Healing Waters

by Nancy Rue

  But at night, the life-giving machines taunt and the swish of shoes in the halls whisper what-ifs. The sleep we welcome at the end of a health-filled day eludes us when we’re in pain. In its place comes the dark threat that there will never be health-filled days again. It is replaced by the specter of death.

  I shivered, and Kim materialized with a blanket, folded lengthwise like a shawl, which she wrapped around my shoulders. I pretended to appreciate its warmth, but I didn’t know if I was hot or cold, exhausted or merely so wired I’d blown all my circuits.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  “I’d kill for a Diet Coke,” I said. “In a sixteen-ounce cup with crushed ice.”

  “No need to kill.” Her voice smiled. “I can fix you up. The doctor is almost ready to give you an update.”

  It was all I could do to go back to the lounge, particularly when I saw that its population had nearly doubled.

  Two women had joined the group, both in the constant motion of females who pride themselves on their stress levels. Sandals clacked, swing haircuts swung, hands raked through tresses. The atmosphere in the room had changed, the way it does with the arrival of the people who know how to take control of a situation.

  The tall blonde dropped her phone into her bag when she saw me and said, “Can you tell us anythang?”

  The “thang” overlapped the shorter woman’s, “We’re looking for her sister—they’ll only tell us anything if we’re family.”

  Kim looked at me sideways.

  “Georgia,” Egan said, “this is—”

  “Evening, folks.”

  Dr. Abernathy appeared in the doorway, and Georgia and the other woman swarmed him like a cloud of honeybees. Marnie and Egan joined the hive, leaving Chip to return to his wall.

  Dr. Abernathy looked over their heads at me. “This is all family?”

  “Friends,” one of the women said. “As good as family.”

  “This okay with you?”

  I nodded.

  He picked up the story where he’d left off, and I felt the facts calming me, brutal as they were. I could understand debriding and irrigating and applying topical agents. I could get through corneal desiccation and oral commissures and neck contracture in my brain. Just as long as I didn’t have to feel them in my heart.

  “Doctor.”

  We looked up at Georgia who, with everyone else except Chip, hovered behind me.

  “Can you debrief your nurse later and use plain English with us?” she said, hands on narrow hips. “I have no idea what corneal decimation is, and I’m sure the rest of us don’t either.”

  “Lucia’s a nurse,” Marnie piped up. “She can explain.”

  “Lucia, her sister?” Georgia said. “Well, where is she?”

  “I’m so sorry!” Marnie thrust out her hands. “I thought you knew—”

  “You’re Lucia?” one of the women said.

  “All right, look, just—what happens now?” the other one said. They sounded exactly alike: imperious and entitled.

  Dr. Abernathy waited for my nod before he addressed them. “We’ll regulate her fluid intake, which is a delicate process. Keep an eye on her lungs—not much we can do but wait there.”

  “For how long?” Egan said.

  “I’ll be talking with Lucia about that, and I’m sure she’ll keep you apprised. Meanwhile, Sonia’s whole support group has access to her psychiatric nurse, Kim.”

  No one said anything until Marnie chimed in with, “And God.” “Most assuredly God,” the doctor said. “That will be a huge factor in her recovery. She’s lucky to have all of you.”

  “I don’t think luck has anything to do with it.” Egan gave his evangelical smile and opened his arms.

  This time Chip didn’t take him up on the offer.

  “When can I see her?” I said to Dr. Abernathy.

  “Right now, if you want. Then we want her to rest.”

  “We’ll be able to see her tomorrow, then.” Georgia nodded, willing Dr. Abernathy to nod with her.

  “We’ll see how her night goes. The staff will work through Lucia.”

  I could feel their eyes on me, disappointed, doubtful that I was the appropriate person for the job when better groomed, more technologically adept, thinner people were available. I watched the doctor slip out the door.

  Kim replaced him, crooking her finger at me.

  “I’ll take you,” she whispered to me.

  I followed her through the doors without looking back at the stiffness we left behind. What possible difference could it make what they thought or said or assumed? I had to steel myself for what I was about to see—because once I saw it, there would be no erasing it. No matter how hard those people prayed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What I saw wasn’t Sonia.

  It was a slab of flesh on a bed. A bloated face smothered in tape and bandages, orifices trailing tubes like snakes on the head of Medusa. It was a scalp stripped of its proud mane and left yellowed and naked and seeping, with no connection to the sister always at the helm of life.

  The vital functions blipping on a screen indicated she lived. The bracelet above the mitten of gauze on her hand and the name on her bed identified her as Sonia Cabot. Even with her ears swollen like red bell peppers, she had a dignified look, and admittedly only Sonia could pull that off. But the helplessness was foreign. The person before me was a fraud; Sonia Cabot would never allow this tangle of catheters and hanging bags of fluids to tether her to the bed. The real Sonia would return soon, and I would be there to once again resent her for being able to light up a room merely by breathing the air.

  Now that air was bitter with the smell of her flesh, and I coned my hands to my nose behind the sterile mask. I thought she slept, but her eyes startled. Eyes that couldn’t close, couldn’t even blink, and couldn’t hide from the horror that must be etched into my face.

  “It’s Lucia,” I whispered. “I’m here, sorella.”

  She searched the ceiling for my voice.

  “Here.” Picking my way among the lines and catheters, I pulled myself as far onto the bed as I dared and got my face above hers. In the cap and the mask and the chalky complexion of my own fear, I was probably no more recognizable to her than she to me, but I attempted a smile. I hoped it reached my eyes and lied to her.

  She examined my face like a small child trying to decide whether to return the smile or burst into tears. If there was something I should say to take the terror away, it escaped me, and as I grasped for it, I took hold of the first words that fled past.

  “You cheated death again,” I said.

  It was the phrase our father had used in our childhood when we ran in whimpering over a skinned elbow or a case of injured pride. “The good news is,” he would say, “you cheated death again.”

  Our mother would shriek, as only an Italian mother can, “Anthony Brocacini, that is a horrible thing to say!”

  “You baby them too much,” Dad would shout back with equal ethnicity.

  And Sonia or I would forget our wounds and run for cover as our parents volleyed insults and clattered pans and slammed doors.

  I saw the memory now in Sonia’s eyes, a glimmer of glee before it glazed.

  “You’re going to live,” I said.

  As she eased back into open-eyed sleep, I wondered if she’d want to.

  What is the matter with you, Lucia Marie? that same Italian mother would have said. You can’t let your sister hear you thinking like that.

  Her voice was a tape that shouted down my thoughts from time to time. I hadn’t heard it for a while, probably because the only time it played was when I dealt with her precious Sonia, whom our mother continued to protect, even from the grave. Usually I could bury her voice under busyness or a package of Oreos. Tonight, I could only sink under the weight of what I knew she expected of me.

  You take care of her, do you hear me? No one else understands how sensitive she is. They think she’s so strong, but you know her, Lucia Marie. You’
re the only one left who does.

  When I went back to Lounge A after my shower the next morning, Georgia and the other half of the Designing Women—Francesca— had turned the place into the perfect setup for a Mary Kay party, complete with a pink tablecloth and a bouquet of tea roses. I couldn’t imagine where a person got such things at that hour of the morning.

  Marnie wafted an arm at the spread of bagels and fruit and every flavor of cream cheese and said, “We knew you’d be hungry.”

  Actually not. Seeing her took away what little appetite I had. The rest was swallowed up in her assumption that of course a woman of my weight was always ready to chow down. I just wanted a Diet Coke, and I wondered in some non sequitur way why we fat people always drank low-cal soda.

  But I couldn’t get away from the Southern hospitality.

  “Ya’ll eat,” Georgia said. “Get you a plate, Lucy.”

  “Lucia.” Francesca ran her eyes over the antacid-pink scrubs I’d just donned. “You haven’t even been home yet, have you?”

  All three of them were clad in versions of the same catalog-cover outfit; Marnie’s was several sizes too big for her, having obviously come from someone else’s suitcase, but she carried it off like a princess whose crown had dislodged only slightly. I was painfully aware that I bore a strong resemblance to a family-size bottle of Pepto-Bismol.

  I cut a bagel in half and then took a quarter. They all watched as I pulled off a piece and let it dissolve in my mouth.

  “Girl, you eat like a bird,” Georgia said.

  “Not me.” Marnie loaded two blueberry muffins the size of small birthday cakes onto her plate. “Unless I’m a vulture.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Georgia eschewed the buffet and brought her Starbucks cup over to sit beside me. “Can Sonia eat?” she said.

  I shook my head. “They’re feeding her through a nasogastric tube.” I pointed to my nostril and felt only slightly guilty when Georgia went green.

  “Marnie, honey, what is it?” Francesca said.

  Marnie pushed her mini-banquet away and dropped her face into her hands. Her winged shoulder blades shook, and Francesca pulled her head against her collarbone.

  “Bless your heart.”

  “She was so beautiful,” Marnie said. “I never saw anybody so beautiful.”

  Francesca nodded, her own face now draining tears.

  Georgia set her cup down decidedly and went to kneel in front of them. “Now, you listen to me, girl,” she said. “Sonia is still gon’ be beautiful. You know the Lord is with her, don’t you?” She gave Marnie’s shoulders a shake. “Don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And besides that, they can do wonders with plastic surgery these days.”

  Francesca nodded so hard I was certain her head would topple to the floor. “A little burn isn’t going to change Sonia’s inner beauty, Marnie, honey,” she said.

  Did Chip realize he would have to raise this girl he was smitten with? The nibble of bagel turned to rubber in my mouth, and I started to make an exit from the Mary Kay Lounge—off to my sister with the “little burn” that had singed all the way to her bone and formed a cave in the side of her face.

  I stopped short at the door when Marnie said in her sob-voice, “I wish Chip was here.”

  “Didn’t he go to the airport to pick up Ivey and Nanette?” Francesca dabbed at Marnie’s eyes with a Kleenex. “We all gon’ need waterproof mascara to get through this, aren’t we?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” Marnie said.

  “Isn’t that his job?” Francesca said.

  Marnie shook her head. “He doesn’t work for ALM anymore. He quit. That’s why we were stopping here in Philadelphia. To drop him off.” Her face crumpled. “I’m so glad we did.”

  “You knew that, Frannie,” Georgia said.

  I didn’t.

  I fled. The wall down the hall rose up to meet me, and I stood with my forehead pressed to it, because the chaotic pieces were collecting so fast and so high, I couldn’t move any further.

  Chip . . . what the Sam Hill? He couldn’t have told me he quit the only job that supported us? The job I’d never wanted him to take in the first place?

  I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to file the pieces away, one by one, shove them into places I couldn’t feel, but they wouldn’t go. They kept accumulating—betrayals on top of lies on top of burned-up dreams.

  Come on, Lucia Marie. Get out of this. Go back to ICU where you can hear the beeps and watch the blips.

  If I didn’t, the aches and the fears would burst me open.

  I saw my baby sister as much as the nurses would let me. They let me assist in cleansing her face and hands in the hydrotherapy room, where in spite of their assurances that Ketamine kept her out of pain, I shrieked inwardly at every meticulous picking-off of dead skin, every pull at the good that came off with the bad and left her bleeding. A little blood couldn’t make the puzzle of white ash and black char and gelatinous yellow look worse. Nothing could.

  Nor could anything make it much better. We could clean and medicate, but Francesca was dead wrong. We were never going to return that face to its previous beauty. Those praying people in Lounge A didn’t get that.

  Egan and the Designing Women insisted they would see Sonia, and brushed aside my explanation that this wasn’t the usual ICU where friends and family could visit for ten minutes every hour. When I told them, teeth gritted, that Sonia had to be protected from infection at all costs, they vowed that they would dip themselves in disinfectant if they had to—because what I obviously didn’t understand was that they would do whatever it took to be there to comfort their Sonia.

  Really, I wanted to say to them. Are you going to learn how to debride her wounds? Catch the drool when she can’t close her mouth?

  I didn’t say it. I actually wanted someone else to take care of Sonia in spite of my mother’s insistence from the grave that I shoulder it all. The chances that one of these women would know what to say to Sonia the first time she looked in a mirror were far greater than they were for me.

  I also tried to avoid the constant insistence that I eat something. How can you eat so little? they wanted to know.

  Their eyes held the rest of that question—and still look like Jabba the Hutt?—which I’d seen on people’s faces at dozens of lunch tables and barbecues and buffet lines. I would have gone on the Gandhi diet before eating in front of people who shopped in the petite section.

  When I wasn’t falling under their judgment, I kept moving, even to the point of volunteering to carry the greenhouse-sized collection of floral arrangements that arrived for Sonia into the Mary Kay Lounge, where the number of occupants continued to climb. The new arrivals—hurriedly introduced to me as members of the board of Abundant Living Ministries—shared the group’s enthusiasm for the names on the cards. I didn’t recognize any of them. As for the board members, five seconds after I was told they were Ivey Somebody and Nanette Somebody Else, I couldn’t have identified which was which.

  Every time I went into the lounge, everyone was in some phase of crying. Everyone except me. If I started, how would I be able to stop the flood that would express what I was trying not to feel?

  The conversation in the lounge now centered on someone named Roxanne, who would be on her way as soon as she’d taped her show. No, she would let the station do a rerun and be on the next plane. No, no, she’d come later with Bethany and Yvonne, the nanny.

  That one slammed into me.

  “Someone is bringing Bethany here?” I said.

  The conversation muttered to a stop.

  “Well, yeah,” Egan said.

  “Don’t even think about bringing that child in here yet.”

  They stared. Some eyes shuttered, others blinked. I wondered who was making the decisions about my six-year-old niece’s life.

  “When do you think?” Egan said. “So I can let Yvonne know.” “When Sonia is able to talk, you should ask her,” I sa
id.

  Egan folded his arms and crunched his forehead. “When is that going to be? I’m not clear on the timeline.”

  “Whenever they extubate her—take out the breathing tube. A week maybe.”

  “You think it’s going to be a week?”

  “Could be two.”

  Georgia stepped forward. “You’re saying she won’t be able to talk for two weeks?”

  “Or breathe on her own or eat or be touched. This isn’t a sunburn. Two layers of her face have been cooked away.”

  I could hear myself breathing as no one spoke.

  I turned just enough to look at Georgia. “I don’t think you get how serious this situation is.”

  “What we get,” Egan said, “is how hard we have to pray and how large a work the Lord is going to do here.”

  The two new women sprang to action, as if Egan had just given them their cue. Their nods and amens brought the room back to nodding and Lord-praising and blessing people’s hearts.

  “I’d like to see her first,” Egan said. “I want her to hear that from me.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Excuse me.” I didn’t wait for them to step back, farther than they needed to, to let me through.

  The silence behind me, I knew, was calculated to last until I was out of earshot, but someone didn’t do the math. I heard Francesca— or was it Georgia?—say, “You know those medical people always think the worst.”

  “Is she a believer?” Egan said.

  At that point—or at some other time in the blur of hours that ran one into the other—I asked the ubiquitous Nurse Kim if I needed to tell them other people might want to use the lounge.

  She angled her head at me. “I take care of those things,” she said. “You just take care of you.”