by Lisa Samson
Life or death.
The first scenario lends me Larkspur’s face for yet more time on earth. The second gives me Charles for eternity.
As Newly says, that sounds like a win-win situation.
Larkspur gave a breathtaking performance at church. I understand her a bit more now, truth to tell. That amazing sound filling the church, her fluid arms and powerful renditions of songs I’ve always loved. And I’m proud of her. I do believe she achieved this in spite of me rather than because of me, and believe me—believe me, as Flannery says—that will change!
Oh, for goodness sake. It’s only ten o’clock! And here I thought I had slept all night.
Fiddle.
PRISMA
WHEN I HEARD HIS VOICE ON THE OTHER END, I was glad I caught the phone on the first ring. Some voices you never forget.
“Is Lark there?” Bradley asked.
“Yes, but I have no intention of getting her at this hour, Bradley del Champ.”
“Prisma Percy! Lark told me you’re still on Greenway.”
“And where else would I be?”
“The White House?”
Now even I had to chuckle at that. “Lark’s told me everything, Bradley. I thought you were giving her until the end of the summer.”
“I couldn’t wait.”
“You’ve got to. Mrs. Summerville is going in for bypass surgery early tomorrow morning.”
“Is she gonna be okay?”
“Who knows? I’m praying she comes out of it all fine and feeling better than ever.”
“I hope so.”
And Bradley did. I could never fault him for being unkind in the general sense.
“Well, we’ll see. Lark’s a little nervous about it all and has already gone to bed. Plus, I don’t think hearing from you early like this is something she needs right now.”
“Has she told Flannery?”
“Nope. Not yet.”
“Well, knowing Lark, she’ll wait until the last minute.”
“You got that right. Listen, I’d better get off the phone before someone wants to know who it is. Give her until after Labor Day, you hear?”
“I was thinking September the first.”
“No. Let them have the whole summer. I think summer ends on Labor Day, unless you want to go with the real end of summer, which is September the twenty-first.”
“No! No, that’s okay, Miss Prisma, we’ll do it your way.”
Good boy. “I knew it wouldn’t take long for you to see sense.”
He breathed a sarcastic, “Hah. You’d be surprised how long it takes me to see sense. Okay, the day after Labor Day it is. Will you tell her I called?”
“Not a chance.”
“That’s what I figured.”
After we hung up, I figured while difficult conversations ran amok, I might as well make another couple of calls. So I dialed down to the Inner Harbor.
“Newly!”
“Prisma? It’s ten o’clock.”
“Do you know tomorrow is your mother’s bypass surgery?”
“Yes. Flannery told me.”
“Are you going to be there?”
Silence. Oh, that pesky boy!
“Now, Newly, all she’s got left is you and Lark.”
“I know that.”
“And family is family.”
“That’s what you keep telling me.”
I wanted to reach through the phone and shake him by his white hair. “That’s all I’m saying then. You be a good son, Newly. Please. Now good night.”
Oh, my, goodness. These Summervilles!
Lord, I don’t think I’ve done too good a job down here all of these years if improvement is this long in coming.
I dialed another number.
“Mama?” my son answered.
“Hi, baby. Just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Mama.”
“I love you, baby.”
“I love you, too. When are you coming down?”
“Mrs. Summerville is having bypass surgery tomorrow, so it will be awhile. My heart is with you though. You know that.”
He sighed, but said cheerfully, “We all have a job to do.”
“Yes, we do, Son. How’s that grandbaby cooking up?”
“With ingredients from me and Caprice and the recipe from a Master Chef, I’d say he’s coming along just fine.”
Oh, I ache for my family, and I tell you the truth on that one. Maybe I should heed my own advice and, instead of pointing fingers at Newly and Lark all the time, point some at me.
Lark
I SUPPOSE MOST WOMEN VIEW THEMSELVES more through the eyes of their mother than their own. If I truly viewed myself through my own eyes, I’d see a woman developing her talent, a woman who struggles but basically comes out okay in the end due to her faith and the love of those people she loves. I’d see a woman who took a bad situation and lived with it, and tried to do the best she could with what she had, tried to utilize the resources she alone possessed instead of begging off of anybody else.
And that’s not so bad.
But instead, I’ve always seen Mother’s view. Or what I perceived to be Mother’s view. And now I’m wondering if I’ve been wrong about that too. Not only in trying to measure up to someone else’s view, but has that view been false? Have I placed imagined expectations on myself and blamed my mother for them?
All this introspection because of faulty wiring and a burned-down home! I glided along for years on autopilot, only to come to this.
I couldn’t get a doctor appointment until November. My whole life feels like a sleeping foot coming back to life.
So there I lay in the darkness of my own room. Midnight came and left and still no sleep. I heard Mother shuffling in her bed and got a novel idea to pray for her.
That’s right, Lark. Put God to the test. See if He can handle granting a little bit of peace to a frightened old woman. See if He’ll do that.
So I lay in the darkness, looking at the ceiling and asking God to give my mother some comfort or, at the very least, a good night’s sleep.
The rustlings became less and less and died down entirely just as I myself slipped off into the luscious oblivion I had counted on for so many years to take me away.
Flannery
MAN, HOW COOL IS IT TO BE UP SO EARLY? I have to admit I am not a morning person, but I woke up at four and couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s okay though, because I wanted to pray for Grandy anyway, and I fell asleep before God and I could communicate much. James is lighting a candle for her at church this morning. I’m not exactly sure what that means to its fullest extent, but I do know it means he’s praying, which is what counts anyway.
I decide to sit by the fishpond and listen to the gurgle of the little fountain. After about ten minutes I go back inside to get my fleece and a blanket. Autumn is right around the corner. And I’ve got a lot of hopes for this autumn, you know. Grad school, James, Mom and Grandy, the lighthouse calendar, and I saw Asil putting in a bunch of mums the other day. I asked if he knew what color they were, and he said he had no idea.
Isn’t that fun?
This autumn should be the picture of predictability, and that is something I’m totally looking forward to. The world is my oyster, so to speak.
At six o’clock I decide to go on in and put the coffee on, but Prisma is already busy in the kitchen. She jumps a mile when I come through the porch doorway. And what a holler she lets out. “Baby Girl! What on earth?”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Well, you could have warned me you were out there.”
“How? Anything I did would have scared you.”
“H’m. Well, anyway, sit on down. Coffee’s almost finished. And what in heaven’s name are you doing up so early?”
“Do you need to ask?”
She slides a couple of slices of her homemade bread in the toaster. “Nope. Me, too.”
“Are you making that for Grandy?”
Prism
a shakes her head. “She’s not allowed to eat anything after midnight. This toast is for you and me.”
“Good. I don’t think I could eat anything more than that.”
“Me neither.”
Wow, Prisma really is worried.
“Now, I’m going to go up at seven to make sure your grandmother is up and at ’em. We need to be at the hospital at nine for the eleven o’clock surgery.”
“Is Asil driving?”
“Sure is.”
“I was hoping I could drive her. With Mom.”
“That’s fine with me.”
I eat my toast and head up to shower. As I dress in my bedroom, I hear the murmurs of Grandy and Prisma as they get her ready.
They are the only sounds in the house right now.
The soft scrape of their matching Daniel Greens, the whispers of their aged voices. The gravity of the day.
It all fills me with a sudden sorrow that time keeps passing and I’ll be old one day too. I’m dying. I know this. Most people who live for heaven do.
So when I hear Grandy say, “They’d better let me wear my bra afterward!” I almost spit out my coffee it takes me by so much surprise.
“You’re having open-heart surgery, Mrs. Summerville. The last thing you’ll want on your chest is a bra.”
“Put it in the overnight bag anyway. I’m counting on a quick recovery.”
I finish dressing in my latest Hepburn getup of an ivory straight skirt and pale blue jewel-necked top, slip downstairs, and call James. When my heart is sore like this, he soothes.
I tie a scarf in my hair. “Tell me you love me, James.”
“I love you, Flannery.”
“You’ll meet me at the hospital?”
“I’ll be there by 10:30.”
You gotta love this guy.
Lark
JOHNNY MET US IN THE FAMILY WAITING ROOM. And seeing him for the first time in his scrubs, with those crazy shoe covers on, offered me a calm reassurance. “She’s almost prepped,” he told us.
He actually looked like a doctor today. Like one of those heavy, studious type of doctors.
Prisma, Flannery, James, and I stood in a semicircle around him.
“You can come in for a couple of minutes before the anesthesiologist puts her under.” He looked each of us in the eye. “You all doing okay?”
We nodded in unison. Somehow, you lose your identity at times like this. You become “a family member in the waiting room, worrying and fretting.”
We visited Mother one by one, and I kissed her on the forehead, then on the cheek, and I held her hand. “Mother, I hope everything goes well.”
“Me, too, Larkspur.”
This might be my last moment with her. I felt sick, but I squeezed her hand and said, “I love you, Mom. We have a lot of good times ahead.”
“You think so?”
“I really do.”
She smiled a gentle Madonna and Child smile, her face void of cosmetics and looking touched by an old master. “I’ll cling to that then. I really will.”
“I’d better go.”
“All right, dear. Larkspur, I love you, too. I’m very proud of you. I don’t think I could have ever done the things you’ve done. You’re very brave. Despite what you think.”
“You be brave too now, Mother.”
The nurse ushered me out.
Leslie
AND HERE I LIE IN THIS MOMENT, trapped in this moment. They wheel me in, and that nice Johnny Josefowski walks beside me holding my hand, though I’m not sure surgeons usually do that sort of thing. And won’t he have to scrub soon?
I don’t know.
I’ve never been under anesthesia before. I’ve never had surgery. Only two colds that I can remember have I suffered beneath.
And now I go straight from the picture of health to bypass surgery. Crack her open, crack open that rib cage.
My stars. Dear Lord.
They’re going to crack me open like an egg, and there will be my heart exposed to the world at large. Just lying there pumping away like some piece of bloody meat that refuses to die. And then they’ll put me on a respirator and something called a heart-lung machine that will pump blood through my body and keep air in my lungs while my heart is still. Some machine will become that spirit part of me that keeps sucking the air into my lungs, keeps my brain breathing and full of life.
A friend of mine had bypass surgery on her beating heart. No machine for her, she said. And I asked the doctor about it. Johnny Josefowski says, “I have better control when the heart is still.”
And I said, “Then by all means, put me on the machine.”
That was Friday.
It is Monday.
That surely happened years ago. Or was it five minutes ago? It’s hard to tell when all you’ve got is this moment. I do hope they can jump-start me back to life.
Oh, God. Let them be able to jump-start me back to life.
Johnny Josefowski leaves my side, and a very nice anesthesiologist explains things to me. He’s talking about counting to ten backward, which is downright silly. How can you count to ten backward? Now you can count backward from ten, but it’s absolutely impossible to count to ten backward.
This moment is all I have. And so I will do as he asks because, as I said, he seems to be an awfully nice man. A doctor, not a mathematician, mind you.
“Ten.”
If he were a mathematician …
“Nine.”
I’d be in a pickle. A downright
“Is she going to be okay, Doctor?”
I heard the voice, but I couldn’t move. The sounds seemed to filter through gelatin, slow and low and wet and thick and somehow sweetly buttery, although I can’t explain that part of it. Newly’s voice did the talking.
Newly?
I tried to open my eyes. I tried to say, “I’m all right, Son!” But nothing worked.
Dear God, I’m paralyzed. I’m a vegetable, and nobody knows it yet but me. Or maybe this is a coma.
“She’s fine. She’s just starting to come off the anesthetic.”
Lots of stories circulate about people in comas and how they hear everything the people around them are saying.
“What are all those tubes for?” Newly asked.
Tubes?
Oh no. I’m going to be on a respirator for the rest of my life. Oh my. I’m just so tired I can’t think anymore. Newly, I’m all right. I really am.
Am I?
“Those tubes are draining the fluid out of her chest.”
“When will they come out?”
“Probably tomorrow. We’ll sit her up in a chair later on tonight.”
Up in a chair? Tonight?
Are these people crazy? I’m in a coma!
I felt Newly’s lips on my forehead. “Don’t tell anyone I was here,” he said to the nurse.
“If that’s what you’d like.”
“Thank you.”
I grunted just to let him know I knew.
Oh, good. A real grunt. That seemed like a good sign.
And then the scrape of ball bearings and curtain hooks told me that Newly had gone.
Well! I didn’t die on the table!
Thank You, God!
Now, that’s a thought that will make you sit up in a chair when they tell you! If I could only open my eyes, it would be a start.
Lark
THE VETERAN FAMILIES IN THE WAITING ROOM told us, “Prepare yourself for when you go in there. They look more horrible than you can begin to imagine.”
What would I find?
I’d been doing so well. And now not only were the ants back, they literally swarmed beneath my skin.
When the nurse opened the door and said, “Is the family of Leslie Summerville here?” the four of us jumped to our feet. I actually squeaked out a little shout, darn me.
“You ready?” the nurse asked.
“Yes,” said Prisma.
James hugged Flannery and said, “I’ll wait here. This should jus
t be family.”
Prisma whispered, “Good boy,” and followed the nurse into the sterile hall, through the electronic double doors and back into the semicircular cardiac recovery unit.
Not sure how I actually placed one shaky foot in front of the other, I somehow made it into the Cardiac Recovery Unit.
I scanned the beds quickly.
Big bald man.
African-American woman.
Really old, short-haired lady.
Silver-haired gentleman.
Pudgy little woman with her hair pulled back.
Backtrack. Wait. Pudgy? That was Mother?
I hurried over to her curtained-off area, quickly gaining the regal place right by her side.
“What in the world is that hose thing for coming out of the bottom of the bed?” Flannery asked as she stood beside me.
It looked like the hose of a vacuum cleaner! And there Mother lay, all swollen up to twice her size. What was wrong? Did this mean she was going to die?
The nurse entered. “I’m Janet. I’ll be with your mom all night. In this unit she’s my only patient.”
“So she’ll get good care,” Prisma said, looking whiter than I’d ever seen her and now standing on the other side of the bed, as close to Mother’s head as the equipment would allow.
“She’ll have my undivided attention.”
Flannery began to cry. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Oh yes. She had a rough time coming out of the anesthesia, and we sedated her. It’s not uncommon.”
I felt scared. “Are you sure she’s going to be okay?”
This horrible bunch of multicolored wires stuck out of her neck like some space-age, alien medical treatment or some obscure part of a car engine.
“She’s actually doing quite well.” The nurse adjusted one of the many boxes on the IV pole. “Her vitals are wonderful.”
How much medication was she on anyway? I counted down. Five different units. “And all these drips?”
“Standard for after surgery. Really, she’s doing wonderfully. I know that’s hard to believe.”
I decided I’d take her word for it. “Is Dr. Josefowski around?”
She shook her head. “He went right into another surgery. He’ll be in to check on her around five. But Dr. Boniczek is right over there at the desk if she needs him.”
