There Was an Old Woman

by Hallie Ephron

  When Mina and Annabelle had first visited, Annabelle had said, “But everyone is so old.” Mina had laughed, but now she was thinking the exact same thing as a woman shuffled past, pushing a walker tethered to an oxygen tank. An old man sat nodding off in a chair.

  But it wasn’t all shuffle and nap. A woman who sat reading a USA Today lowered her paper and gave Mina a sharp appraising look as the energetic guide led them down a hall to a library where all five computer stations were in use. Maybe Mina would finally get around to learning how to use one. Past that was a room set up like a den with a big TV and card tables. Four women there were playing mah-jongg. Another foursome, men and women, were playing poker, betting with nickels.

  “Are you a card player?” their cheerful guide asked with a treacly smile. Lipstick was smeared on her front tooth.

  Mina said she wasn’t, but she wondered if anyone still knew how to play whist. She’d passed many a pleasant evening playing that with her grandmother.

  Past the card room was an exercise room where women and a few men sat in two rows of chairs. According to Mina’s guide, they were “enjoying a session of chair yoga.” As Mina watched them look up at the ceiling, down into their laps, curl and stretch, she realized that she’d probably enjoy it, too.

  All in all, it wasn’t so bad, really. It didn’t smell terrible. No one was muttering, or marching along like a zombie, or disrobing in the hallway. Mina had witnessed all three on the floor where Annabelle had been installed.

  Continuing on, they passed a hall table, its top strewn with flower petals surrounding a carefully calligraphed card that read Dearly Departed. Beside the card was a framed photograph of a woman smiling and looking directly at the camera, her hand to her cheek. Perched on her head was a party hat in the shape of a tiara—just the kind of goofy thing Mina would never be caught dead wearing. But from the woman’s lively expression, it looked as if she was in on the joke.

  Below the picture was a name and a room number and the date, May 17. Three days ago.

  Farther down a corridor and beyond double doors were the rooms. The woman walked ahead with Brian at her side. They were chatting. Brian turned and motioned for Mina to hurry up. But just then a young woman came out into the corridor from one of the rooms. She turned back, holding the door open, talking and nodding.

  Inside, Mina could see a cozy room with ruffled white curtains, a well-worn leather lounge chair, and a bed neatly made with a finely crocheted spread like one tucked away in Mina’s linen closet that she didn’t dare use for fear Ivory would have at it. Which reminded her, would they let her bring Ivory? It gave her a stomachache imagining Ivory being dumped at an animal shelter.

  A woman in a wheelchair sat facing the door, so stooped she was bent near double, her thin white hair tucked into a bun at the nape of her neck. Beside her was a piecrust-top table crowded with framed photographs and porcelain figurines. The young woman at the open door said something to her, and the old woman craned her neck in order to look up. Her face reminded Mina of a shriveled apple. Eyes sharp. She was starting to say something when the young woman let go of the door and walked off down the hall.

  It seemed to Mina as if the door closed in slow motion with the old woman sitting there, talking to no one, until finally she was shut in that room, utterly alone with only a television, pictures of loved ones, and a window overlooking a parking lot. In a few weeks or months, a picture of her smiling gamely at the camera would be sitting on the Dearly Departed table. And the cozy room she was in would be filled with someone else’s memories.

  It was the thing no one wanted to talk about. People came to places like this to die. Even after they’d finished their tour and were riding down in the elevator Mina was still shaken, thinking about the woman in the wheelchair.

  Assisted living? Pfff. If she came here, it would be to die, tidily and off camera, as inexorably as the elevator she was in was going down.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “Next stop, Golden Oaks. It’s not far,” Brian said in a cheery, much too loud voice back in the lobby. He held Mina’s coat for her, and dutifully Mina threaded her arms through the sleeves. But her mind kept replaying the door closing on the old woman.

  Brian handed Mina her cane. “You know, I think I’d like to go home,” she said.

  “Home? Home?” The word exploded from Brian’s mouth and echoed in the empty space, and Brian looked around guiltily. “But you promised,” he continued more quietly. “We’ve made appointments.”

  “You made the appointments. You keep them. I am going home.” And before Brian could protest, Mina started for the door. On her way out, she tossed the envelope with the material she’d never requested in a trash bin.

  She assumed Brian would come chasing after her, shouting and struggling to put on his own coat. Offering to bring the car around and putting his hand out like she’d just fork over her car keys. But when she turned and looked back, there he was, still inside, talking on his cell phone. Gesturing with his free hand like he was explaining something, or maybe apologizing. That was the one thing that, at her age, Mina rarely felt the urge to do.

  The pavement outside was wet. She stepped out from under the front awning and into a steady drizzle. A car stopped so she could cross the circular drive and continue at a brisk pace into the parking lot and down the center aisle, her cane tapping sharply on the macadam. Three rows in, she turned right and walked past car after nondescript car. When she was nearly at the end of the row, she realized her car wasn’t there. She turned around, and around again, checking the adjacent row for her car’s distinctive silhouette.

  Keys clutched in her hand, she started to retrace her steps more slowly now. Stopped. She remembered exactly where she’d parked—right in that spot where a dark red van was now parked. Or was it the spot next to it where there was a black pickup truck?

  She looked up and down the row. Or maybe it was farther along? She took a few steps in that direction.

  “Aunt Mina!” It was Brian, calling to her from the start of the row. “Don’t you remember? You parked over here.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

  What? Mina could have sworn this was right. Could she have gotten completely turned around?

  “Come on!” Brian gestured for her to follow him.

  Mina had started toward him when she heard an engine rumble. Startled, she turned and stumbled, barely catching herself from falling. All she could see was the bed of the pickup truck coming at her, white backup lights glowing in the rain.

  Mina put her hands up, as if she could actually stop a two-thousand-pound vehicle with her bare hands. In a flash of coherence, as she went down hard she thought, Please, not my other hip.

  The next thing she knew, she was on the ground. Somehow she’d managed to get out of the truck’s path. The truck peeled out without so much as slowing down, leaving behind the smell of exhaust. Through the side of her head she felt more than heard running footsteps.

  “Aunt Mina, are you all right?” Brian’s voice came from a blurry figure standing over her. Mina realized she’d lost her glasses, and she patted the ground around her. Her cane and purse and car keys had gone flying, too. “What kind of idiot backs up without even looking? Asshole.”

  Watch your language, young man. The voice in Mina’s head was her mother’s, but she knew it was exactly what Annabelle would have said, too.

  Brian knelt beside her. “Aunt Mina? Are you all right?”

  Her hip throbbed, and her heart was banging like a jackhammer. Each time she tried to breathe, it felt as if a fist pressed against her breastbone.

  “You’re white as a sheet.” His words came to her slowly, as if pushing their way through a fog.

  Mina tried to say, I’m fine. But she couldn’t get the words to come out of her mouth.

  “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  Mina did not want to go to the hospital. Nine times out of ten, you came out sicker than you went in, if you came out at all. She gasped f
or breath, still unable to say a word. Finally, she managed to croak out a small, weak, “No!”

  “Hello? Emergency?”

  “No!” This time she sounded louder. Mina wiped a strand of hair from across her eyes. She took a breath.

  “Lie still,” Brian said. “You might have broken something.”

  “Don’t you think I’d know if I’d broken something?” Mina snapped. Her elbow and knees felt raw, and she thought she might be bleeding. But she’d survived plenty of skinned knees and elbows. Gingerly she flexed her wrists. Rotated her shoulders. Lifted her head off the wet pavement. “Put that fool thing away,” she said, “and help me find my eyeglasses. I’m fine.”

  But the minute she tried to shift her legs, she knew she was not fine. The pain in her hip was white hot and excruciating. She felt a bulge where there shouldn’t have been one, right where the ball of her titanium hip joint was supposed to snap into the pelvis.

  The blurry figure that descended over her had to be Brian. He barely touched her, and she screamed in pain. Then the world went mercifully black.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  As Evie’s taxi drove up the East Side on the way to the hospital, meter ticking, Evie called Ginger to tell her that their mother was in intensive care; then she scrolled through her calendar of meetings for that day and the next and sent out regrets that she’d be unable to attend.

  “Ma’am?” the taxi driver said. Evie looked up. The driver was looking back at her. The taxi had pulled up in front of the hospital. “That’s fifty-six dollars even.”

  Moments later she was inside, following the signs to intensive care.

  The glass double doors of the intensive care unit were locked. Hanging on the door was a clipboard with a sign-in sheet. Evie wrote her mother’s name and her own. Then she pressed the nearby buzzer. A nurse came to the door. She looked tired, her eyelids puffy and sagging.

  “I’m Sandra Ferrante’s daughter,” Evie said.

  The nurse led her to one of the beds in the back where Evie’s mother lay completely still. An IV tube was attached to her arm, and what looked like an oversize clothespin was clipped to her index finger.

  Evie pulled up a chair to her mother’s bedside. “Mom?” she said. Her mother’s closed eyelids quivered. “Can she hear me?” Evie asked the nurse.

  “Maybe. It’s always a good idea to assume they can.”

  Evie looked at one of the monitors to which her mother was attached. There were numbers—85 and 72—on the readout. Evie had no idea if that was bad or good, but the steady iridescent-green wave pattern that laid itself out over and over again on the screen was reassuring.

  “That’s showing us her oxygen levels and her heart rate,” the nurse said. “Right now she’s good. Much better than when they brought her in a few hours ago. An alarm will sound if—”

  A high-pitched alarm sounded from a monitor several beds away. “That’s my cue,” the nurse said, hurrying off.

  Evie turned back to her mother. “Mom? It’s me, Evie. I’m right here. And Ginger is on her way.” She touched her mother’s arm and gently brushed hair off her forehead. Her mother’s eyelids didn’t even flicker.

  Evie had never been in an intensive care unit before. She glanced at the bed closest to her mother’s. A very old woman lay there, her cheeks and eyes sunken into her skull. She was hooked up to a ventilator that wheezed and hissed and thumped as she breathed in and out, along with an entire bank of additional monitors. No one was by her side except a nurse, bending over her and raising her eyelid.

  Evie looked away, then around at the rest of the unit. Every other bed was occupied, every patient connected to devices in what felt like some kind of purgatory. How long did the hospital keep patients here before giving up? she wondered. How many of these people would bounce back?

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “Easy does it,” a woman’s soothing voice said. As Mina was turned over and lifted onto a stretcher, she gasped for breath. The pain in her left side was excruciating. The world around her shorted out and went dark.

  “I’m sorry. I know it hurts.” The same voice pulled her back. Mina blinked up at the figure who was blocking a pulsing light. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” Mina managed to gasp out. She could feel the woman gently wiping grit from the side of her face.

  “Good. Hang on now.” A sheet was tucked under her arms. “You’ve dislocated your left hip. We’re taking you to the hospital.”

  Something was being wrapped around her upper arm. Tightening. A blood pressure cuff.

  “You’re going to be fine.” The woman’s voice again as the cuff was removed.

  They were moving now. Into an ambulance? A hand came down over her face. Mina fought it. Pushed it away.

  “It’s oxygen. It will help you breathe.” That woman, this time with the pressure of a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Your blood pressure is dropping so we want to be sure you’re getting enough. Don’t worry, I’ve got your purse and your cane.”

  Mina grabbed the woman’s arm. She tried to say, “My glasses.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Mina stared up into the face bending over her, just able to make out the features. She tried again. “Glasses. Please.” She could feel the woman’s long hair tickling her face. “I can’t see.”

  “Hold on.” The woman raised her voice. “Hey, watch where you’re stepping. Anyone find this woman’s glasses?”

  After a pause, Mina heard a man’s voice growl, “Yo. Got ’em.”

  A few moments later, Mina’s glasses were slipped over her face, and she could see sky. There was a small break in the clouds and the fresh, unlined face of the young woman standing over her. Long dark bangs hung over her eyes. Mina resisted the urge to push the hair back. How could the girl see? Mina craned her neck to find the waiting ambulance. A police officer was standing by its open doors, talking to Brian.

  Mina didn’t struggle this time when an oxygen mask was fastened over her face. The stretcher she was on started to roll. Every bump felt like an electrode jabbed into her hip.

  Through a blur of pain, Mina could hear Brian’s voice. “Y-e-t . . .” He was spelling her name for the police officer. “Ninety.” She was ninety-one, but she didn’t have the strength to correct him.

  The stretcher stopped at the back of the ambulance. The sky and parking lot disappeared as Mina was lifted inside. It was warm and dry and quiet, and she could just hear Brian’s voice. “No, I didn’t get the license plate, but I saw it peel out of here. I don’t think the guy even realized he’d hit her.”

  The policeman’s response was barely a rumble.

  Brian’s voice again: “I got a pretty good look. It was a dark red Dodge minivan.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Mina said, the words caught in the oxygen mask. It had been a truck, a black pickup truck that was parked next to the red van.

  The EMT was crouched beside Mina. She put her hand on Mina’s arm. “Shhh. Just try to relax. We’ll be at the hospital in a few minutes, and soon you’ll be right as rain.”

  The ambulance doors slammed shut, and a moment later, the siren started to wail, and they were in motion.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Evie sat back and closed her eyes. The smell in the ICU was pure hospital, but with all the clanking and hissing and beeping, and beneath that the rush and squeak of rubber-soled shoes, Evie could easily imagine she was in the belly of some huge machine. She’d been there for less than an hour when Ginger arrived.

  “I got here as fast as I could,” Ginger said. She was wearing a stretched-out T-shirt and yoga pants, and her hair was damp, like she’d come over right after taking a shower.

  “She’s been unconscious since I got here,” Evie said. The numbers on the monitors were still frozen at 85 and 72.

  Ginger bent over and kissed their mother on the forehead once, twice, three times. As she did so, one of the numbers changed. 74. 75. 76.

  “Look at that!” Evie poin
ted to the readout. “I think that’s her heart rate. It jumped when you kissed her.” As she and Ginger watched, it dropped back to 74.

  “She knows we’re here,” Ginger said, pulling over another chair. “Mom?” she said, taking their mother’s hand, her eyes glued to the numbers. “It’s Ginger and Evie. Can you hear me?”

  But nothing happened. Evie sat there with Ginger, taking turns talking to their mother and trying to make the number spike again. Minute after minute dragged by, but Sandra Ferrante just lay there, her eyes half closed, unmoving.

  “I’m glad we talked to her yesterday. At least we know what she wants,” Ginger said, yawning and stretching.

  “She never even opened my birthday card,” Evie said. In spite of herself, she could feel tears rise and her throat close up.

  “Oh, Evie. You know you’re being ridiculous.” Ginger gave her a sympathetic look. “And you look awfully pale. Have you had anything to eat?”

  “Just coffee at work.”

  “No wonder. Let’s go downstairs and grab a bite.”

  “Shouldn’t we take turns?”

  Ginger turned and looked at their mother. At the numbers that weren’t moving. A nurse went by and Ginger stopped her. “Would it be okay if we went downstairs, just for ten minutes or so, to get something to eat?”

  “Of course,” the nurse said. “Give me your cell number and I’ll call if there’s a change, though I doubt there will be.”

  A few minutes later, they stepped off the elevator in the lobby. In the café, Evie grabbed a packaged ham-and-cheese sandwich, a bag of chips, and a bottle of water and got in the cashier’s line to pay.

  “I’m sorry,” the cashier was telling the man in line in front of her, “we don’t have lattes. Just coffee. Caf or decaf.”

  Ginger got in line behind Evie. She’d ladled herself what looked like a cup of pea soup so thick that the plastic spoon was standing straight up in it.