And then he takes a good look at me, with scruff that’s definitely graduated to a full-on beard and my wrinkled clothes.
“Never mind. I guess you fit.”
I don’t answer him. There’s no point.
“Anyway, you’re fired.” He cheerfully hands me a folder that I don’t bother to open. I know what it will be. The usual HR bullshit. A description of stock options and retirement funds held within the company and how to transfer the accounts.
I stare at him. “Is that all?”
“Well, and Valdman has tapped me to take over the firm when he retires.” Northcutt looks ready to gloat in full, but he pauses and tilts his head at me. “Doesn’t that piss you off?”
I stand up. I’m in a rumpled T-shirt and jeans and he’s in a five-thousand-dollar suit and I don’t even care. “Come here, Northcutt. Let me show you something.” And he follows because he’s a curious douchebag and still wants his chance to lord this new turn over me.
We get to my mom’s room and stop outside the glass, and I don’t say anything at first, I just let him take it in. The seven different monitors, the uncountable tubes and IVs, the mask. The small, sunken body.
“I don’t give a shit about you,” I say very clearly. “Or about Valdman. Or about that job. I worked my ass off to have all that money, and all that money couldn’t do shit when it mattered.”
Uncharacteristically, Northcutt doesn’t answer. He’s looking at my mother with real discomfort.
“Well, they’ll fix her up and everything,” Northcutt says eventually. He seems to be saying it for himself and once he says it, he gives a little relieved breath, like he believes it. “Yes, she’ll be just fine. But you won’t.”
I could tell him he’s an idiot if he thinks my mom is going to be patched up and sent home, good as new. I could tell him every single ugly truth about watching a body fail—watching a body fail as it still holds a person you love beyond measure.
But why? I don’t care enough. I don’t even care enough to hate Northcutt any longer. Let him have his empty life and his empty money, let him sit in Valdman’s chair. It won’t change the fact that one day he’ll be in an ICU bed of his own and there won’t be anyone there to sit next to his bed. There won’t be anyone to swab his mouth when the nurses are too busy or change the channel when it’s an episode of Fixer Upper he’s already seen.
No one will be there to keep watch with him through the night. Which begs the uncomfortable, lonely question: will anyone be there to keep watch with me? When it’s my time?
“Thank you for delivering the news,” I tell Northcutt, taking his shoulders and turning him toward the exit. “You can go back to the office and tell everyone I’ve become a bearded slob.”
Northcutt allows me to move him, push him, and it’s shocking to me that after several years of wanting to beat the shit out of him, my movements aren’t rougher than they are. He moves like butter anyway, like a soft man does, and I do tuck away a bit of smugness at that. If someone tried to literally push me out the door, I’d go Kansas City Irish on him in a heartbeat, I wouldn’t even need the whiskey to get started. But he’s nothing but a smirking pushover and utterly undeserving of all the time I’ve spent hating him.
“You know, this wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be,” he says as I finally let him go.
“Funny,” I say. “Feels plenty satisfying to me.”
I’m lying of course. There’s a quiet, clinical part of my mind that feels relieved: no more dealing with Valdman, no more dealing with that world at all. But I’m still that walking, breathing, bleeding hole—I’m just also a hole that’s unemployed now.
Sisterless, jobless, Zenniless and about to be motherless. Satisfaction is as far away from me as the North Star.
The clouds are back. The clouds are worse.
We stand in the room with the X-rays on an old-fashioned lightbox mounted on a wall. Mom is awake behind us, which I’m painfully aware of as the ICU doctor walks us through the progression of her pneumonia over the last few days. It’s like time-lapsed snowfall, like the spread of fog. But fog and snow are quiet and peaceful…beautiful. This white sprawl on my mother’s lungs is exudative effusion at work—or put simply, Mom’s lungs filling with fluid. It started at the bottom cove of one lung and now both lungs are covered with a smoky and thick white—nearly opaque with fluid and inflammation—with only the top part of one lung still black and clear.
“Her vitals are worrying,” Dr. McNamara says. She shows us charts on her iPad. “You can see here—starting two days ago—oximetry, blood pressure, and body temperature are down. The blood counts and gases show the infection overwhelming her systems. Her hypoxemia—dipping below 90% oxygen saturation—is bad enough now that it’s clear the BiPAP can’t keep up.”
“What does that mean, can’t keep up?” Aiden asks. He has his arm slung around Ryan’s shoulders, who is also being held by my dad. Both Business Brothers and the Baby Bell—I feel Tyler’s absence like a sudden kick to the stomach.
“Well,” the doctor says gently. “It means in normal circumstances, this is the time to move to intubation and a ventilator.”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. Because this is not normal circumstances.
You know how every time you check into a hospital, whether for a broken toe or a heart attack, they ask, “Do you have a living will or advanced directive?” And you think to yourself, I should really make one of those sometime? Well, when you have cancer, they stop asking and flat-out tell you to make one. Mom made hers eight months ago, and I know for a fact it’s on file here at this hospital. I know it’s on Dr. McNamara’s iPad. I know it by heart. It requests for her not to be resuscitated, and it also requests for her not to be intubated. A DNR and a DNI.
Dad and I are the first to meet eyes, and then we look away. Aiden takes a moment, then says, “Wait, that directive thing? No, this is different—that was for cancer, and she has pneumonia.” He looks at us like we’re kindergarten students, like we’re too simple to grasp this. “She didn’t mean for that to count now.”
“If she were ventilated,” I ask the doctor, giving Aiden a look that means we’ll talk in a minute, after we get all the information, “what would happen?”
“You mean, do I think she’d recover?”
“Yes.”
Dr. McNamara looks back at the X-rays, but I know she doesn’t need to look at them again. She’s simply staring at something while she gets her thoughts together. “There’s no way to tell for sure, ever. But I can tell you that her CT scan yesterday showed new tumors around her liver and in her intestines, and only a month ago, there weren’t any there. The odds of her surviving this pneumonia on a ventilator are low…but real. But if she survives, I’m not sure she won’t be needing that NG tube indefinitely, and I’m not sure that she won’t be back in the ICU within a matter of days. Her cancer is moving too fast for the treatments to keep up.”
I squeeze my eyes closed, open them again. None of the Bell men are saying anything, which means it’s up to me, I suppose. “And there’s nothing more we can throw at the pneumonia?”