedside, she somehow made the possibility that Rose was actually in there a more distant reality. “Give me a squeeze, Rose,” she ordere
d. “I really need you to give me a squeeze.”
After a whole thirty seconds of this kind of encouragement Nurse Nightmare stepped back and considered Rose where she lay, the respirator pumping away. “You should ask the doctor when the ischemia set in, and what caused it,” she announced. “It’s usually the sign of something bigger going on.” She started to leave. Alison felt her chest constrict, as if an elephant had decided it was time to finally squash her completely. Nothing in her insanely fucked-up career had ever felt as truthfully bad as what that nurse just said, but at the same time, it felt real, like there were terrible things happening here, but they were real terrible things, that she was responsible and she had to do the best she could.
“Please don’t—please, sorry,” she said. “Sorry. We don’t, my father is out of town and I don’t know even, isn’t there someone we can talk to, about what is going on here?”
“Does she have a GP?” Nurse Patricia asked. “Do you know anybody on staff here? Sometimes it helps to have a doctor with a personal relationship, just to get things sorted.” She didn’t look at her, but Alison got the message. Who do you have on the inside? You better have someone, or we’re just going to let your mother die.
Who knows if that was what was being said? Alison was out of her depth. She made the only phone call that was available to her.
Van picked up.
“Hi—yes, hi, uh, Van? This is Alison Moore, Kyle’s friend?”
A surreal silence bloomed on the line.
“Sure, Alison, I remember you,” Van said. Just as poised and appropriate as ever. Even cheerful. “How have you been? Are you in town?”
That was vastly better than anything Alison could have hoped, aside from Kyle picking up the phone himself. “Yes, I am. My mother’s ill,” she explained.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Could I speak with Kyle? I tried him at his office and they told me he had already left for the day. And I, it’s very complicated here at the hospital, I really don’t know how to get any of these doctors to just tell me what’s going on. And I thought, maybe Kyle, I’m sure he knows someone on staff over here, or at least, because he’s a doctor one of them might talk to him.”
“What hospital is it?”
“Jewish.”
“I don’t think he knows anyone there.”
“Could I just talk to him?”
“He’s busy with the baby.”
“I really need to talk to him.” Alison knew she was reaching for straws. But this runaround with the hospital just couldn’t continue, and she needed help, and she also knew enough about the way the world worked. When you’re getting a runaround, you need an insider. She just needed Kyle to get on the phone with one of these nurses, for two minutes. It might help. It had to help.
“Well, I’ll tell him you called,” Van said.
Alison willed herself not to panic. “I just need him for a second, Van. My mom is really in trouble and there’s no one here to help us, I just need to even ask him just a few questions. She’s really sick.”
“Awwwww,” said Van. “I’m sure they’re giving her great care there.”
“Well, they’re not—they’re not—I just thought—”
“I’ll have Kyle call you right back,” Van promised.
And then she hung up the phone.
twenty-six
VAN SLIPPED the phone back into its cradle in the kitchen. She turned back to the lovely granite countertop and wiped off the leafy remains of a head of cauliflower she had just finished dismembering. The idea that Alison Moore would call their home and ask for help from Kyle was laughable, aside from the fact that it completely laid bare all of Kyle’s insistent lies about his relationship with her. Alison just happened to come into town because her mother happened to be sick, and she happened to need a doctor? It was a ludicrous story, particularly when you factored in that Kyle didn’t work at that hospital and that oh by the way he’s a pediatrician. Your mother is sick in the hospital, so you decided you needed to call in your local pediatrician? That was hilarious, really. This whole situation was hilarious.
Van’s bitterness had settled into a permanent distortion. She knew she could not stand in it forever, but her wound was fresh, and exceptionally deep. The hopes she had nurtured for a life with a man who adored her were less than nothing now. She was humiliated by the fact that she had ever hoped anything. Why Kyle had refused to grant her an annulment, no one honestly could say. He insisted it was a lie that he would not tell to his God, but lying relentlessly about his feelings for this other woman seemed to be something he was fine with. He insisted that it would be bad for the girls, to be raised by someone who wasn’t their own father, but he didn’t seem to think that it was a problem for him to raise someone else’s child. In fact, he made quite a show of doting on that baby. It was unseemly, frankly, given the fact that the boy wasn’t his. Another lie he felt okay about perpetrating. It’s okay to tell the world that the baby is your baby, but it’s not okay to say, hey, we made a mistake, we should get an annulment? People got divorced all the time; who cared what you called it? If the Catholics wanted to call it an annulment, what was the big deal?
The light in the kitchen was shifting, settling into stronger angles; the sun was starting its descent. It was all too late anyway. Martin was gone. Not gone from Cincinnati, but gone from her life; as the days ticked by, he had become more and more frustrated with the way Kyle was dragging his feet. And then he was gone, and she was stuck. She could have gone to see him at his law office, she could have created a scene, embarrassed him, embarrassed herself. But the whole idea seemed disgusting to her. I’m carrying your child. I betrayed my husband. I have put my whole family through months of torture and you’re tired. So sorry you found this tiring. She did not send him an announcement when the baby was born.
Kyle never asked about her lover. After their one hissing argument the night he finally figured a few things out, he had been silent, and she resented his impassivity even more than she had the months and years before this crisis. Why was everything so hidden with him? Over time she had found in his silence betrayal, then judgment, then punishment, then cruelty. There may have been love in there at some point, but who could tell? It was a stunning change of course to have him insist on going into couple’s counseling, where apparently all anyone did ever was try to communicate, in ever more grueling detail. Up to this moment in time, she would have said that communicating was the last thing Kyle wanted to do, with anyone.
He had ruined everything for her. If he had just agreed to the annulment when she asked for it, this whole thing would have been over before the baby was born. She and the girls would have moved on; everyone would have moved on. He wouldn’t have even had to pay alimony. But Kyle’s insistence that they talk through every exhausting detail of their non-marriage doomed her plans for escape more completely than anyone could have predicted. He seemed so reasonable. And Martin’s infatuation with the idea of claiming Van and her two adorable girls began to look—to Martin himself—tawdry.
Or was it Kyle’s seeming forgiveness that made their affair look tawdry? When that idea flitted across Van’s consciousness, it really pissed her off; Kyle was in no position to stand in judgment of her. She didn’t fully believe that he had been sneaking off to New York for passionate weekends with his old girlfriend, but you couldn’t tell her that he didn’t lust after Alison in his heart. And Van had sat through enough of those boring Catholic Masses to know that that was a sin too.
She pulled the spray attachment out of its dock at the edge of the sink and rinsed the cauliflower one last time before tossing it into a buttered glass casserole dish and shoving it into the oven. It was so hard to get the girls to eat any vegetables. After years of serving them nothing but whole organic anything, they still complained and whined; all they wanted was pasta, peanut butter, pizza, hot dogs. In the few months of her fleeting happiness, she had let her lover occasionally spoil the girls with these t
reats—it was so important that they all like each other—and now they were in a constant snit that they couldn’t have that junk all the time. Maggie was already getting a little chunky, although Kyle the pediatrician insisted that she was right where she should be in terms of height and weight. After years of ignoring both girls, Kyle now seemed to think he was the expert on everything.
Speak of the devil. There he was, in the doorway, holding the swaddled baby and looking completely besotted, even though Gabe was as usual colicky and screaming. Kyle didn’t seem to mind; he was more in love with that boy than he had ever been with his own daughters. It was infuriating. Her lover had just evaporated, and she and Kyle had never once spoken of her broken heart, her disappointed dreams. This whole public charade, that the baby was Kyle’s, that was another thing that just happened without any discussion. Even when you’re forced to sit through nobody can even count how many hours of couple’s counseling, the important things never make it to the table. Bouncing the fussy baby on his shoulder, Kyle looked at Van, curious.
“Who was on the phone?” he asked.
“Just some wrong number,” she said. “Oh, give him to me.” She took the baby into the next room to feed him.
After some four days of casual consideration, Van decided to pass along the message. If Alison wanted to come along and cry on her old boyfriend’s shoulder because her mom was in the hospital, why should she care? The whisper of guilt which hovered in the back of her head had begun to bother her. She had no reason to feel guilty. She in fact refused to feel guilty. In regard to Alison she remained blameless. The bitterness of her heart informed her that Alison could not say the same. But her own sense of moral certainty finally insisted that she do the right thing.
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