Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  I have roommates, Molly thought. She hadn’t shared a room with anyone since she had been living with Suzanne, but that was another life, another time. Where did these roommates come from? And where were Gary and her son?

  She heard people clapping. She felt as if she were being suddenly watched by a cheerful audience, scores of people all dressed up and leaning forward, wanting to catch her next move, and the joke was on her, she was the punch line.

  I know this, Molly thought with desperation. I’ve been here before. It felt like a horrible mistake she had to somehow rectify. Help, she said, but there was no sound.

  But the blonde heard her. She turned and smiled at Molly in recognition. “There you are,” she said happily. The blonde came over, brushing her damp hands along her dress. “No, don’t do that,” the blonde said with sudden alarm and leaned over Molly. Do what, Molly thought. Something jammed deep into Molly’s throat. A fish hook. A probe. Smooth and sharp and metallic-tasting. Molly felt herself choking, heard herself cough. Something snaked down her nose, down her throat, deep into her. She wanted to scream, to punch the blonde in the face. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. The blonde bent closer to Molly, smiling larger, showing her teeth, bright white, sparks glinting off them. She had a laugh like a cracked bell. She was insane, Molly decided. Molly would have to do everything she could to protect herself against her. Molly stared frantically past the blonde at the woman with the black bob, thinking maybe that woman could help her if she only could stop flirting and see what was going on, but the woman was passionately kissing the man in glasses. “I paid, I get to do what I want,” the man said. Maybe they were crazy, too, maybe it would be worse for Molly to attract their attention.

  She heard the laughter again, a smattering of applause. A bright light shone in her eyes, a clapboard banged shut.

  Molly struggled to gesture. “No, you don’t,” the blonde chirped, tightening something over Molly’s chest. The woman with the black bob was leaning over, touching the top of her forehead to the forehead of the man with the glasses. They bent together into another kiss. Steam hissed up between them. They were less than ten feet away. Molly shut her eyes, thinking when she finally opened them, all the craziness would be gone, everything would be back to normal.

  She woke again, this time drifting up through winter. Everything was in black and white. Hard white snow shot against her face. Ice formed on her lids. Something pulsed about the length of her legs, squeezing and releasing, tightening its grasp.

  Abruptly, her sight cleared. Color returned. She was in an open room. Not the high-rise apartment. Someplace newer. Different somehow. Molly struggled to get up and as soon as she moved, the snowstorm suddenly vanished without a trace. The floor was clean and dry. Green linoleum. The air was clear and silent except for a forced hiss of heat. She looked at the window, at a skyline she still didn’t recognize. The tall, silvery buildings were replaced by stubby brick ones, by a network of telephone wires. And then there, taped up on the far window, was a huge black and white Xerox. She squinted and then felt a shock. It was a photograph of Otis, a picture she had never seen before, blown up so many times it was blurry. He was lying in a bassinet, his baby hands, like stars, stretched out to her, his eyes half shut. “Mommy, I miss you,” was scribbled underneath. “Get well soon.” He misses me, she thought vaguely, and then she began to feel panicked. But where have I been? Get well, she thought, but what was wrong with her? What had happened?

  She shut her eyes, trying to remember. She shivered. “Cold,” she said out loud. “Cold.” She could hear her voice, but it sounded different to her, as if part of it had been scraped away.

  “Do you know where you are?” She heard a voice, deep and sonorous. She felt something wet on her face. She thought of this movie she had once seen, a Pilgrim girl was lost in the snow, and the only thing that guided her was the voice of the kindly Indian who was leading her to rescue.

  “Snow,” Molly said and opened her eyes again.

  A man’s features swam into view. Dark eyes, dark hair, a thin line of a mouth. Glasses and a white coat. A stethoscope. “Doctor,” she took a guess, and he nodded.

  “Dr. Price. Your hematologist. One of the doctors who has been taking care of you.” He paused. “Do you know what’s happened to you?” She shook her head.

  He spoke to her quietly. She heard his voice. She saw his mouth moving, his brow knotting. But she couldn’t seem to concentrate, she couldn’t seem to grab hold of anything he was saying. It all rushed by her, like paper driven by wind. She glanced at the door, and there was the insane blonde bopping by, snapping her fingers to invisible music. She looked at Molly and winked broadly.

  “It’s very, very serious.” Dr. Price put his hands in front of him. He frowned, as if it were her fault. “You’ve been out for some time.”

  “No. You’re wrong.” She looked at the Xerox of Otis. “I had a baby,” she said.

  Dr. Price perked up. “Yes, you did.”

  “Where is he?” Molly blurted. “Where’s my husband? Are they all right?”

  Dr. Price stopped. “Your husband? He was here this morning. I imagine your baby’s at home with him.”

  Panic flamed within her. Liar, she thought. She would have remembered seeing Gary.

  “Are they alive?”

  “Of course they’re alive! What kinds of questions are those?” He looked around the room. “Why would we keep your baby’s picture up if he were dead? Wouldn’t that be a little sadistic?”

  Molly was silent, considering, which seemed to irritate Dr. Price even more.

  “You’re on morphine. You don’t remember.”

  Molly’s legs pulsed and she glanced at them, hidden under the sheet. Three different IVs were attached to her, feeding blood into her, feeding something chalky and thick and yellow, feeding something clear. She was attached to a machine. Molly ordered her arms to lift up, and in astonishment, she saw they did. She turned her head back and forth, and felt a pulse of rapture. “I can move.”

  “Yes. Of course you can.”

  Molly tried to pull down the sheet to look at her body. Dr. Price stayed her hand. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “One piece of information at a time.”

  Stubbornly, Molly continued to draw away the sheets. When she got to her belly, she stopped. Her skin was crisscrossed with stitching. Her belly button was on her right side. She was wrapped in layers of gauze, taped up, and her belly, blue and purple and white, shimmied like lake water. Five clear small plastic bubbles were attached to her by tubes, swimming with blood. She looked back at the doctor in horror.

  “Drainage tubes. You’ve had quite a time.”

  Molly tentatively touched her belly. She couldn’t feel anything. “It will go down some. We had to cut through muscles. And nerves.

  She curled the sheet farther away. Her legs were encased in something rubbery and blue, like a cocoon.

  “Those are for your circulation.” He straightened, clearing his throat. He replaced the sheet, tucking it in at the bottom.

  “I heard music.”

  The doctor looked at her quizzically.

  Molly waggled her fingers and turned her head, looking around the room. Suddenly, behind the doctor, she saw a slice of yellow, and then the blonde suddenly appeared, in a white dress and a lab coat and chunky-soled white sneakers. Molly drew back, alarmed.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “She’s crazy,” Molly whispered, nodding at the blonde.

  “Who is?”

  “The blonde.”

  “Molly. She’s your nurse.”

  “I’m telling you she’s crazy.” Molly looked back at the blonde. Behind her the woman with the black bob was talking to the man with the glasses. “They’re even crazier. He gave her money! They were kissing!”

  Dr. Price followed her gaze. “Dr. Booth is a critical-care specialist. Dr. Schiff is a surgeon. Both of them are highly respected, married,
and not to each other.”

  “Seeing is believing,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said, “but not when you’re on morphine.” He gave Molly’s legs a gentle pat. “You’ll need to stay here for a while. And then we’ll see. Do you understand?”

  “No. What’s a while? You can’t be serious. I just had a baby.”

  He fingered his stethoscope. “I’m serious and what you have is even more serious. Do you know how sick you are?” He surveyed her calmly. “I can tell you, you’re alive because of me. No one else could have diagnosed you, I don’t think.”

  “And am I getting well?”

  “Let’s take one thing at a time.”

  Panicked, Molly tried to sit up again. One thing at a time. What did that mean? What was he saying?

  Dr. Price put one hand on Molly’s arm. “Try to be still. You don’t want to hemorrhage.”

  “Hemorrhage? Where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “My brain? My eyes?”

  He nodded and she recoiled.

  “Well, you asked.” He looked annoyed again. “And it’s your body. You should know what’s going on.”

  She felt herself growing more and more desperate. She didn’t know what was going on. The more he told her, the less she felt she knew.

  Behind Dr. Price, the blonde and the doctor with glasses laughed. “Please, could you just tell me again what happened to me,” Molly said. “Could you just tell me slowly.”

  He told her again, and this time, she heard him. This time she was even more afraid.

  “Call my husband,” Molly begged.

  Dr. Price nodded at her. “I will come back to see you later,” he said.

  There wasn’t a phone in Molly’s room. Even if there was paper or a pen, her hands couldn’t work well enough to write. She scanned the room, trying to figure out what she could do. Every time a nurse came in Molly begged her to call her home. “Tell Gary I have to see him,” she cried.

  “You just talked to him,” one nurse said pleasantly. She bent and folded a towel with a snap, dunking it in water and washing Molly’s face.

  “When?” Molly cried, trying to avert her face. The water hurt. The cloth felt rough. “Where?”

  “Why, right here. Dark long hair, light eyes, cute guy. Right? He brought you two tapes he played for you and he held your hand.” She daubed the cloth against Molly’s nose. “Honey, it’s the painkillers you’re on. I couldn’t remember my own name if I was on those things.”

  “I can remember my name. Molly Goldman. And I want to see my baby! It’s terrible to keep him from me!”

  “Honey, what would be terrible is if your baby got sick. Now your baby’s immune system is too new to come traipsing into a hospital full of sick people. You yourself are too ill. Don’t you want your baby to be safe at home?”

  “How do I know he’s safe?”

  The nurse finished washing Molly’s face and stroked the cloth along Molly’s arms. “Look at these grandma arms! We’ve gotta get you some lotion for those grandma arms.” She shook her head. “Want to know something? My sister’s baby was a preemie. A girl. As small as a minute. She was in an incubator for seven weeks and my sister didn’t get to hold her or even look at her through the glass because the baby was just too sick. No one thought that the baby was going to make it except my sister, probably because she couldn’t bear to think anything else. And you know what else? That girl is now a happy, healthy five-year-old, and no one’s the worse for wear. You wouldn’t know for one second that Mom and baby had ever been apart.”

  “I’m not going to see my baby, am I?”

  “I’m just telling you. You have to try to understand.” She finished washing Molly and snapped the towel about her arm. “Come on now. There’s a lot of depressed doctors walking around here because of you. What have they ever done to you that you should make them so miserable? Why don’t you get better and put some smiles on their faces?”

  She patted Molly’s arm. “I’ll be back later.”

  Molly stared around her. She knew where she was now. Surgical Intensive Care. There were two other beds she hadn’t even noticed before. One of them was empty; another held an old man, his mouth slung open.

  She heard the creak of wheels and then three orderlies pushed a gurney into the room, a stern-faced doctor following behind them. A Chinese girl was propped up, clutching a yellow bucket, a line of clear tubing pulling up out of the lid like a straw, circling on the bed like a long ring of rope. The girl stared expressionlessly at Molly. “One, two, three—and up,” said the orderlies, and they lifted her and the bucket and the tubing up onto the bed. The doctor snapped the curtains shut and then all Molly saw were shadows moving about and then she heard a sharp intake of breath, a long, gurgling hack, and then a shout. “No!” Horrified, Molly tried to make herself as small as possible. She drew the sheet up over her, she tried not to even breathe. Don’t do it to me. Don’t do it to me.

  The curtains pulled open. The girl was sitting up, staring straight ahead, the tube running from her nose into the bucket, which was now on a chair by her bed. There was a suctioning sound. Golden liquid spurted from the tube in her nose and flowed into the bucket.

  “Mrs. Goldman?” Two nurses approached the bed, carrying what looked like a black rubber sling. She heard the clank of metal and instantly Molly recoiled. “Get away from me—” she yelled. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

  The nurses looked at each other. “We’re only weighing you,” one of the nurses said.

  Molly looked at them doubtfully.

  “Relax,” said the nurse.

  They shifted her onto a black rubber pad. It hurt. She screamed. They hooked the pad to a metal contraption that looked like a huge meat scale. “One, two, and three—” said one nurse, and suddenly Molly was lifted up, suspended over the bed. The scale needle jumped and danced. “One hundred and sixty-five,” said a nurse.

  “That’s not possible,” Molly insisted. “I weighed only ninety-eight when I got pregnant. I gained only twenty pounds my whole pregnancy!”

  “It’s just blood, honey, not fat. Think of it that way.”

  “Blood!” Molly was terrified.

  Every half hour, it seemed that someone was giving her pills. Pink and blue and clear, all lodged in a tiny paper cup. “Down the hatch,” the nurse said, waiting, making sure Molly took them. She slept, deep and dreamless.

  Someone was shaking her awake. She didn’t know if it was day or night. She blinked. It was still dark in the room. She could hear the gurgling from the Chinese girl’s bucket and tube, making her clap her hands to her ears. Molly sat up. Six doctors were in a horseshoe about her head and she didn’t recognize any of them. All of them looked her age, except for the one coming toward her, who had a thatch of white hair.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Five-thirty,” said the white-haired doctor.

  “Who are you?” Molly said.

  The doctor stepped forward and pulled back her sheet. He pressed against her stomach, making her jump. “Sorry,” he said, but he kept pressing. He opened some of the gauze padding while Molly averted her face. The other doctors stared and murmured at her. “There,” the doctor said, motioning for the other doctors to come closer. “Take a look at this.” The doctors studied Molly.

  “Ah. I see it,” one of the doctors said excitedly. He pointed, “There.”

  “What is it?” Molly said uneasily. “What do you see?”

  “Old blood,” said one doctor.

  “No.” Another doctor shook his head vehemently. “New blood.”

  “What?” Molly said. “What?”

  The white-haired doctor looked at her and then back at his students. “Let’s talk outside,” he said.

  “Wait! What do you see? What does it mean?” Molly cried, but the doctors were filing out, talking among themselves.

  All that day, Molly waited for Gary. She drifted in and out of sleep and every time she woke, it was to somet
hing terrible or strange or both. She woke to see the Chinese girl trying to yank the tube from her nose, pulling out so many yards of tubing it was filling the floor. She woke to hear a man walking by her room, calling “Morning, people!” making her wonder what kind of a hospital would hire someone to greet people, what would be the purpose of that? And she woke to see a woman in the corridor watching her, a locked safe on her head, and then the woman lifted up one arm and spun the combination around and around in a kind of tune.

  Around dinnertime, Molly woke to find the Chinese girl was gone and a tall, stern-looking man was standing over her. “You look better,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Dr. Kane. Your surgeon.”

  Dr. Kane was in a bad mood. His dark eyes squinted. His mouth pulled down. His sandy hair was slicked back. He opened her covers and when she looked away, he sighed. He pressed down on her stomach. “Boggy,” he decided.

  “Boggy?”

  He ignored her and pressed again. “You feel this?”

  She shook her head, and then he stood up. “You might. Later.” He pulled her sheets up over her again. “No one knows what to expect with you. No one, not the surgeons, not the hematologist, not the critical-care staff, and certainly none of obstetrics ever thought you’d make it this far.” He gave a lean, hard grin. “I saved your life so far. No one’s been in your belly more than I have.”

  He waited, and for a minute Molly wondered if he expected her to thank him.

  “But all is not out of the woods, by a long shot. You’re still very, very sick.”

  “Is my baby all right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Where’s my husband?”

  “I spoke with him this morning,” Dr. Kane said. “And so did you.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” said Dr. Kane, as calmly as if she had asked him to make her a cup of tea. “Has Dr. Swetzer been in to see you?”