“Not again,” Dad says. “Not this time.”
My mother closes the curtain. She comes back and takes his hand. “Let’s be calm,” she says, stroking his palm. “We will do whatever we need to do, OK?”
And then she looks at me. It’s brief, just her eyes, not her face. A flicker. But I know what she’s saying. All at once, I understandwhat she’s asking of me. The reason she is not caught in the details. She is hoping they won’t matter.
I don’t have it, I think, and the realization sends me sailing backward. But there’s nowhere to go, of course, because it’s gone. Evaporated, like the moments before it. There is only here. This hospital. This room.
The relentless present.
“Mom,” I say. “Let’s let Dad rest.”
“I’m fine,” he says. “This is all a bit dramatic.”
“No,” Marcella says. “Close your eyes. We’ll be right back.”
She grabs her bag off the chair and takes my elbow, pivoting me toward the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY
We sit in hard plastic chairs in the cafeteria that smells like hospital. All around us, nurses and doctors, staff and patients, line up for coffee or packaged sandwiches, tiny tins of fruit. How anyone could ingest anything in here is beyond me. It’s impossible to have an appetite when sour air is being pumped through the vents.
My stomach has turned outside in.
“I want to get back up there,” Marcella says.
“I don’t have it,” I say.
If she doesn’t have time, I won’t waste ours.
Marcella looks at me. Blinks slowly.
“I used it. Recently. Something happened that I needed—” I don’t want to explain myself, because I’m ashamed of what I’d have to say, the childish and embarrassing turn I took. “I used it.”
I have very rarely seen Marcella angry. Even when I was a child, she never raised her voice.
But now—
“How could you?” she says.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t stand, but it’s like her whole body begins to tower.
I see a rage in her that is entirely unfamiliar and yet intimately known, because it is the same one I have. It’s the rage that has burned in me every day since the accident, since I lost her to the idea of his safety. The rage at being second place. At being this scared, this careful.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not. I feel glad I used it, in this moment. I want to punish her. I feel selfish and wild. I want her to know that what I’ve done I’ve done for me. “It was mine, and I used it because I wanted to.” And then, as if throwing it away. “No one told me Dad needed it.”
But of course that is not true. I knew. I’ve always known. That someday, probably, we’d end up here. I was saving it for him, wasn’t I? If I’m honest? I believed, all those years, that it was my duty. When I saw him out on the deck, struggling with the board, I knew. That he was alive because of my mom and that he’d stay alive because of me. And then I spared my husband’s heart instead.
“I thought for sure—” my mother says. She is clenching and unclenching her fists. “I thought for sure youunderstood.”
“Why?” I say. “You just assumed what’s mine would be yours when you needed it again?”
I see something in my mother turn over. The anger dissolves into sadness. Right in front of me, right in the middle of this hospital cafeteria it melts, loses form. In another moment the table is dripping with it. “I hoped—”
“That I’d save Dad just like you did. That I was meant to.”
There it is, between us. The thing we’ve never said. Years of guilt and grief woven like an umbilical cord between us. The truth that we are nothing without him.
“No,” she says. “I hoped he’d never need it.”
