Olive, Again: A Novel (31 page)

“Dad,” Laurie said. “You won’t believe this. She had one guy that she made roll around in like a hundred squished-up bananas and then—oh God, Dad, she took a
dump
on him!”

Fergus looked at Laurie hard. “And what changed your mind about this filth?”

Laurie said, “Well, Lisa and I had a really long talk and I began to think about it, and I think maybe she’s right, people should be educated, so I came here to watch it with Mom. And Mom said she would give it a try, because, you know, it’s Lisa, it’s her daughter—”

“Where’s Teddy?” Fergus looked around.

“He’s at his father’s. It’s Sunday.”

Fergus had an odd sensation of not fully knowing where he himself was. He said to Lisa, “You took a shit on a man?”

Lisa looked down. “That’s his thing, Dad.”

Fergus walked to the television set, and then he was aware of a different strange feeling, his eyes became blurry very quickly, and without any sense of warning that his body would do this he went crashing to the floor, hitting his head on the corner of his television; briefly he saw stars. When he came to, he heard the loud talking of women, this would be his family, and they were trying to sit him up, and they did, and then he was standing and they were pushing him into the car.

All Fergus wanted to do was curl up, this kept going through his head, just curl up, curl up, curl up, and when they got him to the hospital he did that, he curled up on the floor of the emergency room, and very quickly a nurse came and got him standing again, and then he was on a thin bed and he curled up on the bed. When someone tried to straighten out his legs, he curled them right back up, almost to his chest, and his head was down there too. All he wanted was to stay curled up with his eyes closed.

Eventually he heard someone say “sedative,” and he thought Yes, give me that, and they must have, because he slept deeply, and when he woke he felt frightened and did not know where he was.

“Dad?” It was Lisa, lowering her head, speaking to him quietly. “Oh, Daddy, guess what? You’re okay! Oh God, Daddy, you scared us so much, but you’re okay. They’re going to keep you here tonight, but you’re okay, Daddy.”

She held his hand, and he squeezed it.

Then Laurie was there, and she said, “Oh, Dad, we were so scared,” and he nodded.

Then he was alone, and he fell asleep again. When he woke, he knew right away that he was in the hospital and it was nighttime, a small light was on above his hospital bed. He closed his eyes again.

As he lay there he became aware of someone stroking his arm, very slowly, rhythmically, back and forth went the hand on his arm. He kept his eyes closed so it would continue, and it did. After many minutes went by—who knew how many minutes?—he turned his head and opened his eyes and saw that it was his wife. She stopped when she saw him watching her and put her hand into her lap.

“Ethel,” he said. “What have we done?”

“Done about what?” she asked quietly. “You mean our life, or our children?”

He said, “I don’t know what I mean.” After a moment he said, “You have to tell me about Anita’s kids. Not right now, but someday soon.”

“Oh,” Ethel said. “They’re looney tunes.”

“Not like ours,” he said.

Ethel said, “Not like ours.”

And then he nodded toward his arm, a small nod, but old marrieds that they were she understood. She began to stroke his arm again.

O
live Kitteridge opened her eyes.

She had just been somewhere—it had been absolutely lovely—and now where was she? Someone seemed to be saying her name. Then she heard beeping sounds. “Mrs. Kitteridge? Do you know where you are?” Wherever she had been was very sunny and there was no sun here, just lights on above her. “Mrs. Kitteridge?”

“Huh,” she said. She tried to turn her head, but it wouldn’t turn. A face appeared right near hers. “Hello,” she said. “Who are you? Are you Christopher?”

A man’s voice said, “I’m Dr. Rabolinski. I’m a cardiologist.”

“Is that right,” said Olive, and she moved her eyes to looking back up at the lights.

“Do you know where you are?” the man’s voice said.

Olive closed her eyes.

“Do you know where you are, Mrs. Kitteridge?” The voice was getting annoying. “Mrs. Kitteridge, you’re in the hospital.”

Olive opened her eyes. “Oh,” she said. She considered this. “Well, hell’s bells,” she said. The beeping sound continued. “Phooey to you.”

Now a woman leaned down. “Hello? Mrs. Kitteridge?”

Olive said, “It was awful nice. Just awful nice.”

“What was nice, Mrs. Kitteridge?”

“Wherever I was,” said Olive. “Where was I?”

“You were dead.” This was the man’s voice.

Olive kept looking up at the lights. “Did you say I was dead?” she asked.

“That’s right. You had no pulse.”

Olive considered this. “Petunias,” she said, “are such a nuisance.” She said this because she thought the word “deadhead.” To deadhead petunias was a constant job. “Godfrey,” she said, thinking of lavender petunias. “All the time,” she said.

“All the time, what? Mrs. Kitteridge?” This was the woman, who kept appearing and then disappearing.

“Petunias,” said Olive.

And then the voices lessened, they were chatting among themselves, and the beeping sound continued. “Can’t you get that to stop?” Olive asked the ceiling.

The woman’s face, a plain face, came back into view. “Get what to stop?”

“That beep-beep-beep-beep.” Olive tried to figure out who this woman was; there was something familiar about her.

“That’s the heart monitor, Mrs. Kitteridge. That lets us know your heart is beating.”

“Well, turn it off,” said Olive. “Who gives a damn?”

“We do, Mrs. Kitteridge.”

Olive thought through everything that had happened so far. “Oh,” she said. And then she said, “Oh,
shit
. Honest to Christ,” she said. “For fuck’s sake.” The woman’s face went away. “Yoo-hoo,” said Olive. “Hey, yoo-hoo. Excuse me, I have no idea why I said ‘shit.’ I never say ‘shit.’ I hate the word ‘shit.’ ” No one seemed to hear this, though she could hear voices nearby. “All right,” said Olive, “I’m going back now.” She closed her eyes, but the beeping continued. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said.

The man’s face returned. Olive liked the man better than the woman. He said, “What is the last thing you remember?”

Olive thought about this. “Well,” she said, “I can’t say. What should I say?”

“You’re doing fine,” the man said.

What a nice man. “Thank you,” Olive said. Then she said, “I would like to go back now, please.”

The man said, “I’m afraid you won’t be going home for a while, Mrs. Kitteridge. You’ve had a heart attack. Do you understand?”

When she woke up next, a different man was there; he seemed almost a boy. “Hello,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Jeff,” said the fellow. “I’m a nurse.”

“Hello, Jeff,” said Olive. “Now tell me why I’m here.”

“You had a heart attack.” The fellow shook his head sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

Olive moved her eyes to look around. There were many machines, and many little lights, and still that beeping noise. Then she looked at her arm and saw there were things attached to it. Her throat felt funny, kind of achy. She looked back at the boy. “Uh-oh,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, with a shrug. “I’m so sorry.”

Olive pondered this a while. “Well, it’s not your fault,” she said. The boy had brown eyes, and long eyelashes. A lovely young man.

“Oh, I know,” he said.

“What’s your name again?”

“Jeff.”

“Jeff. Okay, Jeff. How long do you think I’ll be in here?”

“I really don’t know. I don’t even think the doctor knows.” Jeff was sitting in a chair, she realized, that was pulled up right next to the bed she was lying on.

She looked around, without raising her head. “Am I alone?” she asked.

“No. You have two roommates. You’re in the ICU.”

“Oh
hell
.” After a moment Olive said, “Who are the roommates? Are they men?”

“No. Women.”

“Can they hear me?”

Jeff turned his head, as though to look at someone. He turned back and said, “Dunno.”

Olive closed her eyes. “I’m very tired,” she said. She heard the chair being pushed back. Don’t go, she wanted to say, but she was too tired to say it.

When she next woke, her son, Christopher, was sitting by her bed. “Christopher?” she said.

“Mom.” He put his hands in front of his face. “Oh, Mommy,” he said, “you scared me to death.”

This was more confusing to Olive than anything that had happened so far. “Are you real?” she asked.

Her son’s hands came away from his face. “Oh, Mommy, say something else. Oh
please
don’t have lost your mind!”

For a few moments Olive was silent; she had to gather her thoughts. Then she said, “Hello, Chris. I haven’t lost my mind at all. I’ve—apparently—had a heart attack, and you have—apparently—come to see me.” When he didn’t say anything, she demanded, “Well? Did I get it right?”

Her son nodded. “But you scared me, Mom. They said you were swearing. And I thought, Oh God, she was swearing? Then she’s gone absolutely dippy, and I thought, I’d rather she be dead than dippy.”

“I was swearing?” Olive asked. “What kind of swearing?”

“I don’t know, Mom. But they got a kick out of it. When I asked, they just laughed and wouldn’t tell me, just that you were really angry.”

Olive considered this. Her son’s face seemed quite old to her. She said, “Well, never mind. I was someplace gorgeous, Chris, and then they brought me back here and I guess I was mad, I don’t remember, but ask me anything and I’ll show you I’m not dippy. God, I hope to hell I’m not dippy.”

“No, you sound better. You sound like yourself. Mom, they said you were
dead
.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Olive said. “I think that’s awful interesting.”

Dr. Rabolinski held her hand when he spoke to her; she did not remember that he had done that before. But his hand was smooth and yet a man’s hand, and he held her hand in both of his, or sometimes just one of his hands would hold one of hers as he spoke to her. He had glasses that were fairly thick, yet she could see his eyes behind them; dark and penetrating, they looked at her as he spoke, holding her hand. She was a strong woman, he said, and gave her hand a little squeeze. She’d had a stent put into her artery, he said. She had been intubated; Olive did not know what that meant, and she did not ask. He told her again that she had had a heart attack in the driveway of the woman who cut her hair. She had fallen forward onto her car horn, so the woman came right out and called 911 immediately, and this was why Olive was alive, even though she had had no pulse when they came to get her. But they had brought her back to life.

Looking into Dr. Rabolinski’s eyes while he held her hand, Olive said thoughtfully, “Well, I don’t know if that was such a good idea.”

The man sighed. He shook his head slowly. “What can I say,” he said, sadly.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing to say to that.”

She had fallen in love with him.

Olive stayed on in the ICU unit; pneumonia arrived because of the intubation. These were days when she knew very little of what was happening to her, she had the sense that she was a huge chunk of smelly cheese and every so often someone seemed to mop her up, turning her one way, then the other. She drifted in and out of sleep, and then she seemed to not be able to sleep at all. A deep sadness gripped her, and she could only stare at the ceiling, or try to talk to Christopher—who showed up, she thought, quite a lot—sitting by her bed, talking to her, sometimes looking so anxious that she wanted to say, “Please go now,” but she didn’t say it, she was old and tired and her son was there to be with her. It seemed to her to be one of the few times in her life when she didn’t say what she thought. But when he wasn’t there her sadness deepened, and she understood after a while that she was probably not going to die, but that her life would be very different.

She said this quietly to Dr. Rabolinski when he came to see her and sat on the bed and held her hand. “Your life is going to be very much what it used to be,” he said to her. “You just need to recover, and you will.”

“Ay-yuh,” she said, and she pulled her hand away.

But he stayed seated. Oh, what a nice man he was. She flopped her hand back over to where he could hold it again if he wanted to, but he didn’t, and in her foggy state she understood that she had made it impossible for him to do so.

“Hold my hand,” she said. “I like it when you hold my hand.” And so he held her hand again, and told her that she was being given intravenous antibiotics and they were helping and soon she would be out of here.

And then she was out of there, and into a regular hospital room. She stayed in the hospital room for a few days, later she found out it had been seven days, and when she thought of it she thought it had seemed longer than that, and also shorter. In other words, time had become something different. She was moved to a room where her bed looked out a window onto the trees—it was autumn and she watched the maple leaves fall off one by one, sometimes two or three of them would flutter downward—and she liked that. She didn’t like the woman she shared the room with, and she asked that the curtain be drawn between the two beds, and someone did that for her, and Olive said, “Now let it
stay
that way.”

At night it seemed to her she did not sleep and yet she did not seem to care, or perhaps she did sleep; Christopher had brought her little transistor radio to the hospital for her and she clung to it, held it to her cheek, like it was a stuffed animal and she was a child. In the early mornings, she watched it get light through the window and the sky was astonishing as it changed from pale gray to rose to blue; it backlit the treetops and then penetrated them; Olive really felt astonished by this. Beautiful! And then—so early the sun had barely come up—Dr. Rabolinski appeared, saying, “Hello, Olive, how’s my favorite patient today?”

“Oh hell,” she answered, “I want to go home.” Except she didn’t want to, because she was in love with this man. Privately the shame of this seared her. But she could do nothing about it.

When he asked if she had moved her bowels, she almost died. “No,” she said, looking away. When he asked if she had broken wind, she said, “Don’t know.” And he said, Okay, but let him know when this happened. He sat down on the bed and took her hand. He said she was doing very well, that she could go home in a few days.