Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (25 page)

She gazes around the room with big, searching eyes.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” I ask.

She looks directly into my eyes.

“Later, Lucia. Not now.” She sounds only annoyed.

Oh, God
. I have asked my mother for her last words and she has brushed me away. In these final moments at Tenacre, while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, the fear that I am watching my mother die before my eyes, leave me forever, is eclipsed by another fear: that her final, enduring thought of me will be
Shame on you
.

We arrive at
the hospital ahead of the ambulance and wait in the admitting area of the emergency room. My father sits alone and stares at the gray linoleum floor. Olivia wanders from one corner to another. Sherm and I just stand. Isn’t an ambulance supposed to beat the traffic? What could be delaying it? If the worst has happened, will they still bring Mom here?

John Florence arrives shortly after we do. He is our family’s stockbroker, someone my father considers a friend, probably the only friend he has nearby who is not a Christian Scientist. He has been summoned today not for financial advice but because Dad vaguely remembers him mentioning once his involvement with the hospital’s capital campaign. An ex-Marine and former college football
player, Mr. Florence greets each of us warmly. His hug feels accepting and protective, but I wonder what is going through his head. Has he ever sensed, from his frequent conversations with my father over the months, that something’s not right at the Ewings’?

We hear the wail of an ambulance siren. Suddenly, there is a great deal of commotion as a pair of emergency medical technicians hastily pushes a gurney past us, disappearing through swinging double doors and behind a partitioning screen. Dad, Olivia, Sherm, and I quickly follow them. Is it Mom? I’m not certain. People are moving back and forth behind the curtain.

“I need to speak with a member of Joanne Ewing’s family. I need a medical history,” a nurse says urgently, sticking her head out around the curtain.

My father is totally bewildered. He approaches the curtained area cautiously and turns around, beckoning with his eyes for one of us to accompany him, which I do. There, on the other side of the curtain, my mother lies on an examining table. She is surrounded by a platoon of doctors, nurses, and young interns. There’s not enough room for everyone.

“Full name?”

“Joanne Johnson Ewing,” I say.

“Age?”

“Fifty.”

“Address?”

“Box 431, Hopewell, New Jersey.”

“Occupation?”

“Housewife.”

“Spouse’s occupation?”

“Christian Science practitioner.”

It seems to take forever for the nurse to write down the three words. I wonder if those words remind this nurse of others who may have made the eight-minute trip from Tenacre to the hospital and arrived like … this.

“Medical insurance?” The nurse looks up.

I shake my head no.

“Doctor’s name?”

I shake my head again.

“The last time she was seen by a doctor,” I tell the nurse, “was when my brother was born, twenty-two years ago. We were all C-sections.”

“She had her appendix out as a child,” my father offers feebly.

“What have her symptoms been?” the nurse asks.

Silence. My father shakes his head almost imperceptibly, as though trying to make sense of a foreign language. I watch him struggle to answer the barrage of questions and wonder what he is feeling.

Does he feel responsible for the condition my mother is now in?

Because I do.

“When was the last time she ate?”

I turn to my father.

“She’s been eating regularly,” he says, “until yesterday. She hasn’t had much of an appetite. But she’s been drinking milk shakes.”

Not exactly milk shakes, I think, nutritional supplements. But I don’t correct him.

“Has she been in a lot of pain?” the nurse continues.

“I don’t know if you’d call it pain, really,” my father says, his eyes wincing. “She’s experienced some … discomfort.”

Discomfort!
I cringe when I think of how many times I have heard this euphemism over the last seven months.

“Is there blood in her stool?”

“I wouldn’t know,” my father says.

I look into my father’s eyes. I want to know if this is true. I know it is possible, in theory, for Mom to have blood in her stool and him not to know, but it seems likelier that he would know, does know, did know.

“Has she passed any blood going to the bathroom?” the nurse tries again.

“I don’t know”—my father sighs—“maybe.”

Maybe?
I am seething.

“How long has she been in this condition?” the nurse asks.

I wonder myself. And I wonder how my father will answer. There must have been early symptoms. She must have been sick since well before last Thanksgiving.

“Well,” my father says, “quite a while now.”

“How long is a while?” a doctor presses, barely masking his impatience. I realize the rest of the medical team is looking at me. I wonder if it’s because they want an interpreter, or because they think I have the answers.

More silence. It is as though my father cannot process the question.

“How long has she been sick?” the doctor continues. “When did she first show signs of illness?”

My father breathes in deeply.

“It started sometime last year. But she was getting better this spring. She was really beginning to show improvement. She would sit in the garden. Or in the screened porch …”

“Dad,” I say firmly, “she wasn’t getting better. She was just
home
. She was never getting better.”

“That’s just not true!”
my father shouts. His fists clench, and then he lowers his voice. “She
was
getting better.”

The medical team looks startled by our angry exchange.

My father’s eyes meet mine and stay there.

Suddenly, his eyes fill with tears, which he wipes away with his shirtsleeve. He looks completely defeated. He turns toward Mom, and immediately I picture the Steuben bud vase that stood on her bedside table in the room at Tenacre, those single roses that my father always brought her. Never once did I see a rose in it that had even begun to wilt. It is an image I cling to.

“She went to Tenacre the day after the space shuttle blew up,” I say, turning to the doctors and nurses. “She’s been there ever since. Except for two weeks earlier this summer.”

I look down at my mother, who is more alert than she was an hour ago at Tenacre. There, while we waited for the ambulance, she lay in her bed in a fetal position, shivering beneath several blankets,
her eyes rolling back in their sockets. Here, she lies nearly motionless on the examining table, as her eyes search those of the doctors. She looks like a terrified child, small and vulnerable, hesitating slightly before handing the nurse her wrist to take her pulse.

I hold my mother’s hand and try to comfort her. “They’re going to help you, Mom. I’ll be right here.”

It feels odd—unfamiliar, good, unsettling—to be saying these reassuring words. I feel like an actor on a movie set, reciting memorized lines, and I wonder if I believe them. Will my words be true? Yes, I will be right here. But can the doctors help her?

A nurse pulls back the white sheet to expose everything that has been happening to my mother’s body over the last several months; everything I have not insisted on seeing; everything the practitioner, the “nurses,” my father, and my mother have kept denying. I am startled by the small voice that creeps into my own head.

There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter …

For months I have watched my mother’s face and arms wither to little more than skin-covered bones. At Tenacre, she was always covered up to her neck with sheets and blankets. Now, I see her nearly naked body on the table. I am shocked. Her legs are swollen to three times their normal size. Her feet look like water balloons ready to burst, her toes like fat dumplings, clammy white. How did everyone at Tenacre witness this for months and continue to claim that she was getting better?

How did I witness her deterioration for months and do nothing? Even when I knew she wasn’t getting better?

I know the doctors and nurses are asking themselves the same questions.

Dr. Sierocki will
be Mom’s doctor. He greets us, “Joanne’s family,” in an adjoining conference room. His eye contact with each of us moves in advance of his handshake, and I feel like we are being
surveyed. Like a prisoner who has just seen daylight for the first time in months, I feel overexposed. We are an odd bunch. I glance at my father. He could still pass for a Princeton professor, every bit the WASP in his scuffed Gucci loafers and golf shirt, but he is weary, his posture bowed. Olivia is wearing a beaded cotton dress, her long dark hair falling forward like blinders. Sherm is unshaven, in a T-shirt and faded jeans, but he has incongruously thrown on a blue blazer. I’m in a white linen jacket, a white tank top, and black linen pants; I could pass for a caterer.

The doctor sits before us with his arms folded. Sometimes he calls his new patient Mrs. Ewing, other times Mother, or, glancing down at his notes, he pauses (is he looking for her name?) and calls her Joanne.

He peers over his reading glasses at us. “Mother’s hemoglobin count is very low. She arrived in a premorbid state. Let me give you some figures: twelve is a normal hemoglobin count,” he says, again looking down at his clipboard. “Joanne’s is hovering around three.”

Premorbid
. My body sinks into itself.

“She needs a blood transfusion. And we’ve put her on hyperalimentation,” he says, clicking his ballpoint pen, “which is essentially megadoses of calories. Mother is in a state of advanced malnutrition.”

Dr. Sierocki looks up again, but I can’t face him. I look at my fingers instead. My hands are folded, as if in prayer, and I am digging into the quick of my fingernails again.

“We’d like to get her strength back. As you know”—the doctor looks at Dad, then me—“we inserted a main-line catheter into her chest cavity. This will aid in administering the intravenous feeding, the medications, and the transfusions.”

The doctor has a clipped, precisely articulated voice; he speaks as though he is dictating to a secretary. He stops talking, and we sit in silence for a moment.

“Do you know what the nature of the underlying illness is?” I
ask awkwardly. Giving voice to this question that has haunted me for so long makes my voice quiver.

“It’s too early to say. Mother is very, very sick. Until she stabilizes, we will not be able to proceed with diagnostic tests. It appears she has some sort of blockage or tumor in the abdominal region, but until we can do a biopsy, we won’t know if it’s malignant.”

Tumor. Blockage. Biopsy. Malignant
.

Again, I hear an unwelcome voice.

Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual
.

It shocks me that these words are still with me. I thought I had exorcised them years ago.

“The whole region of her lower abdomen is infected,” the doctor continues. “We’ve started her on antibiotics. But there is also a sizable fistula …”

He takes a deep breath and looks down at his notes again. “Until we can do something about that …”

His voice trails off momentarily. He hesitates. It seems he is unclear whether to proceed or stop.

He unfolds his hands and stands up.

Then he adds, “It’s quite possible she won’t make it through the night.”

We sit nervously
in the Intensive Care Unit family lounge, waiting for Mom to be brought up from the ER. There is some debate over who should be contacted, and who will make those phone calls. We decide that Olivia will call Aunt Mary, and I will call Uncle Jack. Aunt Kay is somewhere in Wyoming on vacation; we will have to find her, probably through Aunt Mary. Sherm will call the house in Hopewell and tell Aunt Nan and Aunt Lucia. We—Olivia, Sherm, and I—want to call Ham too—he has been living somewhere in Paris—but when we mention this to Dad, he is adamant and becomes visibly distressed.

“We’re
not
calling Ham,” he says through clenched teeth and gets up from the table. We drop it.

To have gone from being bound in silence to making phone calls feels revolutionary, historic, as though Olivia, Sherman, and I have staged a coup, although we know we have done no such thing, any more than the crew of a ship can take credit for the shifting wind. Dad stands alone in the middle of the lounge, dazed, hands in his pockets, staring vacantly at a television suspended from the ceiling. He can’t possibly know he is tuned in to the ABC afternoon lineup:
All My Children, One Life to Live, General Hospital
.

I press my forehead against the cool aluminum interior of the telephone booth in the opposite corner of the lounge and wait for the pounding in my chest to quiet. When it doesn’t, I dial Uncle Jack’s work number anyway. Suddenly, I’m at a party at Aunt Mary’s house a few years back, where I encounter my uncle standing in a hallway. Cocktail in hand, he wraps his right arm over my shoulder, leaning toward me to bestow some avuncular advice. (He is, after all, my godfather.) At six foot seven, he towers over me. It feels like he is leaning on me and I may fail as a prop. The drink, gimbaled in his hand, hovers over my velvet dress sleeve and threatens to spill.

“Lucia,” he says, with his raspy voice, which always sounds like he has a secret to share, “do you know the key to a woman’s success?” He pivots so that we face each other, his arm-drape transformed into a loose half-embrace. His eyes are ice blue, and his complexion is tanned. I have a horrible feeling that he is going to try to sell me a pair of breast implants.