The Gift Bag Chronicles (25 page)

“Every kid hates hospitals.”

“But you were really bad. That time you broke your arm and we took you to the emergency room.”

“I remember.”

“Dislocated the bone. The doctor had to knock you out to set it. Used a huge needle.”

“I
remember.”

Jack and I are sitting in the hospital waiting room. Styrofoam coffee, round three. If the Hyannis airport is a trip back in time, the hospital is utterly timeless. Fluorescent light, white linoleum, blond wood furniture with scratchy pink upholstery. That chemical smell in the air and the spongy squeak sound of the nurses’ soft-soled shoes. The poets have it wrong. Death comes on little rubber feet.

Jack’s right. I do hate hospitals. I have always loved airports and flying. The idea of leaving.
Escape
. But hospitals frighten me. Not just needles and pain — what a kid fears. But that dulled sense of extended layovers, of people held against their will, with no idea when or if their flights will depart, their lives begin again.

“More coffee?” I say, eyeing Jack’s cup. My own has been drained, no memory of the taste or even its heat. Now it’s just a worry bead I have picked apart, shredded to a few damp chips clutched in my hand.

“I love your mother, but I don’t have any more stomach lining to give to the cause,” he says, shaking his head and tossing his cup into the trash can. “You should eat something.”

“So should you.”

Neither one of us budges. We’ve been here nearly two hours, gone over what’s being done and why. There’s some discussion of a stent being installed. Or inserted, or whatever it is doctors do with stents and heart patients. But we won’t know for a bit. After more waiting. More tests. So we wait. Jack and I. Amy won’t arrive until tomorrow now. Something with flights and leaving Bevan in Philadelphia with the nanny.

“If you need to call people …” Jack says, nodding at my bag at my feet. “I mean, you do have a job.”

“It’s not important,” I say, leaving the bag untouched.

And then it’s like a scene in
E.R
. As if someone finally called “Action.” The double doors bang open, and the doctor materializes — scrubs, lab coat, closer to my age than Jack’s, which startles me. The fact that doctors can be my age. George Clooney on TV is one thing, a real doctor my age is another.

There is information. I know there is, because I can see him, the doctor, Dr. Pratt by his name tag, talking animatedly to Jack. But for some reason, I can’t hear them. Can’t make it out. Like I’m underwater, or behind glass. Jack turns to me and smiles, mouths something I can’t hear, but he is smiling. Good news. Or at least not bad.

We are moving now, the three of us, down a hall. An elevator. Another hall. Around a corner, past a nurses’ station where a TV flickers.
Oprah
, I think. Finally, a room. Her room. The door is slightly ajar, the lights dim inside. Jack and the doctor push in. I hang back and close my eyes. Even if she is fine, if she is going home tomorrow, she is still here now. And the one thing I do not want to see, more than the illness and the frailty, the hallmarks of the passage of time, is my mother as a stranger, small, humped, unknown to me, in a strange bed.

“Hello, Alex,” she says, her voice faint, her face pale. Pale but smiling. Like a mother greeting her newborn child.

“What are you doing? Mom can’t eat that now.”

I don’t even bother looking up. Two days later, I’m in the kitchen at their condo, making Helen scrambled eggs — what she said she wanted — with Amy second-guessing my every move.

“They’re Egg Beaters,” I say, tilting the pan so the eggs cover the bottom. “Besides, Mom said she had a taste for eggs, and the doctor said the main thing was to get her to eat.”

Amy scowls and moves to the refrigerator, opens it, and emerges with a carton of low-fat cottage cheese. “Well, I’m giving her this as well. She could use the calcium.”

I don’t say anything. We both know Mom hates cottage cheese. Ever since she went on the cottage cheese and grapefruit diet after she had Amy. Lost fifteen pounds and most of her mind. Eventually, she just gave up and started smoking again. “Best weight loss system God ever devised,” she would say, sitting on the patio, her long, slim legs in Bermuda shorts, her perfectly manicured nails, painted coral for the summer, holding a Winston Light, an ashtray, and an iced tea on the white wrought-iron table. Lunch was served. Took a couple surgeon general’s reports, a lot of warnings by her doctor, and a stroke from her closest friend and bridge partner, Bitsy Warner, before she saw the light. To his credit, Jack never said a word. Not until it was too late.

“I should have insisted she quit smoking years ago,” he said in the car after he picked me up at the Hyannis airport, eyes locked on the unfamiliar roads. “None of this would have happened if I had made her quit smoking.”

“Don’t do this to yourself. No one can make Mom do anything,” I said. “You know that more than any of us.”

“Still, I should have tried. Foolish now, looking back. What you put up with. What you choose not to see.”

Amy opens cupboards looking for plates. “I don’t know where anything is in this new place.”

“They’re right there,” I say, nodding at the china cupboard next to the refrigerator. “I thought you came up here with them earlier this summer.”

“I did,” she says, pulling down a salad plate. “But that doesn’t mean I remember where everything goes.”

I pull the pan off the stove and spoon the eggs onto the plate I’ve set up on a tray.

“You’re using a tray?” Amy says, catching sight of the tray I’ve set with silver, linen napkin, and a Waterford glass. “She’ll hate that whole sickbed thing.”

I finish scraping the eggs, dump the pan into the sink, and turn to her. “Can we just stop this? For once, just stop? I don’t even remember why or when this started, but really, just stop. If there ever was a time for us to quit acting like two sulky kids, it’s now.”

She looks at me, startled. Like she’s never seen me before. “I’m just trying to help Mom,” she says, her voice small.

“Well, so am I,” I say, holding her gaze and then turning to the tray. “So let’s take the fucking cottage cheese and go help her.”

Oh, but we are sunny pushing into Mom’s bedroom. “Hey,” we both say, ducking in, laden with our offerings, heads bowed, voices hushed like we are entering a chapel.

“Oh, there you are,” Helen says, pushing herself up in bed.

Jack, who’s been reading
The Wall Street Journal
in the chair, puts it aside and steps toward us. “Can I give you girls a hand?” he says, reaching for the tray.

“Hope you still have that craving for eggs,” I say.

“Egg
Beaters
,” Amy says behind me.

“Right,” I say, shooting her a look. “By decree of the surgeon
general and Dr. Pratt, when we say ‘eggs’ we now mean ‘Egg Beaters.’”

“Doesn’t matter,” Helen says, reaching for the tray. “It’s just nice to have someone else doing the cooking. And not to be eating hospital food.”

She picks up the fork, gazes at the plate and then up at the three of us, circled around the bed. “You have seen me eat before,” she says wryly. “Unless I’m mistaken.”

We all sink down, finding something, anything to do except stare at the patient. Someone should do a study on the personality changes that happen when people get sick. Astonishing, all the differing emotional responses to illness. For as long as I’ve known her, Helen has been compulsive. A perfectionist. Ordered down to the last pillow fluffed on the sofa, the Christmas cards in the mail the day after Thanksgiving. Never weighed more than five pounds above her high school weight except when she was pregnant. Gave up anything — knitting, tennis, serious cooking — she couldn’t do better than 90 percent of the people she knew. Compared to her, I am walking chaos. Now, faced with the gravest of fallibilities, stunningly, she loosens rather than tightens her grip.

“Oh, and the cottage cheese is Amy’s Proustian offering,” I say, looking up from my perch on the edge of the bed, pretending to read Jack’s paper.

It’s been so long since I’ve heard Helen laugh, the sound takes me by surprise. Amy and I shoot each other looks, like dogs startled by a strange noise.

“Serves me right,” Helen says, eyeing the plate. “Who knows, maybe I’ll develop a taste for it again.”

“So wait, Helen has a heart attack —”

“A mild heart attack, but yes, a heart attack.”

“And the ice queen thaws?”

“Let’s not make jokes about my mother, who’s just had a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just so used to hearing the horror stories,” Steven says.

“Yeah, I know, it takes some getting used to,” I say, turning on my side to look out the window at the trees, the leaves starting to turn. I’m in the guest bedroom, lying on one of the twin beds talking to Steven on my cell. I’ve been here a week and have talked to him just once a day, which is some kind of record for us. Still, it’s more than I’ve talked to Charles. Which is my fault. My elusiveness here in the sick ward. Or maybe it’s not my fault. Maybe I’m finally seeing things clearly. For so long, I thought if Charles and I got closer,
physically
closer, things would become obvious. We’d see how our lives would finally mesh together. As a real couple. But that’s the thing about crises. They throw everything into high relief. Like a blinding light that picks out the hidden cracks, fissures you never see in the normal light of day.

Or maybe it is just me. Ever since I got here, I’ve been so preoccupied with Helen — getting her home from the hospital, helping Jack run the house — that it’s been hard to think of checking in somewhere else. This is where I am. When I reached Charles that first night, after Jack and I had spent nearly the whole day at the hospital, I was so exhausted, so worn out from the flights, from the time change, from the not knowing if she was going to live or die and then the relief of knowing, yes, she would live, that it was all I could do to just burst into tears, croak out a few words.

“Do you need me to come up?” he’d said, sounding like he was offering me a towel after I spilled something.

Yes
, I wanted to scream,
yes, I fucking well want you to come up!
If I’ve
ever
wanted you to be here, with me, really be
with
me, and not have one eye on your BlackBerry and one ear on your cell phone, it’s now. And I don’t want to have to ask you for that. Not
after three years together. I want you to just know that this is where you should be. With me. But apparently I do. Have to ask.

“No, oh God, no,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I mean, yes, I do want you here. For moral support and, and all of it. But you only just met Helen, and I think it’s better, for now at least, less stressful for everyone, that it’s just me and Jack and Amy. Maybe later. If I’m here for a while. And you can get away.”

Sure, he said, he understood. And who wouldn’t? It’s a family crisis, and whatever Charles and I have been for the past three years, it’s not a family. It’s not. And I know that. And I also know that that is what I want. I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t want a relationship. I want us to be a family. Where you don’t have to ask. It doesn’t have to mean a million kids, and a mortgage, and in-laws every holiday. It doesn’t even have to mean a marriage. Even if it’s just a man, an apartment, a cat, and a fire in the fireplace, it’s still a family.

I roll back on the bed. “So Mom’s actually doing really well,” I say to Steven. “Once the surgery’s healed, it’s really diet and a couple of cholesterol medications. But it is amazing. Even Amy and I are getting along. Well, sort of. I’m telling you, it’s a Ph.D. thesis. How people change in the face of a life-threatening illness.”

“A thesis? It’s a reality show. ‘Real Families. Real Health Scares. Real
Changes.’
Fox, Mondays at ten.”

“That’s a nine o’clock show if there ever was one,” I say. “So what do I need to know? Caitlin doesn’t tell me anything.”

“That’s because she doesn’t know anything, except when the Fred Segal sale is. Or was.”

It takes me a second for this to sink in. I’ve been gone only a week, but the office seems distant, remote. “Okay, so you get to bring me up to date. Kia went well? I’m sorry I had to miss that.”