“They were stabilizing her when they got here. I’m sorry, Melody. We were just trying to keep the students calm. Ms. Richards is with them now.”
“The guidance counselor?” The hallway was spinning.
“Yes. And I’m here to bring you to the hospital. Mrs. James is on her way. She’ll cover the rest of your class. Please go get your things, okay?”
My eyes swelled with tears. “Is my mom okay?” I asked Mr. Ludwig.
“I hope so,” he said. “I’m honestly not sure.”
Twenty-five minutes later, Mr. Ludwig dropped me off in front ofthe entrance to the emergency room, leaving me there so that he could park his car. I explained to the lady at the desk that my mom was just brought in by an ambulance and could I see her, and a maelstrom of questions and answers followed. At some point, Mr. Ludwig returned and sat with me, helping me attempt to fill out forms. A doctor arrived and said something—a whole bunch of words strung together that made no sense. Mr. Ludwig had to explain them to me three times before I understood what he was saying. My mom was having emergency surgery, he said. PCI. Percutaneous coronary intervention. It was a way to look inside her arteries and figure out what happened.
He stayed with me for seven hours, uncomfortably asking if there was someone he could call on my behalf. But no. It was always just me and her.
Finally, I was escorted to the area where the beds were. Mom was behind a privacy curtain, dressed in a hospital issue blue and white gown. She had tubes everywhere, an IV, a breathing mask, and she appeared to be asleep. “Is she okay?” I swallowed the words in my throat.
A kind-eyed nurse was adjusting the IV bag. “She’s okay, aren’t you, Miss Birdie?”
Mom’s eyelids fluttered.
“You her daughter?” she asked me.
I nodded, clasping a hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t completely dissolve into a puddle of tears.
“There, now,” the nurse said. “Birdie, it’s your girl. She came to see you. Show her you’re okay.”
Mom opened her eyes and scanned the area. When she locked them on mine, she opened her hand up at her side, and I stepped in to take it. The nice nurse gave me a chair to sit in, and I dropped my head onto my mom’s hip, sobbing, finally able to fall apart now that I knew she was, at the very least, alive. She ran her fingers through my loose hair, lightly scratching myscalp. With her free hand, she lifted the oxygen mask off her mouth and whispered, “It’s okay, Pretty Girl. It’s okay.”
The following day, I stopped at her apartment to get her some essentials: a change of clothes, her toothbrush, face wash, hairbrush, and (at her insistence) makeup bag. I peeked into my old bedroom and looked around, pondering all that she’d been through in the past twenty-four hours. My bedroom looked back at me, untouched. Like after I moved out and went to college and later moved to Brooklyn to be in a trendy place I could call my own, the room was just content to collect dust, awaiting my return. As if it was inevitable—the universe knew it, even the apartment building knew it.Melody will be back.And they were right; I would move back home just a few months later. Mom’s degenerative diagnosis saw to that. Congestive heart failure, stage C, the doctor had said. The words repeated themselves over and over in my brain.Quit smoking immediately. Healthy lifestyle. Prognosis.These were the words Dr. Hartman had used.
For as long as I’d known her, Birdie Paulson had a love affair with Marlboro Lights. It was a side effect of the music biz, she always said, and in the same breath, she was sure to let me know that if she ever caught me lighting up a cigarette, she’d kill me. I always worried about lung cancer. I never thought about heart disease. In fact, I was so naive that Ilikedthe smell of cigarettes, because they reminded me of her.
So in my bedroom that day, trying to think about how on earth my mother was going to be able to successfully quit smoking without any notice, I remembered.
The hacky sack.
I fished it out of my old sock drawer, and I brought it to the hospital.
Mom was never without it from that day forward.
Until she was.
And then it was mine again.
Now, I can’t sleep without the damn thing. It’s amazing to me how amother and a daughter can share so many threads of who they are, all the way down to their strangest, most childish quirks. I wonder if I’ll ever be calm enough in my heart to not need that bit of comfort in order to get any rest. If I’ll ever find a happily-ever-after that soothes my soul and makes me feel safe at night.
Well.
Certainly not this week,I decide, rolling the hacky sack in my palm until my breathing evens out and I drift away.
Chapter 21
We’d booked a special mother-daughter spa day for December 30—our fifth day in Aruba. The Renaissance had a full menu of spa services, but we decided to do the Sunset Romance Couples Massage at the Island Cove outdoor spa hut on the private island. We didn’t care that we weren’t a honeymooning couple—the package boasted two and a half hours of private use of the Island Cove spa hut, four frozen cocktails, a bountiful platter of fresh fruit, and a sixty-minute Swedish massage for each of us. We even went an extra step and added on a Himalayan salt scrub for our feet and a hibiscus paraffin treatment for our hands. All that plus a sunset in paradise, and I knew we were in for a real treat.
So, on that day, we stayed by the pool in the morning and had lunch at the swim-up bar. We watched an activities person try to teach a group of rowdy children how to play sand volleyball (to no avail), and Mom took a longer nap than usual: from about 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Beckett came to see us after lunch, and we lounged on floats in the water, holding hands and talking about life back home in New York. He shared how his novel was coming; apparently, he’d stalled out a little because his mind had been occupied with something else—some girl he’d met on vacation, he joked. Our easy conversation and banter made me warm inside.
“So, what are you thinking for dinner tonight?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. We’ve got the spa till 6:30, so already that’s kind of late for us.”
