“Because she isn’t well.”
“She’s not on any machines,” Pam argued.She felt she’d seen enough in the past few months to deserve a more substantial answer.“Some patients are hooked up to so many that you can hardly see them through the wires.Not Mom.There are no machines, and she isn’t in a body cast or anything.She doesn’t even take much medicine.”
“Still, she’s not well.”
“Then let her come home and we’ll get a nurse for her here.”
“She needs more than just a nurse.”
“Then we’ll hire whoever she does need.”
“Pam,” he put down his fork to stare at her as though she were a half-wit, “this house isn’t designed for a paraplegic.”
Pam resented his tone.She resented the way he talked down to her—and she resented the way he could eat as though everything were normal, when there’d just been another turn for the worse in a tragedy that seemed to go on and on.“Don’t call her that.”
“It’s what she is.Isn’t it time you were honest with yourself?Your mother is paralyzed.”
“I know that,” Pam said, sounding as calm and grown up as she could.She was going to have to be both if she hoped to fight John.“She won’t ever walk.But that doesn’t mean she can’t learn to use a wheelchair.The doctors said it.So did the physical therapist.And just because she can’t walk doesn’t mean she can’t come home.We’re not poor.We can afford to do what has to be done here so she can get around in a wheelchair.I was sitting right there when the physical therapist told her about it.”
“And what did Patricia say?”
Pam remembered that well.She had been so sure her mother would show some sort of excitement.“She was pretty tired.They’d been working with her legs for a while.”
“Did she say anything?”
After a minute, Pam quietly conceded.“No.”
John began to eat again.“Um-hmm.”
“But she’d be better at home.I know she would, John.She should be here with us and her own things.We could turn the library into a bedroom so that she wouldn’t have to do the stairs.Most of the doorways are already wide enough for a chair to pass through.So if we put up bars in the bathroom—”
“Things aren’t that simple.There are other factors involved.”
“What factors?”
“Emotional ones.”
“Her depression?But there are ways to fight that, too.She’s been seeing a psychiatrist at the hospital.She could see one here.If she sticks with it long enough—”
“Pam, she doesn’twantto come home.”
Pam refused to believe that.“Of course she does.”
“Has she told you so?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything.She doesn’t say much at all.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?”he asked archly.
Pam’s stomach was twisting.She had to work harderto keep her thoughts straight.“It tells me that she’s still upset about the accident, but we already know that.She’s upset about Daddy and upset about herself, and she can’t talk with me until she deals with those things.”One of the nurses had suggested that to her, and it made sense.“So she’s been seeing the psychiatrist at the hospital.”
“And what do you think she tells him?”
“I don’t know.I’m not there.”
“She tells him,” he said slowly and distinctly, “that she doesn’t want to come home.Why can’t you accept that?”He forked a large piece of tenderloin into his mouth.
“How canyouaccept it?”she cried, throwing good intent to the winds.“And how can you eat that way, John?It’s disgusting.How can you eat at all?Aren’t you the least bit upset?”Tossing her linen napkin onto the table, she stood.“You aren’t.None of this bothers you.You got over Daddy’s death the minute he was in the ground, and now you’re in a rush to put my mother away somewhere.”
