Stay Awake (21 page)

My mother collapses on the floor of her bedroom. She is perhaps on her way to the bathroom or to let the dogs out. I am sleeping in a motel outside of Provo, headed back to L.A., and she lies there with her face pressed against the carpet, unconscious. The dogs are anxious, pacing from the bedroom to the back door in delicate circles, nosing my mother with their muzzles, whimpering introspectively. They lower themselves down beside her and rest their heads against her side as her breathing slows and she goes into a coma. They lick her salty skin.

She is still alive when her neighbor friend comes by the next morning. The dogs have relieved themselves in the kitchen, unable to control their bladders any longer, and they hide in shame
under the bed as the neighbor friend calls my mother’s name. “Mary Ann! Mary Ann!” the friend, Mrs. Fowler, calls. Even though my mother has been deaf for as long as they’ve known each other, Mrs. Fowler nevertheless continues to speak at her—loudly, steadily determined, oblivious. When she sees my mother on the floor, she screams like a maid in a murder mystery. When I get back to Los Angeles, there is a message waiting for me on my answering machine. “Charles,” Mrs. Fowler will recite in her most declamatory voice. “This Is Mrs. Fowler. Your Mother’s Friend. I Am Sorry To Have To Tell You That She Is In The Hospital, And Very Ill.”

After I’ve listened to the message a few times, I get on the cellphone and call Rain. “Listen,” I say, “it looks like I’m going to have to cancel our date again. You won’t believe this but I have to fly back to Nebraska. My mom’s in the hospital! It must have happened practically the minute I left!”

“Oh, my God,” she says. Her voice is soft with concern, actually very warm and—though we’ve only dated briefly—seemingly full of genuine tenderness. I imagine her touching my hand, stroking my forearm. She has beautiful dark-brown eyes, the ineffable sadness of a girl who drinks too much—I’m drawn to that.

“Actually,” I say, “I think my mom’s going to die. I just have this feeling.”

“Go,” Rain says, firmly. “Just get on that plane and go to her,” Rain says. “Call me when you get there.”

I know that she is going to fall, but I’m not sure how to stop her. I stand there, with my hands clasped awkwardly behind my back as she shimmies unsteadily up the tree toward her cat. “You know,” I say, and clear my throat. “Rain, honey, that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” She pauses for a moment, as if she’s listening to reason; and then, abruptly, she loses her hold on the branch. I watch as her body plunges down like a piece of fruit, not flailing or screaming or even surprised, but simply an expressionless weight coursing to earth. She hits the edge of the deck’s railing, knocking over a plant, and I say: “Oh, my God!” And then she lands on her back. “Oh, my God,” I say again, and finally have the sense to move toward the flower bed where she has come to rest.

“Are you hurt?” I say, leaning over her, and for a moment she doesn’t open her eyes. I take her hand and squeeze it and a tear expels itself from beneath her eyelid and runs down her face.

The wind has been knocked out of her, and at first her voice is hinged and creaky. “I’m so embarrassed,” she whispers, wheezing. “I’m such an idiot.”

“No, no,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

But she begins to cry. “Ow,” she says. “It really hurts!”

I bend down and kiss her on the mouth, comfortingly. “It’s okay,” I murmur, and run my hand over her hair. But she flinches, and her eyes widen.

“What are you doing?” she gasps. “I can’t feel my legs.” And then she begins to cry harder, her mouth contorting with a grimace
of sorrow like a child’s. “Don’t touch me!” She cries. “I can’t feel my legs! I can’t feel my fucking legs!”

Another hour passes. The five children and I sit in the waiting area and watch the television together, and I keep my eye on them. These children seem to know what they’re doing, whereas I have never been in a hospital waiting room before. Rain’s purse sits in my lap and the children laugh politely along with the prerecorded laughter on the soundtrack of a comedy show.

I am not really sure how I am supposed to behave in this situation. I can’t help but think that I should be sitting at Rain’s bedside, pressing her damp hand between my palms. I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators. I sit there for a while longer, imagining this romantic pandemonium, and then finally I go to stand in line at the reception booth again.

When I sit down in the chair opposite the bulletproof glass, Valencia stares at me grimly. “Yes?” she says, as if she has never seen me before.

“Hi,” I say. “I was just checking on the status of Rain Welsh. I’ve been sitting here for a while and I hadn’t heard anything so I thought …”

“And you are …?” Valencia says.

“I’m the boyfriend. I’m the one that called the ambulance. I’ve been sitting right over there waiting because you said …”

But she is already looking away, staring at her computer screen, which faces away from me, typing a little burst of fingernail clicks onto her keyboard. Pausing, pursing her lips. Typing again. Pausing to consider. Typing again.

“She’s in X-Ray right now,” Valencia tells me at last, after several minutes.

“Well,” I say, “do you have any idea how long it’s going to be? I mean, do you have any idea what the situation is? I’ve been sitting here patiently for a long time now, and I’d just like to know …”

“That’s all the information I have, sir,” Valencia murmurs firmly, and gives me a look that says:
Are you going to give me trouble? Because I know how to handle troublemakers
.

“So I guess I’ll just wait,” I say. “I’ll just wait right over here.”

NO SMOKING ON HOSPITAL GROUNDS
, so I head out to the bus stop on the sidewalk just beyond the parking lot and stand there to smoke one of the nasty Mistys that I found in the purse. It has a kind of perfumey, mentholated flavor, like a cough drop dissolved in Earl Grey tea.

I had no idea that Rain smoked, and in some ways this makes me like her more. The fact that she was shy about it, that she wanted to hide it from me. That’s kind of sweet.

I’ve always liked the idea of smoking more than I liked the actual smoke. Watching someone smoke in movies, for example,
is a lot more pleasant than waking up after a pack of cigarettes and coughing up a yellow-green slug of phlegm.

Nevertheless I have a predilection for it. My mother was a fiercely committed smoker, and, growing up, I probably ingested half-a-pack-a-day’s worth of secondhand smoke. I’ve always found cigarettes comforting, a taste of childhood, the way some people feel about Kellogg’s cereal or Jell-O or Vicks VapoRub.

I’m just about finished with my smoke when I look up and see three women coming toward me. The women are being led out of the emergency room in their gowns and slippers, pushing their wheeled IV stands down the sidewalk. The IV stands look like bare silver coat racks; a clear plastic bag full of clear liquid hangs from each one, and a tube runs from each bag to each woman’s arm. They walk along, single file, followed by an orderly who is talking on a cellphone. When they get close to me, they all stop, take out packs of cigarettes, and light up.

It’s pretty surreal, I guess. I didn’t realize that such things were allowed, but apparently they are desperate enough for nicotine that someone (the orderly, smoking himself) has decided to take pity on them. Has sneaked them out the back door for a quick fix.

This isn’t, after all, the fanciest neighborhood in the world, nor the nicest of emergency rooms. The women are all poor to working class, grim-faced, clearly having a bad day, and I can’t help but think of my mother—who wouldn’t go anywhere unless she could smoke. Had, in fact, once left a hospital in outrage because they refused to give her a “smoking room.”

I stand up, gentlemanly, and nod as the women approach.

“Hello, ladies,” I say. “Beautiful evening.”

Having grown up kind of poor to working class myself, I can’t help but feel a kinship with them. “You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,” Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true.

There is, for example, this blond woman who reminds me of my mother’s side of the family—all sharp cheekbones and shoulder blades and sinewy muscle, a body built for hardscrabble living—and I smile companionably at her as she breathes smoke into the night air. She is gazing off toward some cheap apartment buildings in the distance, the vertical rows of identical balconies, and I stare out with her. Together we look up and see the moon.

As expected, she’s dead by the time I get there. By the time my plane touches down she’s being moved from the hospital to the funeral home, and her friend Mrs. Fowler calls me on my cellphone as I’m standing in line at the rental-car place.

“Charles,” Mrs. Fowler says. “Would you go and sit down somewhere for me, honey? Sit down in a comfortable chair.” And then her voice breaks. “I have some terrible news.”

About two hours later, I pull into the driveway of my mother’s house in my rented car and it still hasn’t sunk in.

The death of a parent is one of those momentous occasions, one of the big events of your life, but what do you
do
, exactly? My father died when I was three, so I barely even remember it,
and my ex-wife’s mother passed away during the early, happiest years of our marriage, and I hardly had to do anything at all; I just stood by looking sympathetic and supportive and people would occasionally nod at me or pat me on the shoulder.

So: sinking in. I sit there in my car, idling in the driveway, and I try to remember exactly what went on at the funeral of my late ex-mother-in-law but my mind has gone completely blank. Here is the door of my mom’s house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

I left home when I was eighteen—more than twenty years have passed!—and though I came back dutifully every year the connections that held us together grew more threadbare as time went on.

I can remember being about five or six and running around and around that lilac bush in the front yard, chased by Mother. Laughing, joyous, etc.

I turn off the ignition in the rental car and after a minute I take out my cellphone and call Rain.

I don’t know why. We seem to have connected, she seems like a very bright, sensitive, caring woman.

“This is Rain,” she says. She is in the midst of directing a commercial, a public-service announcement about teen suicide, and her voice has an official snap to it.

“I need some advice,” I say. “I’m not sure what to do.”

“Charlie?” she says, and I love the way that she says my name, a matter-of-fact tenderness.

“My mom’s dead,” I tell her.

A little past midnight, the television has been shut off and the children in the waiting room are huddled together in a row on the chairs, leaned up against one another, smallest to largest, sound asleep.

How long are people expected to wait in these places? No one seems to know the answer, though as time has passed I’ve tried to engage some of my fellow waiters in conversation on the subject.

“I’ve been waiting here for five hours,” I disclose, and people regard me with varying degrees of commiseration. “Does that seem normal?” I ask them. I don’t know why I do this: why, after all these years in Los Angeles, I still have the Nebraska-like urge to banter with strangers.

I seem vaguely familiar to people, which is frequently a kind of advantage, particularly in Los Angeles. They are always asking: Do I know you from somewhere? And I shrug modestly. Probably they have recognized my voice from television commercials, or—especially if they have children—from one of several popular animated series such as
Fuzzy Fieldmouse and Friends
. One of my specialties is the earnest, disarmingly boyish voice. “I don’t know if I can do it,” Fuzzy Fieldmouse often says. “But I know I can try!” Anyone who watches children’s programming on public television has no doubt heard me utter this phrase.

Which is not to say that this gives me any particular leverage in a situation such as this one. It’s not as if I can throw my weight around with Valencia: “Do you realize that I am the voice of Fuzzy Fieldmouse?” doesn’t exactly open too many doors.
Though I have to admit that I am used to being a little better liked than I have been tonight. Valencia glances over at me once, but when I give her a little hopeful wave her face goes still and her gaze sweeps past. When I finally manage to catch her eye, she emanates a serene kind of inhospitality, like Antarctica or deep space.

And so another hour has passed when a man comes out of the
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
area to wake the children.

“Little ones,” the man whispers, and I watch as, head by head, they lift their sleepy faces. “Do you want to go back and see Mommy?” the orderly says. “Your mommy wants to see you guys.”

It’s kind of heartbreaking how delighted the poor kids are, how excited they are to see the mommy.
Yes! Oh, yes!
They beam, and the girl of about four actually does a little hopping bunny dance, and the orderly gives me an indulgent look. “Cute,” he says.

It occurs to me at that moment that no one will stop me if I follow along behind them. I can just walk right through along with them, just shadow them past the
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
sign, past the security guard who stands holding the door open for them, following along as if I might be some kind of guardian, an uncle, perhaps, a neighbor or family friend.

Amazingly, no one says a word. I just line up behind the tiniest child and march right through; the security guard even smiles respectfully at me as if to acknowledge that, hey, I’m a good guy, to be watching over these children. I glance over my shoulder at Valencia, and she’s chatting with someone on the phone; she isn’t even looking.