Around the Bend (9 page)

“She’s on blood thinners, which is what caused her to bleed so heavily this morning when she got that cut. A simple thing like that can turn into something really big, really easily. But the anticoagulants—” at this he drew in a breath, and Mr. Dread tightened his grip again, refusing to let me turn away, to stop listening “—aren’t working as well as we’d hoped, because she didn’t keep up with monitoring her dosage. She should have been having labs drawn every four weeks, but skipped her last appointment.”

“Why would she do that?”

He shrugged. “I think some patients assume if they’re feeling fine, they must be fine. Non-compliance happens more often than we’d like to see, and it can lead to all kinds of trouble down the road.”

“Once she’s on track with that, she’ll be okay, though, right?”

His gaze flickered away one more time, which made me
nervous, as if there was a box that hadn’t been checked on the HIPAA form, but then he nodded, all reassurance one more time. “That’s the plan. We’ll get her blood thickened up again, then let her go home in a couple days, make sure her levels stay consistent. But…” He drew in a breath, and here, I knew, came the left hook, the punch I didn’t want to take. “Eventually, she’s probably going to need a vena cava filter. It prevents the clots from getting to the heart, but it’s a procedure that comes with its own risks.”

“What kind of risks?”

“It can lead to the very kind of thing we’re trying to prevent. Strokes, pulmonary embolisms.” He put up a calming hand, waving those horrors off. “By and large, these go smoothly, but with any surgery of this kind, there’s always a chance of complications. And your mother…well, she’s not interested in taking that chance, not now.”

I sagged against the wall, seeking strength from the gray zigzagged wallpaper. “She never told me any of this.”

He nodded, non-plussed. Apparently, keeping relatives in the dark was par for the course. “She shouldn’t be in a car. And she especially shouldn’t be making a cross-country road trip. She needs to be close to a hospital. Please talk some sense into her, because she’s not listening to me. Believe me, I’ve tried several times. Perhaps there’s someone else at home?”

I shook my head. “No, there’s just me.”

“I wish you well then.” He laid a hand on my arm, offered me a look of sympathy, before walking away.

Chicken. I had to face my mother alone, without even medical back-up. Apparently, Paul Barton, M.D., had already fought that battle and wasn’t going in there again.

The fluorescent light above Ma’s bed cast a grayish tint over her face, deepening the valleys beneath her cheeks, the shadows under her eyes. Every one of her sixty-seven years showed, a harsh reminder of time’s onward, brutal march.

“Hilary,” she said, rousing, her voice still thick with sleep. She turned, a slight smile on her face, then reached for the button on her bed. With a reluctant groan, the electric motor inched her torso upward. In the darkened bed to the right, an elderly woman snored, while a machine hissed, dispensing something in a steady drip.

“Hi, Ma.” I pulled the pink vinyl chair closer to her bed, bent one of my legs beneath me and sat.

“You used to do that all the time when you were little. Never knew how you could stand to sit like that.”

I looked down. “Oh, this. I don’t know. I guess it’s comfortable. Or I’m a glutton for punishment.” I drummed my fingers on the armrests. “Are you sleeping okay?”

Her gaze narrowed. “What did the doctor say to you?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t lie any better at thirty-six than you did at sixteen.”

Putting off the conversation would only delay the battle. I’d read my history. Stalling didn’t tend to work out too well, not for Napoleon, and not for me. “He doesn’t want you traveling. I think he’s right. Why don’t we just turn around and go back home? You’ve waited this long to divvy up grandma’s stuff, what’s a few more—”

“No.”

“Ma—”

“I said no. We’re going and that’s the end of it.”

“This isn’t a trip to church for Easter service, Ma. And
you aren’t Captain Picard. Just because you say it, doesn’t make it so.”

“Captain who?”

“Jesus. Don’t you watch any TV?” My feet plopped to the floor and I spun out of the chair. “I refuse to drive you one more mile when you could have a clot explode in your lungs at any second. I know how to mix a mai tai, find a cab for a guy who’s had a few too many, balance the books for Ernie, but I can’t perform goddamn emergency surgery on the turnpike in the back of a minivan.”

“We’re going.”

“I’m not.”

“Fine. I’ll drive myself.”

I wheeled around. “Are you
suicidal?
Didn’t you hear what he said?”

“I heard every word that Dr. Barton and my doctor said and all the others have said and I am still going.”

I let out a gust, heaved in another breath, prayed for patience that didn’t come. “Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because—”

“Will you two just please shut up? Some people come to a hospital to get rest, ya know,” the old lady in the next bed grumbled. “I can hear you jibber-jabbering away. You should stay, no, no, I wanna go. I say you should both go. I need my damned sleep and all you’re doing is keeping me awake.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lott,” Ma said, “but—”

“No buts. No ifs, ands or otherwise out of either one of you.” She propped herself up one elbow, her hair a cumulous cloud of curls on the left side, a flat pancake of white on the right. “I’m not getting one day younger here and I refuse to
go to my grave with two strangers yammering in my damned ear.” Then she flopped over, grabbed her pillow and jammed it over her head.

“I’ll see if I can get you a private room,” I whispered.

“Mrs. Lott’s okay. And she has every right to expect us to be quiet.”

“I can still hear you,”
Mrs. Lott sing-songed. “My God, you East Coast people must come born with megaphones in your mouths.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lott,” Ma repeated, as calm as a lake, “my daughter is just being stubborn. We’ll try not to bother your sleep anymore.”

“You young people should know better than to disagree with your elders anyway. What’s this world coming to?”

“Forget it, Ma.” I threw up my hands and walked out of the room. I knew my mother when she got like this. The Great Wall of China had better odds of moving.

I leaned against the hard hallway and closed my eyes. Grief settled its weight on me, along with the realization of my mother’s mortality. Rosemary Delaney, the immovable force in the Delaney family, the one who kept the engine rolling, had been running around with a ticking time bomb in her leg, and hadn’t even told me.

But then again, my father had had one in his head—a time bomb of a very different kind—and he hadn’t told a single soul, either. This time, though, I knew and I could stop her. I held the keys—literally.

And yet, she insisted on arguing with me, pushing that envelope. I sighed, and wished for one day of peace, one moment without an argument.

“This is a long way for a man to come just for a Jimi Hendrix keychain.”

I popped forward, opened my eyes and gaped at the last person I expected to see in Indiana. Joy burst in my heart, an explosion so strong, it nearly toppled me. “Nick. What are you doing here?”

He grinned. “Embarking on my new career as a stowaway.”

“Oh, God, I’m so glad.” I stepped forward and into his arms, inhaling the scent of cotton and wood that was uniquely Nick. His arms wrapped around me, with no room to spare, his grasp tight and firm, forming our own little world. The hospital went on around us, nurses bustling down the hall, patients calling for food and bedpans, the murmur of TVs whispering a talk show undertow behind us.

But for me, there was only Nick. The feel of him, the solidity of him. The realness of him. For a long, long time, I simply leaned into his body, inhaled his scent, felt his body beneath mine, the scratch of his stubble against my cheek, the sturdiness of his shoulder under my jaw. When the reality of him became as sure as the tiled floor, I drew back. “Why are you here? How did you find us?”

“Second question first. I talked to Karen, and she told me your mom was in the hospital, and which one she was at. I took the first plane out to Indiana and paid an obscene amount of money to a taxi driver to bring me here.”

“But why?” He’d flown all this way, without saying a word, doing something no man had ever done for me, ever before. I stared at him, dumbfounded.

He smiled the smile that I knew as well as my ABCs, the sum of two and two. “Because I knew you’d need me.”

I buried my face in his shirt again, the worn cotton as soft as down. “Even if I didn’t get you a keychain?”

He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, then let his lips linger there, warm breath in the top of my hair. “Even if.”

I’d always thought hospitals would serve healthy food in their cafeterias. That they’d ban French fries and grease, nix anything with trans fats and high cholesterol. Apparently, even the people who knew better couldn’t resist a culinary waltz with the dark side.

“She’s still determined to go to your uncle’s house?” Nick asked, as he stabbed a pile of lettuce coated with tuna and ranch dressing, then popped it in his mouth. Nick had willpower.

I’d given up on my waistline three states ago. I reached for a French fry, dipped it in a tiny paper cup of ketchup, then realized how much the ketchup resembled blood, which led me to a frightening thought about what I was doing to my arteries, and how it could easily be me in that hospital bed in just a few years. I pushed my tray—which had seemed so appetizing five minutes ago—to the side.

Without a word, Nick halved his salad, dumped the second portion into the clear plastic lid and slid it over to me.

I smiled my gratitude. “I don’t deserve you.”

“No, you don’t,” he said, then grinned. “But I’m no angel, either.”

I waved a spork in his direction, keeping it light, always light. That was me. “You do have your bad habits.”

“And not to mention I come with my own baggage, and an ex-wife in Tulsa. No kids, unless I can convince you to—”

“Can we stick to the subject of my mother? One nightmare at a time, please.”

His lips thinned into a straight line, but he didn’t say anything. He went back to his lettuce and ranch dressing, the air between us a few degrees cooler, the distance a few inches farther. “Are you going to take her to California?”

“Of course not. She could die.”

“I think you should.”

“Are you crazy? Just because she wants to do this doesn’t mean we should.”

“You need to work things out with your mother, Hilary. I learned that with my parents after college.” He shrugged. “I think you should go.”

He made it sound so easy. “What if something happens, Nick?”

“I’ll be there.”

Knowing he would do that—drop everything to ride along from here to the other side of the country—filled me with an overwhelming relief. This man had come halfway across the country and was willing to traverse the rest, just because I needed him.

Why wouldn’t I go the distance with him emotionally? I looked down at his hands, work-toughened, dependable, strong, which lay just inches from mine, and knew why. Because somewhere down the road, those hands would inch away from mine.

I’d become someone else. Someone domesticated, like a lion kept too long in a cage, and so would Nick. We’d end up unhappy, and chained together, all because we’d made things legal.

No, I decided. I liked his hands as they were, and where they lay.

“So, what do you say? You and me, taking your mother to California?” he asked.

“That’s like having Tweedledee and Tweedledum along for medical backup. Neither one of us knows what to do in an emergency.”

“Your mother is not stupid, Hil. I’m sure she’ll take her medicine and listen to her doctors. I found this vein thing on Google and if she does what the doctors say, she’ll be okay.”

“You found my mother’s medical condition on
Google?
”

“Yeah.” His gaze met mine. “That’s what men who love their women do.”

My heart melted, and I wanted to crawl across the table, into his lap, and give in to that feeling for a while. To give in like I had in the hall for that one second, lean into him and let him take care of me.

But doing that would mean believing he would be there tomorrow. Sure, he was here today. And he was saying all the right things and doing all the right things, but in five years or ten, or when the road got a little bumpier, would Nick still stay? Or would the smile in the photo fade and he’d stop taking airplanes to meet me in the middle of the country, stop using Google, stop taking care of the woman he loved, and instead turn away?

Would he start to feel imprisoned by marriage and lock
himself away? Would one or both of us stop laughing, watch our spirits get sucked down a deep, sorrowful drain? I’d watched it happen to my father.

I couldn’t watch it happen to Nick, too.

I wagged a French fry at him, passing it off as a joke, because I had no other way to deal with the seriousness on his face. “You are way too beta for me.”

Nick didn’t laugh—which wasn’t typical Nick. Instead, his lips thinned again, and frustration took over his normally placid features. “Fine. You want me to ride in on a motorcycle with a leather jacket and treat you like crap, I will. Will it make you think I love you because I ignore you or stand you up because my buddies are having a beer, like every other man you’ve dated?” He shook his head. “Is that what real love is to you, Hilary? Or are you finally ready for a grown-up relationship where a man actually cares about what is important to you and maybe, just maybe, once in a great damned while, takes care of you?”

“I don’t need anyone to take care of me.”

“Yeah, because you’re doing such a damned fine job of it yourself.” He rose, making his chair screech in protest against the tile, threw his paper napkin on top of his tuna and stalked out of the cafeteria. The ranch dressing soaked through the napkin, and absorbed it in a spreading circle of destruction.

If there’d ever been a metaphor for my life, it was sitting on the black paper plate before me.

“You got any advice? Because everyone else seems to be hell-bent on telling me what to do.”

Reginald grunted again, burrowed his head into the ground
and rooted around in the grassy field behind the motel. Looking for leftover Halloween candy, the second coming of Jesus, I didn’t know and I didn’t care.

Rather than going back to my mother’s room to face her, Nick and the wrath of Mrs. Lott, I’d returned to the motel to walk Reginald. The pig had practically bowled me over when I’d opened the door, clearly in desperate need for a potty break.

“What do you want to do, Reginald? Go back to Boston, or forge westward?”

He grunted, wiggled his tush, and pawed at the ground. I’m sure in some bygone primitive culture, that would be a communicative sign.

In my culture, it was simply a pig getting ready to let loose another one.

I stepped out of the line of fire and sighed. “I’m not taking her to San Francisco. Uncle Morty’s the one with all the money. He can just load up a U-Haul, drive it on out to Boston, let Ma pick and choose, and then drive himself back with the leftovers.”

Reginald toddled over, his tail wagging back and forth behind him.

“I’m not going.”

Reginald seemed okay with that, and seemed done with his afternoon toilette, so we headed back into the motel room. I took off his leash, refilled his food and water bowls—undoubtedly wreaking havoc with his dining schedule—then lay on the bed for thirty minutes, waiting for an answer.

I already had my answer. But for some reason, I kept stalling on the action-and-exit plan.

I heaved myself off the bed, heading toward the bathroom
to fill one of the hotel’s plastic cups with some tap water, too lazy to go fill the ice bucket. My father stood to the right of the bathroom door, on permanent vacation.

I stopped, drinking in the sight of his blue-green eyes, his windswept dark blond hair, his lean, but over-fifty-and-starting-to-go-soft frame. An ache I hadn’t felt in a long, long time started in the pit of my stomach and grew, building in intensity like fire in a dry woods, gathering steam with every breath, curling around emotions that had lain in wait for a thousand miles.

“Dad,” I whispered.

I wanted him to step out of that cardboard, to pouf into three dimensions, but most of all, to come back to me and sit between my mother and I, to form that cushioned barrier. He’d been the only one who could soothe the waters between us, and ever since this third leg of the triangle had left the family, the rest had collapsed. Neither one of us knew how to hold up just two sides of something that could—and had—only worked with three.

I took a step forward, my grief giving way to anger, disappointment, frustration, the miles, the long day, the shock in the hospital hallway, all of it catching up with me in one big torrent. The cheap plastic cup crushed into a hard tight ball in my fist, then fell to the carpet with an almost imperceptible plop.

“Why did you leave me with her?” I asked. “What were you thinking?”

Dad stared back, a slap-happy grin on his face. That “there’s nothing wrong in my life, all is well, we’re so happy” smile sitting there.

One of the biggest lies in the room.

“You knew,” I said, moving even closer to his picture, to face those pixels, one-on-one. “You knew we didn’t get along. How did you expect us to make it without you?”

No answer, just that same damned smile. I’d thought I’d known that smile.

I ran my fingers along the crease of his grin, tracing the familiar line, wanting it back so bad, the ache nearly tore my heart in two. I closed my eyes, the cardboard cold beneath my fingertips, yet solid and real, and tangible enough that I could just pretend that he was here, and not in a small brass urn atop my grandfather’s casket at Blue Hills Cemetery in Braintree.

In view of the koi pond, but not me. Never me. Had he really seen me, he wouldn’t have left.

“What am I supposed to do, Dad?” I whispered, as lost as when I was four and had wandered off in the JCPenney men’s department, bored because my father took too long to pick out a tie for my grandmother’s funeral. It had taken them an hour to find me, an hour I’d spent huddled inside a rack of suit jackets, tucked inside myself like a ball, scared and sure I’d never see his face again.

And then, he’d been there, parting the sea of navy and gray, reaching long arms in to pull me out, drawing me to his chest, warm and safe and secure. Home again. Always, I’d thought, my father would be there.

Until he wasn’t.

And this time, too, he wasn’t coming, and I had to handle all of this on my own. Without a compass, without a map, without a single damned clue.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked again, my voice a sob now, the tears I’d held back from Nick coming hard,
streaming down my face, but I didn’t feel them, didn’t wipe them away, just let them wash over me. “Dad, tell me. I don’t know. I don’t know
her
.”

He didn’t put out his arms.

He didn’t smile and make it all better with a joke, or an impromptu magic trick.

He did as he’d done for the last seven states. He stood there with that look on his face that said “Come on out in the cold, Hilary, it’ll be fun.”

But it hadn’t been fun at all. And I was still lost, still without any answers. I stumbled back onto the bed, dropped my face into my hands and cried. For what I didn’t have anymore and for what I couldn’t find.

Something nudged my ankle. I turned around, and found Reginald at my feet, his blanket in his mouth, as if he was packing. Ready to go. He oinked.

“But she could
die
,” I said to the pig.

Reginald grunted, waved his snout, the blanket like a toreador’s cape.

“I
can’t
—” The sentence lodged somewhere between my heart and my throat. I turned again to my father’s picture, seeking an answer. And still didn’t find anything but an empty, silent smile.

I was on my own—

Unless I wanted to take the advice of a pig.

Reginald still stood beside me, waiting, four little patient hooves and a pair of beady eyes that seemed far smarter than mine.