I hung up and looked down at my hand. I was still holding the head of the broken angel, gripping it so tightly that the jagged glass on its neck had cut my palm. She stared back at me, her face sticky with my blood, her eyes taunting:Got you back.
TWO
IPAID A SMALL FORTUNEto catch the last direct flight of the day from Burlington to New York and landed at JFK a little after eight, then hailed a cab to Washington Heights with my overnight bag slung over my shoulder. The city made me feel panicked and tiny. The buildings were too tall. The streets and sidewalks too full of people and noise. There was a reason I lived in Vermont—the land of no billboards, in a town where everything shut down at six p.m. I needed to be in a place where I could hear myself think. I had enough overstimulation in my own mind; I didn’t need it in my surroundings too.
I texted Paul when I arrived at the hospital, and he gave me directions to the unit my mother was in. I made my way along the polished corridor to the elevators and stepped on, inhaling the hospital smells—antiseptic, hospital food, and sorrow (if sorrow had a smell). I felt, as I always did in hospitals, as if I’d entered another world with its own rules, its own climate and air, sights and sounds. The elevator was crowded with people in scrubs and white coats, with visitors carrying flowers and food. I don’t think of myself as being claustrophobic, but it was too much—the small space, all those bodies in it, the jolting movement of the elevator, the smell of stale coffee.
Paul was waiting for me in the hall when I got off the elevator, looking like he’d just stepped out of the pages ofGQ—an even tan, freshly cut dark hair, khaki pants and a pale-blue button-down that looked like it had been custom-made. He didn’t look like he’d aged a day. In fact, he never did. Perhaps he’d look thirty forever.
He even smelled amazing when I hugged him: like expensive aftershave, clean cotton, warm leather.
“How is she?” I asked.
He answered with a wordless sigh and a grim shake of the head.
“Paul,” I said, hesitating but needing to ask the question, needing to know. “Did my mother really ask for me? Or was that actually you?”
I couldn’t face the idea of walking in blind, seeing the surprise or dread or disappointment on my mother’s face. I wasn’t up for rejection. Not now. Not here.
“She asked for you. Several times.” He looked a little pained by this, as if hurt by the realization that he alone wasn’t enough for her.
I nodded. “It’s just… well, you know, she and I…” I wasn’t sure how to go on. My eyes pricked with tears, and I swiped them away.
“Alison,” he said, taking my hand. He didn’t seem to know what else to say.
I cleared my throat. “So there’s nothing they can do? No treatment options?”
He shook his head. “You should talk to the nurses and her doctor, of course, but really, there’s nothing. It’s about keeping her comfortable at this point. Palliative care, they call it.”
I took in a breath. Looked down the hall at a nurse rolling a cart into a room. Heard the mechanical beeps and hums, the low hush of voices, the ding of call bells going off. The overhead lights were too bright, too harsh, the floor too shiny and polished.
“They want to send her to hospice,” Paul said.
I nodded like any of this made sense to me.
I was going to lose my mother. I’d spent years telling myself there would be time. That we could fix things somehow, that I could have the mother I’d always longed for. And now here we were, nearly out of time.
My chest felt tight. I forced myself to take a deep, slow breath.
“But the thing is,” Paul said, “she’s refusing to go. Says she doesn’t want to die in a sterile, unfamiliar place surrounded by strangers.”
“Can she go home? Receive care there? Aren’t there private nurses or something?”
Money wasn’t an issue. My mother had done just fine for herself financially. More than fine, actually.
Paul was silent for a minute. His eyes darted away from my face and fixed on the gleaming waxed floor. “That’s an option, of course. But as I said, she doesn’t want to die surrounded by strangers.” There it was again: that hurt look, maybe even slightly bitter. Surely he didn’t believe my mother viewed him as a stranger.
“Well, what is it she wants?”
There was a long pause. I heard more beeping, voices, a doctor being paged for a call on line two. Somewhere down the corridor, a patient moaned, low and ghostly.
“I think you should ask her,” Paul said, looking down the hall rather than at me. “She’s right down there”—he nodded—“room 412. I’m going to go down to the cafeteria and see if I can find a sandwich or something. Want me to bring you back anything? A coffee?”
“Coffee would be great,” I told him. I’d had two cups of it on the plane and was already queasy and jittery, but the idea of hot coffee comforted me—something to help ground me. He turned and headed to the elevators. I watched him go, then walked along the hallway in slow motion, steeling myself, breathing in the hospital smells.
When I reached room 412 at last, I hovered in the doorway and peeked in, wondering what little drama I was about to step into and become a part of.
I hadn’t seen my mother since Aunt Frances’s funeral back in April. As I looked in at her now, it was as if she’d aged twenty years since that day only months ago. She was thin to the point of being skeletal, pale (not a trace of makeup), and even her hair looked sad and limp. She was wearing a faded hospital johnny and her body beneath it reminded me of a just-hatched baby bird; she looked that small and weak, that vulnerable.
