An Illusion of Control

by Cecelia Earl

  Alone, I push my dad, with his head hanging, into the ER. There's a mom and young daughter huddled on an orange-cushioned bench to our left. I wheel Dad over to the right, whisper, "Be right back," and walk to the counter.

  When the receptionist looks up, I begin to speak, but nothing comes out. The lights are too bright and there's a ringing in my ears. I clench the edge of the countertop, clear my throat, and try again. This time my voice works.

  "My mom called a little while ago. About my dad, Rick Carroll." I turn and motion toward him. He looks like he's sleeping. His mouth hangs open and his eyes are closed with slits of white visible. After she asks, I begin to explain what I know about his condition. The past four months, the dialysis, the water retention, the anemia and sleepiness, and then the past hour. Dry heaves, bloody urine, lack of strength, disorientation and confusion.

  It's as if I'm talking about someone else. As if I’m someone else. My voice sounds detached. My hands feel detached. I look down and they look like they belong to someone else. For half a second I imagine my life belongs to someone else. Somehow I jumped into someone else's life and I'm pretending to be this other person in this other body, and I'm waiting to be put back into my own. But I tell myself to clench my fist, and my fingers close. There's a scar on my hand from when Dad and I built a bookshelf for my room. The memory is enough to convince me I'm still in my own life. My scary, surreal life.

  Mom hurries through the doors with the overnight bag and her purse clasped to her chest like they're her last belongings on earth. She's behind Dad in a flash, trying to maneuver the bags so she can take the wheelchair handles. The receptionist is typing away.

  "How do you spell your last name?"

  "C-A-R-R-O-L-L."

  "And it's Richard, not Rick?"

  "Yes."

  "But he only goes by Rick," my mom calls out. "He hates being called Richard. Or Rich. Never call him either one of those."

  "What's your birth date, Rick?" the receptionist calls from her seated position. "Rick?"

  Seriously? She can't get up and approach him? He's practically comatose. Two nurses come in from the rooms off this small entrance and walk over to him. One talks to my mom quietly (much better than the receptionist, who I walk away from to go by my dad) and the other puts her hand on my dad's shoulder. "Rick? My name is Amy. Can you tell me your name?"

  He says nothing.

  "Rick? Can you tell me your birth date?"

  His head bobs and he murmurs, "Ten, one, sixty-seven."

  His head rolls to the other side.

  "Rick, can you tell me where you live?"

  "Ten, one, sixty-seven."

  "How old are you, Rick?"

  "Ten, one, sixty-seven."

  I'm afraid to look at Mom, so I look at the nurse. She's either not surprised by him or she's hiding her concern. I'm concerned. I don't know if I'm hiding it or not. I dig out hand sanitizer from my purse and squeeze some in my palms. While rubbing it in my skin, all around my fingers and under my fingernails, up onto my wrists, I follow the nurse. She's not saying anything.

  "What's wrong with him? Is it his kidneys?"

  She glances at me, pushes a button on the wall so two swinging doors open in front of us. Dad's being pushed by my mom and the other nurse behind us.

  "Is there something else wrong? Did his kidney problem cause another problem?"

  She turns a corner and I follow.

  "Is this normal?" I can't stop asking questions. I'm tempted to whip out my phone and start Googling symptoms to find out what's going on. There've been plenty of times I self-diagnosed with the help of the Internet. Why hadn't I been playing closer attention? To my dad's appearance? His everything? I should've been researching all of this months ago . . . maybe longer. I could've told my parents exactly what to do all this time! Or, at least convinced them to get to the doctor months earlier.

  She motions for me to enter a room and puts her hand on my arm. "We will run some tests and find out what's wrong with your dad. He's in good hands here."

  The room is small and smells like antiseptic, and claustrophobia.

  Dad's assisted into a bed and his clothes are removed. A flurry of doctors and nurses come in, introduce themselves. Mom introduces us, corrects them each time someone calls Dad Richard.

  "Rick! He hates Richard. Please, call him Rick."

  Dad's still mumbling ten, one, sixty-seven over and over.

  I sit in a chair by the wall and dig through my purse. I can't get Internet to do a search, so instead I find a nail file and start to grind down my nails, one by one. Then I pull out my wallet and resort sales receipts, alphabetically (you never know when you'll need to return something), and wipe my phone off with a wipe (I keep a small pack of anti-bacterial wipes in my purse). I'm careful not to touch any part of my skin to the chair. Who knows who sat in it last and what awful illness he or she had.

  I hate hospitals.

  They finish taking my dad's temperature and there's a mad rush of hospital personnel. I'm up out of the chair, on my feet, hands in fists. Fight stance. "What's going on? What's happening?"

  I may as well disintegrate, burst into a cloud of dust, and flutter to the floor. Mom is in the way, reminding everyone new to call Dad Rick. There are people reading from the computer screen in the corner, people pricking Dad, people manning the twenty-some vials of blood being drawn.

  There are more people on the far side of his bed, so I scoot my chair over and find his hand through the bed rail. I rest my hand on his and tell him silently that I'm here, that we're going to fix this. "We're taking care of you, Dad," I whisper.

  A doctor with a white coat comes in and speaks in a low, soft voice. Soothing. He introduces himself, and we have the same conversation we've had forty times in the past twenty minutes.

  "Your husband," and then he looks at me, "your dad, is very, very ill. We are going to move him up to the intensive care unit." He looks at Dad, smooshes his lips together and shakes his head twice. "With how very sick he is, I don't think he's going to make it through the night. But we'll know more once we get him upstairs and can have our lead nephrologists look over his records and his test results from tonight. Our kidney doctors are incredibly knowledgeable, and they'll be able to tell you more."

  The ringing in my ears has grown so loud it's filled my head, filled the room. All I can hear besides the ringing is, "He's not going to make it through the night. He's not going to make it through the night. He's not going to make it through the night." My heart, or dinner, or my stomach has lurched up into my throat. I rub Mom's back. Tears stream down her face, and she's smothering Dad's cheek and forehead with kisses.

  "He doesn't know for sure, Mom."

  She turns to me and looks at me through tears. Her left hand finds mine and squeezes.

  "Who should we call?"

  While final blood is taken out of my dad's now purple arms, Mom calls Grandma. We haven't spoken much to her side of the family in the past four or so months, not since Mom and Dad quit socializing. He's been tired, Mom's been stressed, and I don't think either of them wanted to hear anyone comment on Dad's changing appearance anymore. They got sick of brushing his declining health off as "fine."

  Anyway, once my parents fell flat on the social scene, family kind of quieted down when we did show up. Any time we entered a room, their voices hushed, like people do when they're talking about you and you walk near when they didn't expect you.

  Then Mom calls her boss, and then Dad's boss, though they've been out more than in their offices lately. I suppose they need to know where we are and where we won't be tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. Thursday. School. Two exams, one in lit class. Great. Passing out yearbooks. Mocha Monkey shift. Mom'll call the principal. I text May. The only school committee I could convince her to join was Yearbook, so she'll have to take over in my place. I have the yearbooks all stacked by homeroom with name slips in place. Shouldn't be a problem.

  Now I'm thankful Chase grabbe
d my phone when we ate during break last night. He'd punched his number in so we could "hang" sometime. I text him in case he or his Mom need to know what's going on come Friday, and to see if he'll take my shift at Mocha Monkey. I'll text Alan once I have a replacement lined up.

  I want to call Marc. Suddenly I miss him with an urgency. I want to crumble into his arms and bury my head into his chest. I want him to kiss my hair and say something sweet.

  I want to call Marc.

  So I do.

  9

  absence of him

  The waiting area is not far from Dad's room. It's small, but somehow fits two love seat couches, a chair wide enough for two, a fake plant in the corner, and a coffee table. I think about sitting, but pace instead, around and around the circular coffee table. Marc doesn't answer. I take a breath into his voicemail and then hang up without saying a word.

  What was I thinking?

  So he doesn't think he's won and I'm running back to him, I text him an FYI that we took my dad to the hospital. I press send before I can overanalyze it.

  I pace a few more times before speed-walking back to my parents.

  "May will take care of Muffy for us—walks, outside breaks, food and water, all that," I tell Mom. She nods.

  "Should I call Brady or do you want to?" She holds her phone out for me until I hold my own up to wave. "Oh, yeah," she says. "No, I should call."

  I shrug. It's past eleven. Pretty much by this point of the night, any night of the week, one can bet he's wasted. Bars. Basement house parties. Secret dorm room bashes. How he's managed good grades the past three years in college is astounding. Since the halfway point freshman year, we've barely seen him but for Thanksgiving and Christmas. "Go for it," I say, sitting back in my chair where I can hold Dad's hand. "There's a family waiting room down the hall if you want to call from there."

  She shakes her head while biting a nail and waiting for my brother to pick up. Nails are pretty much the germiest place on our bodies. I want to tug it out of her mouth, but I let her keep her vice. I can hear the rings from where I sit. When the rings reach the voicemail, she hangs up.

  "I can't leave him a message about something like this."

  I roll my eyes and pull out my phone again. I text: Yo. Call ASAP. EMERGENCY.

  "It's taken care of, Mom. He'll call. Don't worry."

  She gives a weak nod, leans over, and puts her head next to Dad's.

  He's moaning off and on, mumbling, but mostly out of it or asleep.

  Two more nurses, or ER staff, whoever they are, come in and explain that they're taking him for a head scan, standard procedure, to see if his brain has normal function.

  "Brain? I thought we were worried about his kidneys."

  One of the nurses looks at me while making sure the tubes connected to Dad won't be a problem once they start turning the bed to take it through the door. "Normal procedure. We're being thorough."

  Mom and I follow the bed silently down the hall, down an elevator shaft, and down another hall.

  Then, after the test, we go back up.

  At that point the same doctor who told us he may not make it through the night is back. He's got a different bed with him, and two guys in black suits with bags of who knows what.

  "He's not going to make it without a kidney transplant. I have a helicopter waiting. With your okay, we can transport him to Froedtert, a hospital down in Milwaukee. There's a team of specialists, transplant specialists, there who will be the best option for your husband." He nods once, eyes wide, waiting for Mom to agree.

  "Can I go with him?"

  Mom hates to fly with a passion. She's more afraid of flying than drowning—and she can't swim, can't even tread in shallow water.

  He looks at the guys in black. Must be the pilots. Before they respond, he looks at Mom. "How much do you weigh?"

  She tells them, and the guys confer.

  The guy with brown skin and dimples says, "Sorry, even if you were lighter, there's not enough gas. We can only take the two of us and your husband. "We'll get him there in about twenty minutes. You can drive and meet us there."

  I'm proud she holds in her tears. "Where is there?"

  We get directions and say goodbye to Dad.

  Goodbye.

  It crosses my mind I may never see him again.

  Then Mom and I are standing in a room without him and it's very strange, the absence of him.

  As if on autopilot we leave the room and return to our car. The night is very dark and through the blackness comes the sound of a helicopter, the blades slashing through the sky.

  I tell myself Dad's so out of it he won't notice, won't wake up scared. He's not freaking out like we are, beneath our stony expressions.

  The five-minute drive home takes forever. We move through the house in silence, filling two bags with toothbrushes, toothpaste, brushes, makeup, comfortable clothes, extra socks and underwear, books. At the last second, I grab running clothes. When I feel like I'm going to burst out of my body, I need to sprint. And I definitely feel a case of explosionitis coming on. I almost think about Dad never walking through these walls again, but don't. Can't.

  I kneel and hold Muffy. I bury my nose into the fur on the side of his neck. He licks my ear. I tell him we're taking care of Daddy and will be home soon. He barks, so I let him out under the sky, where somewhere overhead Dad is flying. Once Muffy is curled up on my bed, we reverse the car and start an hour-and-a-half-long trek toward Milwaukee. I want to stop for coffee, but Mom is hell-bent on racing there. She can't stand that she's separated from Dad, and I know we're both holding our breaths that he makes the flight.

  It's midnight.

  My phone chimes with a text message, and I'm surprised to see so many have come through that I’ve missed.

  May wants constant updates, wants to meet us there. Chase is sympathetic and will take my shifts, as many as I need. Marc. Marc is texting sweet things that don't irk me, don't boil underneath my skin. He says to call him. The thought of hearing his voice in my ear is so very tempting. I hold onto the thought until we take the exit we need and I need to help Mom make our way through construction blocks and streets that curl under one another.

  When finally we U-turn and find the right parking garage, we slam the car doors and stand under layers of cars, staring at one another.

  "Here goes nothing," I say.

  We walk a little farther, out from under the confines of the garage, into the night air. We find a bench a few feet outside the hospital entrance. I stop to catch my breath, lean a hand on its frame, white even in the darkness. In Loving Memory of Betty Ashman, reads a plaque.

  "Love you, Lainey," Mom says.

  "Love you, Mom."

  "It's fine," she whispers. "Everything will be fine."

  10

  abyss of blackness

  For the life of us, we can't find where we're supposed to go. I don't know how many entrances this place has, but we've found every single last one of them, and I’ve lost count. Not to mention dark staircases. And elevators that lead to floors we don't need to be on. There is nobody around at one-thirty in the morning to ask directions either. And I don't hear a helicopter.

  Where the hell is my dad?

  We've walked a marathon of hallways at this point, and Mom's slowing down. I'm impatient and half a hallway ahead of her, bound and determined to find him.

  Finally I find Emergency. And a person to talk to.

  "No, dear, you need to go to the family center to check in. Then they'll tell you where to go after that."

  Are. You. Effing. Kidding. Me?

  We passed the family center minutes ago!

  "Mom," I call as I reverse and race toward her, and past her, "We need to backtrack. The family center is this way."

  The family center looks like a hospital wing in and of itself. A woman with crazy poofy hair and huge dangly earrings glances up from the reception desk, sticks up a long-nailed finger, and continues to write while hanging on the phone. I gr
it my teeth and hug myself, wondering where above me my dad is lying.

  On either side of the reception desk are hallways leading to an abyss of blackness. To our right is a seating area. Behind that, a wall of windows faces us. Our reflections are startling and sad. In front of the windows, and our pathetic replicas, sits a guy about my age. To his left, in a corner is a couple. The lady's crying and the man's got his arm around her. He's watching the news on the television that's mounted on the wall. I wonder who they're waiting for, why she's crying. The guy my age is leaning forward with his arms resting on his legs. He's looking at his feet. One knee is bouncing around like it can hardly stand the fact that he's sitting idle. One of his fists is inside the other. I imagine it's because he's trying to restrain himself from punching the lights out of the woman making us wait.

  Behind the infuriating woman's desk is a counter housing a sink, coffee pot, tea, and cups.

  "Coffee," I say to Mom. She raises her eyebrows. I point. "Want a cup?"

  "No. I want to see your dad."

  I set my lips and nod with understanding, but walk over and pour myself a cup, no sugar, no cream. I blow on it and my eyes wander back to the guy.

  His gaze has followed me from where I stood by my mom to the coffee pot. I can't bring myself to smile. Why would I? His knee is still going mad. The turbulence must be traveling down the cushion to the couple in the corner. How can they stand it?

  "How can I help you?"

  She's finally hung up the phone and is ready to help us. I walk back quickly without spilling a drop of hot coffee.

  Oh my goodness, I don't know how I didn't notice it before, but the receptionist lady also has blue eye shadow smeared up to her eyebrows. How is that possible? I can hardly look at her.

  "We are the family of Rick Carroll," Mom explains. "He was flown in an hour ago from Appleton."

  The woman looks and looks at the papers before her, then her laptop.

  I stand on tiptoe and raise my eyes to see what she sees. No good.