I tell Valdman I’ll be working remotely for the week. It doesn’t go badly, but it doesn’t go well. He’s annoyed with me, annoyed with how much I’m willing to let my family interfere with making him money. His displeasure is the kind of thing I would have cared about before, but now…
Now, I couldn’t fucking care less.
And then somehow this week is gone, this precious week, one of the two I have with Zenny, and I have nothing to show for it. Not a healthy mom, not a confession of love, not even a boss who likes me as much as he did at the beginning of the week. It’s hard not to feel like something is slipping away from me, time or something as vital as time, and the harder I try to grab onto it, the more elusive it gets. A quick fish in the water, a ribbon in the wind.
At night, my dreams are of empty arms and white flowers propped against fresh dirt.
I will myself to pray again, even if it’s just to scream obscenities at the ceiling, but nothing comes. Even my anger has ribboned away in the wind.
Chapter 25
One week left.
Chapter 26
There are clouds in my mother’s lungs.
Dr. Nguyen and I are bent over his iPad in the hallway, looking at the X-rays, while my father paces behind us.
“This was yesterday,” Dr. Nguyen says. “And this is today.” He swipes on the tablet, bringing up the most recent image, which shows a sprawling fog of white along my mother’s lower left lung. “My best guess is that there was some aspiration into her lungs when we were suctioning her stomach. It’s not an uncommon complication in these scenarios. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing the response I’d like after three days of antibiotics.”
I run my hand over my mouth. Not seeing the response I’d like is a polite way to frame the state of the woman in the room behind us.
“See, I’m looking at this effusion in the lungs and I’m looking at her respiratory rate and the oximetry readings, and I’m thinking that we need to move upstairs.” Dr. Nguyen looks up at me with apology in his eyes. “She needs the ICU.”
My dad makes a noise from behind me, and the Sean Bell who Gets Shit Done, who’s a priest in the Church of Cancer, makes note of it, shelves the noise away as a reminder to touch base with him later. But for now I make myself talk through every step of this with Dr. Nguyen, every option, every variation. Steroids, different antibiotics, CPAP, BiPAP, draining, not draining, pain management—all of the puzzle pieces are laid out and considered. Dad distantly agrees to what the doctor and I decide on, and then Dr. Nguyen goes off to make it happen. Within an hour, Mom will be moved upstairs. I try to remind myself that people move back downstairs from the ICU all the time; this isn’t a one-way street, this isn’t a cascade of dominoes. The dominoes can be picked up again, straightened and reset. It will be fine.
I still call all the other brothers and let them know.
Back in the room, Mom is awake, blue-lipped and ashen. She looks staggeringly unbeautiful like this, frail and strangely flattened, every line and wrinkle in her face thrown into sharp relief. And yet, I can’t remember my chest ever stitching with so much love and pride for her.
She tries to say something to me, and she can’t find the breath to do it. I touch her arm. “It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “You don’t have to say anything right now.”
“Need…to,” she pants.
“Okay,” I say, taking her hand. “What is it?”
“You…” she manages “…look…like shit.”
I burst out laughing and when I also start crying, she doesn’t say anything. Simply gives my hand a weak squeeze.
“We’re going up to the ICU tonight,” I say after I can speak again. I wipe my face with my sleeve. “They need time to try some more antibiotics, and they’re going to give you an oxygen mask to help you breathe while they do that.”
She doesn’t respond for a minute. Then she says, “Will it hurt?”
“They said the mask might be uncomfortable, but otherwise, no.”
She looks like she wants to say something more, but she can’t catch her breath. It’s only as the nurses come in to start readying her bed and IVs for the transfer that she gets it out.
“Go…home…few hours,” she says. “Not going to die tonight.”
I go home.
I shower and I do some laundry and I consider shaving for about three seconds before I decide I don’t have the energy. I’ve gone from “sexy stubble” to actually scruffy over the course of the week, but there just hasn’t been time to do anything more than wash my body and brush my teeth in between the hospital and Zenny and trying to keep a handle on work.
So instead I yank on an old henley and some jeans and crack open my laptop to get some shit done in the quiet of my kitchen before I go back to the hospital. Before I go up to my mom’s new room in the ICU.
Except.
Except now that I’m home and things are quiet, it’s really hard to drown out the lingering hospital feelings. I can hear the beeps and the murmurs, I can see Mom’s face, that uncomfortable combination of sick-sunken and steroid-swollen. I can hear Dad crying softly to himself in the lounge, see the steam curling off the free, oil-black coffee as the respiratory therapist talked us through how the BiPAP would work.
And now that I’m alone, now that I don’t have to be strong for anyone or take notes or take charge or anything else—everything crashes into me like a train from nowhere.
Not going to die tonight.
But she is going to die, isn’t she? Maybe not tonight, maybe not even this time at the hospital, but she’s going to die and I failed her. I threw all my money in all the directions I could, I barely let her out of my sight, I spent every waking minute trying to get her well—and I failed.
The knowledge of it rolls through me, those prairie storms I’m always thinking of, vast and charged and ready to tear through trees and chew through houses.
You failed
You failed
You failed
She’s going to die
She’s going to die she’s going to die she’sgoingtodie—
With a vicious gesture, I slam my laptop closed and grab my keys, trying to escape the clouds roiling black and electric in my mind.
“Sean!” Zenny squeaks as I wrap my arms around her from behind. “You scared me!”
“I’m sorry,” I say, nuzzling her neck. “I couldn’t wait until you were done with your shift. I needed you.”
She’s in the shelter kitchen, finishing up with the dishes. Now that the meal is over and the supply pantry of fresh clothes and toiletries has closed, the shelter is emptied out. Zenny’s told me before that it’s common during the warm nights of summer; people will come in to shower and to eat, but prefer to be on their own afterwards.
“Maybe some of them feel awkward about the charity,” she’d said when she was explaining it to me. “And some of them are suspicious of us, think that we’ll try to preach to them.”
And in a way, I can understand. Sometimes freedom is worth the discomfort.