I'm Glad About You (43 page)

Patricia was nice enough, but she wasn’t giving out any extra information. She messed with Rose’s machines until she stopped thrashing about, and then talked to her like she was six years old. “What are you fussing about, Mrs. Moore? You’re being a bad girl now, if you manage to tear your sutures I’m going to be very upset with you.”

“What is the matter with her?” Alison asked.

“She just had major surgery, for one.”

“I’m her daughter,” Alison announced. Nurse Patricia glanced up at that one but again didn’t have a comment. “I just flew in, my sister was here with her yesterday during the surgery but she had to go home to be with her kids, so I’m really catching up here. I just I don’t know anything about the surgery or or or—I don’t know really anything.”

“Her doctor will be by in about twenty minutes,” Nurse Patricia told her. The machine breathing into Rose reasserted its mechanical rhythm as the unconscious woman’s distress eased itself. The nurse checked her watch to make sure, then nodded: Twenty minutes, that’s how long it would be before the doctor showed up. “He can fill you in.”

“Can’t you fill me in?”

“He’ll have more facts.” And with that she was gone. Alison assumed that Nurse Patricia had adjusted Rose’s pain meds, and it was that which had calmed her mother down. But she didn’t know for sure.

When the doctor didn’t show up after twenty minutes, and then thirty, Alison called Megan.

“The doctor hasn’t shown up yet,” she told her.

“I think they’re pretty understaffed there.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been here an hour and I haven’t spoken to
anyone
about what happened.”

“I know, it’s frustrating. You should have been there when I brought her in, she was really a mess and no one would even
look
at her for four hours and then they were all like, rush her to surgery, it was so scary.”

“She doesn’t look good, Megan.” This news fell like bricks tumbling out into the universe. The significance and weight of it floated away as soon as the words were uttered.

Megan sighed. “Well, what do the nurses say?”

“They don’t seem to want to tell me anything.”

“Did you ask?”

“I did, but—”

“You have to ask them really nicely. They’re not supposed to tell you things, but if you are super friendly and polite, usually one or two will let you know a few things, they know a lot.”

“Okay, I’ll try, but—”

“They think that because you’re so young and you’re a girl they don’t have to tell you, they actually think that. When Dad gets home, he’ll be in a better position to take care of things,” Megan promised.

“Have you talked to Dad?”

“They told me they were getting a message to him, up at that fishing lodge, but he hasn’t called yet.”

“Megan, I’m here in the ICU and it doesn’t look good. She looks bad. I think people should come.”

“What people?”

“Everybody,” Alison said. “Jeff and Andrew and, everybody. This is serious.”

Megan was an innate skeptic. Plus, she was exhausted.

“But you haven’t talked to the doctor yet.”

“I can’t find the doctor!”

“Just sit tight. Don’t go to the bathroom. If you miss them, it’s hours before they show up again.”

“YOU CAN’T USE YOUR CELL PHONE IN THE ICU!” Nurse Patricia suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the door behind her, and she was finally worked up.

“I got to go,” Alison muttered, and tapped the phone off.

“You cannot make phone calls in here.” Nurse Patricia was staring at her as if she expected Alison to leave. Alison stared back.

“Yeah, okay, I won’t make any phone calls in here,” she said. She held the phone up and then dropped it into her purse. Pissed, Nurse Patricia went back and checked her mother’s vitals. Alison stepped forward, tentative. “How’s she doing?” she asked. “Is the doctor coming?” Now proving a point, Nurse Patricia silently continued her procedures, checked her watch, and left the room.

I wonder why it’s so easy for me to piss people off
, Alison thought. She sat in the chair next to her mom, and reached up and held her hand. Her skin was so fragile, her hand clawed, the knuckles prominent. It was the hand of an old woman.

She had missed seeing her mother growing old. When she started insisting that she couldn’t come to Cincinnati anymore—
I don’t have the money, Mom, I have an audition this weekend, I have to be in LA—
Rose had done her best to fill in the blanks. She called every week, whether or not Alison called her back. She sent birthday presents, packages full of cookies Alison couldn’t eat and old-fashioned photos of all her kids and grandkids, the ones who actually did make it back to Ohio for Christmas. And Alison had just blocked it all out, let the rift establish itself.
Movie stars don’t have families from the Midwest.
For a moment Alison had the urge to climb up in that bed and wrap her arms around her mother’s tortured body, give her a hug, hold her, tell her stories, apologize. But she knew that she’d just wreck everything. Nurse Patricia would come in and yell at her. Megan would hear about it and roll her eyes. Besides which, she probably would just yank out Rose’s IVs and kill her. So that was a bad idea. Better just wait for the doctor.

Who, when he did show up, was not reassuring or even clarifying. Young, bespectacled, and Jewish—he wore a yarmulke—he managed to be both serious and evasive.

“How are we doing in here?” he asked semiconsciously. He was looking at a clipboard in his hand. “How are we doing, Rose?” This a little more loudly, as if the unconscious woman on a respirator in the hospital bed hadn’t immediately answered the first time because she was hard of hearing.

“Well, you tell us,” Alison began. “I’m her daughter, I just flew in this morning. My sister was here with her all day yesterday and a lot of last night.”

“Yeah, we had a little bit of an emergency, didn’t we?”
Why did they all sound like they thought everybody was in kindergarten?

“A little bit, yeah.” Alison offered up a sardonic laugh, trying to put them back on equal footing. The doctor ignored her. There was a black metal box on a pole right by Rose’s head, with lots of blinking lights and numbers, which the doctor seemed to think was a little worrisome. Or maybe that was the look that was always on his face when he was thinking.

“Are you Doctor Wiggans?” she finally asked. He glanced over at this with a distant surprise.

“Oh no, Doctor Wiggans is your mother’s surgeon. I’m Doctor Frankel, I’m the attending,” he said.

“I’m sorry, what does that mean?” Alison asked. “I’m a little confused.”

“These are confusing situations,” Frankel admitted. “Your mother came in yesterday with a blockage in her small intestine, which Doctor Wiggans felt needed to come out immediately.”

“What kind of a blockage?”

“A tumor.”

“What kind of tumor?”

“I don’t have the epidemiology in front of me.”

“Is it cancer?”

“As I said, we don’t have the epidemiology. When Doctor Wiggans makes his rounds, he can fill you in on the status of the cultures.”

“My sister said, when she called me this morning, she said that they told her it
wasn’t
cancer.”

“That is probably true, then. I don’t know why the surgeon would tell her that, without the follow-up from the lab, but doubtless he has other information that I’m sure he’ll be happy to share with you.”

“So how is she doing? How long does she have to stay on this respirator?”

“Well, her system has been through a shock and her blood oxygen levels are not great.”

“They just came in and gave her some painkiller.”

“Yes, that’s here on the chart,” he acknowledged. “We’ll know more in a couple hours.”

“More what?”

“We’ll just have more details.” He looked at her with a sudden, earnest concern, and took a step forward. He paused, as if considering whether or not he should just tell her the truth. “Are you on television?” he finally asked.

“I was—yes,” she admitted, surprised. “Sometimes. Yes.”

“I thought I recognized you,” he said. “My daughter watches your show.”

“I’m not on that anymore,” she told him. It surprised her how embarrassing this felt, and she tumbled on like an idiot. “I still do guest spots on different things and I was in a movie that just came out a little while ago,
Last Stop
, it’s called
Last Stop.
”
It’s not like he’s a casting agent. You don’t have to feed him your résumé
.

The doctor was charmed. He beamed at her with a stupefying appreciation for her achievements. “What’s your name again?”

“Alison Moore.”

“Alison Moore. Alison Moore! She is going to be so excited to hear that I met you. Alison Moore,” he repeated, so as to be sure that he didn’t forget it.

The surgeon, when he finally showed up, was little better. He was tall and slender, a silver fox. He didn’t say much, but he also didn’t mince words.

“Your mother had a blood clot,” he said. “It was lodged in the second quadrant of the small intestine, where it gathered a mass of cells around it. Unfortunately, there was also a series of perforations, she’s probably been suffering from undiagnosed diverticulitis for a number of years, and peritonitis is acute.”

“Diverticulitis?”

“Has she had a colonoscopy, ever?”

“Has my mother ever had a colonoscopy? I have no idea.”

“Well, there’s significant infection. We need to get that under control before we can take her off the respirator.”

“I don’t understand why she hasn’t woken up yet.”

“When patients come out of the anesthesia, they generally try to rip that respirator right off, so we’ve got to keep her sedated for a little while. As soon as her system indicates that it can transition into breathing on its own, we’ll take it off.”

Having spent the last five years in show business, Alison was more or less used to people talking at you without really saying anything. But the things directors and producers and studio execs and agents said were often lies, and these nurses and doctors were clearly not lying. They were obfuscating, but without a purpose that Alison could intuit. She couldn’t even tell, from the things they said, if her mother was all that sick.
She’s on a respirator, and she hasn’t regained consciousness
, her brain reminded her.
She’s sick.

But then why won’t anyone admit that?
The other, more pathetically hopeful side of her brain was clutching at straws.

What do you want them to admit?

Megan said she’s fine.

Megan’s not here.

Nobody’s here—it’s clearly not serious, or wouldn’t they be here?

If it’s not serious, why don’t the doctors tell you that?

If it
is
serious, why don’t they tell me
that
?

This went on for hours. Alison continued to update Megan, and get her own updates—they finally got through to Dad and he would be on a flight from Anchorage tomorrow, it was going to take at least eighteen hours to fly him from his fishing lodge, which was out in the middle of nowhere. Reinforcements were on the way, but Megan herself couldn’t get there before five, maybe not even that soon, she still hadn’t landed a babysitter. Lianne was driving down from Chicago sometime tomorrow. The possibilities of even one other sibling showing up any sooner were dicey; everyone was too far away; there were kids, and planes, and problems. Alison spent a lot of time holding Rose’s hand and whispering nice things,
it’s okay, Mom, Dad’s on his way back, I love you, you’re doing great, the doctors say you’re fine, it was nothing, undiagnosed diverticulitis! You’ll wake up pretty soon.
She kissed her head and stroked her hair. The nurses came and went without report.

At one point, Rose squeezed Alison’s hand. It was not much of a squeeze, but it was real; she didn’t imagine it. She squeezed her mother’s hand back with both of her own, delighted there was finally a sign.

“Hi, Mom. Hey, hey!” she said, cheerful. “I’m here. It’s Alison. Wow, you have so put us through it, hey!” Rose’s eyes were half open, the pupils skittering under delicate lids. Alison felt a rush of adrenaline. Rose was coming back. She reached over and banged the call button for the nurses, which she had finally figured out how to use. “Okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll just get someone in here right now, to take care of you. You’re fine! You’re going to be fine.”

Another ten minutes, but Nurse Patricia did manage to make a pretense that she had hurried over.

“Something going on with our girl?” she inquired.

“She squeezed my hand!” Alison told her. She fucking hated Nurse Patricia by now but she was also desperate to tell anyone good news. “And her eyes are open. She knows I’m here. I think she’s waking up.” Nurse Patricia was predictably unimpressed by this but she went to Rose’s bedside and looked her in the face. “Rose?” she asked, loudly. “Can you see me, Rose? Can you squeeze my hand, Rose?” Having taken Alison’s place at Rose’s bedside, she somehow made the possibility that Rose was actually in there a more distant reality. “Give me a squeeze, Rose,” she ordered. “I really need you to give me a squeeze.”

After a whole thirty seconds of this kind of encouragement Nurse Nightmare stepped back and considered Rose where she lay, the respirator pumping away. “You should ask the doctor when the ischemia set in, and what caused it,” she announced. “It’s usually the sign of something bigger going on.” She started to leave. Alison felt her chest constrict, as if an elephant had decided it was time to finally squash her completely. Nothing in her insanely fucked-up career had ever felt as truthfully bad as what that nurse just said, but at the same time, it felt real, like there were terrible things happening here, but they were
real
terrible things, that she was responsible and she had to do the best she could.

“Please don’t—please, sorry,” she said. “Sorry. We don’t, my father is out of town and I don’t know even, isn’t there someone we can talk to, about what is going on here?”