"I talked with a couple other members of the team and, despite what you've already said, we're hoping if we were to sweeten the comp package you might look differently at the offer."
"Jeanne, I—”
"Autumn," I hear my mother's voice through my closed door. Her tone doesn't sound like an inquiry as to why I'm taking so long with the popcorn. It sounds more like worry. Panic rises in my throat, filling the space, and I wrench open the door. My mom stands there, her expression blank.
"Mom?" The panic I feel saturates the word.
Her knees begin to buckle and, in the doorway to the room she painted lavender after I'd begged her to when I was twelve, she wilts like a flower.
"Mom," I scream, catching her under the arms before she hits the ground. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hear my phone clatter to the floor.
"Autumn?" Jeanne's voice floats into the air. "Autumn?"
Holding my limp mother in one arm, I grab the phone. I hang up on Jeanne and dial 9-1-1. It's a sequence of numbers I've never dialed, and hoped to never need to.
The woman who answers is kind, efficient, and knowledgeable. She stays on the phone with me until the ambulance arrives.
My mom doesn't wake up, not when she's lifted onto a stretcher, not when I sob over her in the back of the ambulance, not even when Owen runs into the emergency room and tells the doctor about her current condition.
I've never seen him so in command and confident. At least that's how he appears on the outside. But I know Owen. That authoritative exterior? A facade.
On the inside, he's got to be as terrified as I am.
* * *
I hearOwen before I see him. He's speaking to someone else, someone beyond the white and blue patterned curtain that gives my mother a bit of privacy in the emergency room.
Owen's face appears around the curtain. He looks at my mom first, then at me, and straightens, pulling the curtain aside.
"Good to see you awake, Faith." He smiles the easy smile of a man being handed a cocktail on a tropical beach. As if he doesn't have a care in the world, as if he isn't in a place that smells like cleaning products and sounds like scuffed shoes and beeping.
I forget for a minute that he works here day in and day out among the dying.
My mom returns his smile, but it's not like Owen's. Hers is weak. Tired. Much more appropriate given the situation. It occurs to me that Owen uses that smile to cut through worry. Maybe it works. When he smiles like that, it certainly doesn't seem like anything bad could truly be happening. He’s the doctor with the news, the keeper of her fate. If he doesn’t smile, then the world is ending.
It only takes two steps before he stops at the side of her bed, his gaze on the monitors. "You gave Autumn a scare," he says, his tone playfully chiding. When my mom doesn't respond, Owen glances at her. Their eyes meet and a crack forms in his cheerful demeanor. I see inside, to the place where his anguish lives.
"Just say it, Owen." Her resolute tone breaks my heart in two.
Owen looks over to me, worry in his eyes.
I nod at him, telling him I'm okay. I'm not, of course. I never will be. This is a cruel, slow torture.
Marzi-fucking-pan goddammit.
"You experienced something we call 'syncope.’ Basically, you fainted. But your encounter lasted longer than typical. A lot longer." Owen pauses, takes a deep breath, and folds my mom's hand into his. "I've been spending a lot of time around you recently, Faith. So I don't need to ask either of you the questions I would normally ask a patient and their family. I know how little you've been sleeping; I've seen how hard it is for you to walk … how much pain you’re in. You try hard to hide it from Autumn"—his gaze skirts over my face before returning to my mom—“but I know it's harder for you to do what you did even two weeks ago."
Mom nods, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip. I want her to look at me, will it in my mind, but she doesn't. "How much time?" Her voice is soft like a caress.
"At most, three months. But I don't think it will be that long." His answer is a knife, slicing into me swiftly. He said six months just a few weeks ago. Now it’s three at most? The thought of only a few months left with my mother guts me.
I scrunch my eyes against his words. The urge to be a child overtakes me, to stuff my fingers in my ears and tuck my knees to my chest.
My mother.
There is a touch on my shoulder and I open my eyes. Owen is bent down in front of me. His eyes are glassy, unshed tears dangerously close to spilling out. He pulls me in and my arms wrap around his neck. As quietly as I can, I cry. My mom watches from her bed, tears running down her face. She’s cried more lately than I've seen her cry in my entire life.
I gather myself as best as I can. "What do we do now?"
