by Gerri Brightwell
As her Uber turns toward the bridge, Elise catches sight of the hospital. The walls with their too-few windows. That closed-in look. St Joseph’s—even the name brings back the odor of antiseptic, the glassy smell of floor polish, an uncertain dread. She shuts her eyes and tries to focus on the soft leather of her bag beneath her hands, how warm it is, how almost velvety.
It doesn’t work; of course it doesn’t. Closing her eyes just makes her self-conscious, and when she opens them again, there’s the driver watching her in the mirror. She looks away before he talks to her. These drivers, they want you to have an amazing experience and give them a stellar rating when all they’re doing is driving you from the airport into town, and the whole of it—the driver’s weary face, his aging Honda with its cheap seat covers and the chewy smell of new floormats—makes her press her tongue hard against her teeth.
It’s close to eight in the morning, and the light’s being crushed out by clouds sagging under their weight of snow. A few flakes skitter over the windshield, tangled in the wash of cars and buses rushing over the bridge as commuters head to work; yet here she is, being driven relentlessly toward St Joe’s because her old mom’s in the ICU. She’s going to be unbearable, Elise thinks, Vindicated, because at last she’s truly, seriously ill after decades of taking to her bed when there wasn’t a single goddamn thing wrong with her. Who leaves their husband to look after the children when he’s home from work? Who makes the older sister look after the younger one when he isn’t?
That older sister, Mindy—there’ll be her to deal with, too, when Elise feels worn out from traveling all night. She thinks she should have taken a sleeping pill on the plane, should at least have bought a coffee at the airport.
Down on the river, a barge is slowly skewing toward the bend. The sight of it’s soothing after the rush of the last twenty-four hours: Mindy’s phone call, Elise’s emails to colleagues to cover her classes, rushing a peer review of an article in the departure lounge because the damn thing was due today. And yet, on the water, the barge is slipping along as though there’s no reason to hurry, no reason at all, and Elise cranes her neck to watch until it’s lost from sight.
At the end of the bridge, St Joe’s looms over the road. Already, the indicator’s tiredly counting out each second, then the driver brakes for the main entrance. Words push up Elise’s throat: that she needs to go back to the airport, that something’s come up. Instead, she loops her bag straps over her shoulder. In a few moments, she’ll be striding away into whatever comes next because that’s what life’s about: following through, even when you have to steel yourself to do it. The words ring through her head as if she’s proclaiming them to someone—to Mindy, she thinks, and she pushes the thought away.
As soon as she gets out of the car, the cold wind’s everywhere, and she knots her scarf more tightly. The driver’s hauling her roller bag out of the trunk, telescoping the handle for her, then he leans close to say something. She says, “Excuse me?”
“I hope you had a pleasant ride.” His tongue catches the R, trilling it.
“It was fine.”
“Then if you wouldn’t mind, on the app—”
“You’ve just dropped me at the hospital. Do you think I have time?”
His mouth pinches up, and yet he tells her, “Then the best of luck to you, madam.”
She strides away with her roller bag rumbling along behind her, and she’s thinking, What the hell does luck have to do with it?
The wind is merciless. In the few seconds it takes to get to the entrance, it has sliced through her jacket, sent her scarf flailing, and filled her ears, her nose, her mouth with a pitiless cold that lingers even when the automatic doors have closed her into the stillness of the lobby. In here, there’s some prickling chemical odor mixed with the smell of floor polish, just the way she remembered. Otherwise, though, the lobby is unrecognizable, as if the place is trying to pass itself off as a hotel: Armchairs and TVs, leafy ferns in pots, gleaming bronze doors for the elevators. She catches sight of herself in one and reties her scarf, smooths her hair with her fingers. Not bad for forty-two, she thinks. The sort of mantra you need when you spend your days teaching kids in their twenties.
Then, Elise lifts her chin and lets her shoulders sink down and back, feeling the poise that comes from wearing snug black slacks and two-inch boot heels. This is her professional self, the self who won’t stand for nonsense from students or colleagues. Or from her family, she thinks. When she finds Mindy, which she surely will when she gets to the ICU, she won’t start in with Mindy not picking her up at the airport—no, her professional self knows there’s a chance (a slim one, granted) that there’s a reasonable explanation. Perhaps Mom suddenly deteriorated while she was on the plane. She fumbles her phone from her bag. No message, no missed call. Surely, even a flake like Mindy would have tried to get hold of her.
Elise heaves in a breath, pushes it out. How tight her chest feels. She’s tired, she’s stressed, but this is not the moment for an asthma attack. She digs in her shoulder bag for her inhaler and takes a hit that she holds for as long as she can. She tries to picture the world around her as soft and safe, but her mind resists. Her mom suddenly is in the ICU with a brain tumor, and Mindy insists she come right now because this is it, Mom’s dying. When she lets out her breath, she tries not to hear the slight wheeze as the air leaves her lungs. It’s going to be a few minutes until the inhaler works. She has to stay calm and breathe, just breathe.
The elevator doors slide open, and a porter standing behind an empty gurney nods her in. She nods back and hauls her roller bag with her, punches the button for the fourth floor. Her gaze flinches away from the gurney. Her ex was a gastroenterologist who loved sharing work details over dinner or after they’d made love. How hospitals transport the dead in double-decker gurneys, the body hidden below and an empty bed up top. How doctors fuck up on a regular basis, and people die with the family none the wiser. How it feels to hold a beating human heart cupped in your hands.
The irony: her, a woman who became anxious in hospitals, who disliked even their smell because as a teen she’d spent six weeks in St Joe’s, had ended up with a doctor. But it had all been so captivating—that’s the word that comes to mind. She was captivated by him and his world: How the body is essentially a tube for processing nutrients. How it’s possible to diagnose someone by the yellow tinge of their eyes or the fruity smell of their breath. How pharmaceutical companies get doctors to prescribe their over-priced medications by sending them on junkets to Hawai’i or Mexico. Being with him was like having someone translate the world so it made a new and brutal sense.
It took her five years to wise-up. He never wanted to hear about her doctoral thesis, wasn’t interested in Victorian literature or the faculty positions she wanted to apply for. All that held their relationship together was her interest in everything he did and everything he said, until she decided that she just wasn’t interested anymore and took a job hundreds of miles away. No more listening to him talk about the terrible ways a body could go wrong, or impatiently explaining that, if her asthma was triggered by stress, she should simply avoid stressful situations. The day she moved into her own apartment, she threw open the windows, never mind that the air con was on. She had boxes to unpack and furniture to assemble, but she stood at the window and gulped in air that was peppery with heat. From nine stories up, the world looked full of hope—city streets dazzling in the sunlight, hills in the distance softened by haze, the shocking blue of the sky.
As the elevator slows for the fourth floor, she wonders, what good had everything she’d learned from her ex done her? No good at all, she decides, because now she can’t help wondering if Mom’s doctor just scraped through med school, if he’s the one that other doctors wouldn’t let near their relatives if they were dying.
*
It turns out that the ICU has visiting hours, and four minutes after eight is fifty-six minutes too early. Just outside the doors, a nurse explains this to Elise.
“But can you at least tell me how my mother’s doing? I’ve come all this way—”
The nurse juts her chin toward the information board on the wall. “You need to call the nurses station. The number’s right there.”
“Is my sister with her?”
“If it’s not visiting hours, there aren’t any visitors with her.” The nurse slaps out each word then takes off through the doors, pushing them hard and letting them thud shut behind her.
Elise’s throat tightens with hatred for that woman in her soft-soled shoes and her scrubs, for Mindy too because, of course, Mindy’s not here. She pulls out her phone for all the good it will do. All she gets is the same error message, so she hangs up and dials Mindy’s landline again—who the hell still has a landline?—and leaves another message: “I’m at the ICU, and you aren’t anywhere in sight. Please call me back so I know whether to wait around or if that’d be a waste of my time, too.”
That too. She tells herself Mindy deserves it. Why ask for the flight information if you’re not going to show up? Why say she has to fly home, right now, then leave her hanging? Elise’s fingers ache from gripping the phone too hard. She’d known Mindy wouldn’t be there, hadn’t she? That’s Mindy—reliably unreliable.
Don’t let her make you mad, she tells herself, do something, and she does. She calls the nurses station. She keeps her voice even and professional, and when she’s told that they can only give out patient information to immediate family members, and that, no, she’s not listed as an immediate family member, she gives a curt, “I see,” and hangs up.
She stands there, phone in one hand and the other holding the telescoped handle of her roller bag. Her heart’s juddering against her ribs—the asthma medication kicking in—and when she breathes, the tightness has gone. She wheels around, heels snapping against the floor and her roller bag gliding along behind her. She leaves another message on Mindy’s answering machine: “The nurses can’t tell me how Mom’s doing because you haven’t given my name as a family member.” She presses the elevator call button. “I’m going to look for somewhere quiet with halfway decent food and get on with some work. If I don’t hear from you in the next hour—” I’m going to fly back. That’s what she wants to say. “—I’ll meet you back here for visiting hours.”
*
The map on Elise’s phone shows a Thai place that does breakfast a couple of blocks away. The sky has darkened, and a thick, clinging snow has started up. The wind drives it into her face, and it sticks to her lashes and makes her eyes water. Somewhere in her roller bag, she has gloves and a hat. She hadn’t imagined needing them before she had the chance to unpack, so she slogs along, one hand holding her woolen scarf wrapped over her head, the other pulling her bag.
Thankfully, the restaurant is luxuriously warm and smells of spices and fresh coffee. Elise stows her roller bag under a table, then heads for the bathroom where she holds her freezing hands under hot water and stares at herself in the mirror. Mascara smudged beneath one eye. Her skin wan beneath her tan. Her hair a tangled mess. She takes a comb from her shoulder bag and a tissue that she dampens under the tap. Barely an hour back in this city, and already, she’s unraveling. Whose fault is that but Mindy’s?
There’s a glass of water and a menu waiting for her when she sits at her table. After being up all night, it doesn’t feel like breakfast time. It doesn’t feel like any particular time, so she orders chicken fried rice and coffee. She drinks the coffee fast and sets out her cup for a refill. Perhaps more caffeine isn’t such a good idea when her heart’s jumping in her chest from the asthma medication, but she drinks it anyway, then takes her laptop from her shoulder bag. There’s a conference deadline looming, and her proposal needs to be trimmed-down. The coffee has washed away the grittiness of exhaustion and sent a fragile energy coursing through her. Now, she launches into reconfiguring sentences and slicing out words, neatly tucking into one compact paragraph her thesis about perfectly healthy women in Victorian novels taking to their beds as a means of exerting control. It’s not until she reads the whole thing through that guilt prickles at her. Two blocks away, Mom is in the ICU, dying, and this is what she’s working on?
A server has just slipped a plate of fried rice onto the table when the door opens, and a large woman in a puffy blue coat walks in. Before she’s lowered her hood, Elise has recognized her, and all the pleasure of sitting here with her work and her food drains away. Mindy. Her hair’s streaked gray and messily pulled back in a ponytail that leaves the broad expanse of her face naked, and her cheeks are flushed and damp. She peers around before bustling over. “I’ve been looking for you, Elly-babe! For crying out loud, what are you doing here?” Elly-babe—like they’re still kids.
Elise sits a little straighter. “If your cell phone was working, you could have just called me.”
Mindy waves that away. “It’s on the fritz. Anyway, it’s all good because I’ve tracked you down, haven’t I?” She gives a small smile. “I knew I’d find you somewhere ethnic.”
And there it is—that familiar irritation burning along Elise’s nerves because, as always, Mindy is blundering over everything. She snaps at her, “You know how I feel about hospitals,” as though that’s what they’re talking about here.
“Jeez, Elly, St Joe’s is different now. The cafeteria has lattes and breakfast sandwiches and all sorts.” Mindy stares at her plate. “What is that?”
“Fried rice.”
“For breakfast?” Mindy’s nose wrinkles, as though she needs to mime her disgust. “Just leave it. We need to get going.”
“I’ve been up all night. I’m starving.” She pokes her fork into the rice. “Why don’t you sit down and fill me in about Mom?”
Mindy’s face tightens. “Not now, for goodness sake, we just had a wasted trip out to the airport.” She leans close and lowers her voice, and the fusty smell of her coat is everywhere. “Darren’s not happy about driving all the way out there for nothing.” Which means, of course, that she’s not happy.
“It felt like you’d left me to make my own arrangements. What else did you expect me to do?”
Elise knows exactly what Mindy expected her to do—to wait around, no matter if she and Darren were going to be an hour late or not show up at all. There’s always a reason: Darren taking an extra shift at work. The car’s headlights were not working so they couldn’t drive at night. A mix-up over the dates that’s somehow Elise’s fault.
Elise points at the laptop. “Besides, I have work I need to get done. It was hard enough dropping everything and flying out here.”
“If it’s too much effort to come and say goodbye to Mom—”
“Come on, you know that’s not what I meant. But I have a job, and I have deadlines.”
At that, Mindy looks away. A sore point—one of many. Elise having a career when Mindy has the occasional stint as a supermarket cashier, or an aide at a childcare center.
“Well then,” Mindy says softly, “you can come if you want, but I’m leaving right now because Darren’s parked illegally out front. If you’re too busy, you can make your own arrangements.” A twitch tugs at the skin beneath one eye, then she starts away toward the door.
Elise should have guessed that would be thrown back at her. Although Mindy is easily wounded, she thinks nothing of making waspy attacks. This is how it’s going to be for the entire time Elise is here—but she’d known that, hadn’t she?
“Oh, come on, wait,” Elise calls after her. She jams her laptop into her shoulder bag, snatches up her jacket and scarf, her plate. The thudding in her chest is worse, and it doesn’t help that Mindy’s making the little sniffing noise that means she’s irritated, never mind that Elise has followed her, is at the counter pulling out her credit card while a young man lays open a to-go box for her fried rice.
Mindy tells him, “Don’t bother with that, we don’t have time.”
He catches Elise’s eye. “Please,” she says, and he neatly tips the rice into the box and settles a fresh wedge of lime on top. She feels ridiculously moved to see him take such care.
Mindy mutters, “For goodness sake,” then gestures through the glass to Darren who must be parked right outside.
The problem in coming back, Elise thinks, is that Mindy’s never moved away—she’s never even moved out of the house they grew up in. For her, the world is essentially the same as it was when being five years older meant minding Elly-babe when Dad was at work and Mom had shut herself in her room, which she did for days at a time. If there wasn’t cruelty exactly to how Mindy looked after her, there was a degree of heartlessness, as though little Elly-babe wasn’t quite a person, as though what Elly-babe wanted was never important enough to take into consideration. All these years later, nothing’s changed, though Dad’s dead, and Mom’s dying, and Elly-babe’s not a kid sister anymore, she’s a tenured professor, while Mindy—
Stop, Elise tells herself, just stop. She focuses on the pen as she signs the slip of paper the server has handed her, then she picks up the boxed food and heads outside with Mindy. The air’s thick with exhaust and the hum of engines, and snow’s spinning down more heavily than ever. An old Volvo’s parked at a bus-stop, a battered thing with one end of its fender duct-taped on. Mindy gets in and slams the door.
Behind Elise, a voice calls, “Madam! Madam!”
The server, and he’s pulling Elise’s roller bag.
“Thank you,” she tells him, “thank you so much.” The anger that flares through her is wretched and untidy—Mindy walking away so she had to hurry, punishing her when Mindy was the one who’d screwed up. For the next few days, it’s going to be nothing but Mindy with her hurt feelings and her drama, turning her life upside down.
Mindy’s watching through the car window. Behind the glass, she looks worn out, her face creased, her hair untidy, like someone Elise would never have anything to do with if she wasn’t her sister. There’s a clunk—Darren’s popped the trunk. He can’t be bothered to get out and lend a hand, not that she believes in all that gentlemanly nonsense, yet there seems something mean-spirited about leaving her out here in the snow and the wind with her hands full, trying to make room for her roller bag in the mess of their trunk. That’s Darren—the stolid young man who dated Mindy while Elise was in high school, who married her after Dad died and moved into the house while they saved up for a place of their own. Over twenty years later, he’s still there. Over twenty years of living with Mom. What sort of husband puts up with that?
Elise balances the box of food in one hand and with the other pushes aside trash bags full of god-knows-what—shopping totes, gym shoes—then hefts in her roller bag and slams the trunk shut. She reaches for the door, but Mindy gestures at her to get in the other side—there’s their dog peering out from behind the smeared glass—so she has to dart out in the wake of a delivery truck and snatch the door open as a cab slices past with a honk.
The backseat’s full of blankets and dog toys, and the damned dog is barking at her, a shrill, nervous bark. Then, it noses at the box of food. There’s no time to find the seat belt before Darren jams his foot on the gas, and they take off into the traffic, the dog lurching then finding its feet, pawing at the box, and when she eases the dog away, it lets out a tirade of barks.
Mindy shouts, “Cool it, Gonzo!”
They’re stopped at a light when Mindy glances around with a smirk. She tells Darren, “You’ll never guess what—Elly forgot her suitcase in the restaurant! Can you imagine? Just shows what good all that education does you!” She tips back her head as she laughs, and Darren lets out a grunt that might be a laugh too, and the dog starts up barking again. The sight of that small dog throwing its anger at her is too much. Elise shoves it away, and it stumbles into the footwell then launches itself at her, furious, and nips her hand.
Elise cries, “For god’s sake, it just bit me!”
Mindy glares at her, as though this is her fault, then snatches away the dog and cuddles it to her chest. “He’s just a little dog, Elly. He’s not going to do you any harm.”
“It bit me.” She lifts her hand, points to pink trails where the dog’s teeth scraped across her skin. “Look!”
“You’ve never been good with animals. You just don’t have the patience, and they can sense it.” She huffs out a sigh. “Isn’t that right, Darren? She’s never been good with animals.”
Darren grunts. Then the lights change, and he takes a left back toward the hospital, and inside the car, all is silent except for the throaty growls of the dog who won’t take its eyes off Elise.
*
The dog has to stay in the car, and its yips echo through the parking garage. How cold it is with the wind gusting in, and snow pelting past into the dreary day. Mindy and Darren walk shoulder to shoulder in their bulky coats, chatting softly to each other, and Elise has to trail along behind them through a back entrance then down corridor after corridor, and it isn’t until they’re outside the ICU that Mindy and Darren seem to remember Elise. They exchange a look, then Mindy tells her, “I don’t want you to be upset when we go in there, Elly.”
“You don’t want me to be upset that she’s dying?”
Mindy frowns. “She’s been talking a lot of nonsense.”
“A lot of nonsense,” says Darren. “She can’t help herself. It’s the tumor pressing on her brain.”
Mindy unzips her coat and stuffs her gloves in a pocket. “And all the morphine they’re giving her. She doesn’t know where she is or what’s going on.”
“Well, OK,” says Elise, “I’m forewarned.”
Mindy glances at Darren, who gives the slightest shake of his head. “Listen,” she says, and squeezes Elise’s arm, “don’t take anything she says to heart, that’s all.”
“Honestly, you two!” Elise lets out a little laugh. “I understand, alright?”
“Fine,” Mindy says, and pushes open the door.
The ICU’s oppressive quiet is stitched together with soulless beeps. Here, everything gleams, sharp and unyielding, everything except the lumpen shapes in the beds. This feels like a nightmare Elise has had repeatedly since she spent that summer in St Joe’s as a teen: a grim hospital ward, beds full of listless people with dead eyes, one empty bed waiting for her. The dread it stirs up—it comes shivering through her as she watches Mindy and Darren approach a bed where a shrunken woman lies, her stringy hair spread over her pillow, an oxygen mask clamped to her face. It doesn’t make sense that this is Mom until Mindy stoops to kiss her.
Elise’s gut lurches. Her smile falters as she forces herself close. “Mom,” she says.
Her mom snatches at the mask and yanks it down. She croaks out, “You?”
Elise bends to kiss her forehead. “So good to see you.” This is what she says when she runs into colleagues she hasn’t seen for a few weeks. What else is there to say to someone who’s dying?
Before she can straighten up, her mom grabs her arm, and Elise is trapped, their faces only inches apart. Her mom stares into her eyes, wiry eyebrows arched as though she’s trying to puzzle something out, then her gaze softens and slips away. “They won’t let me out of bed,” she wails, and there it is, that querulous voice that plagued Elise’s childhood. “I keep telling them I need to go home. No one ever listens.”
“Mom, you’re in the ICU. You can’t go home yet.” Elise winces at that last word but her mom doesn’t seem to notice.
Her mom’s eyes find her again, and this time, there’s something hard and distrustful in them. “I know exactly who you are,” she says.
“It’s me, Elise.”
“I know,” her mom spits. “You think I don’t know that?”
There is nothing else in the world except the ferocity in the eyes of this old woman gripping Elise’s arm. When Elise tries to pull back, her mom holds on all the tighter, even lifts herself from the pillows until their foreheads are almost touching and says in a voice thick with hatred, “Before you, we were happy.”
“Mom!”
“I should’ve gotten rid of you. I should have had the nerve.”
Elise yanks her arm away, and her mom falls against the bed’s side rail and cries out.
Mindy’s quick. She settles Mom back against the pillows and tells her, “Come on now, you know that’s not true.” She lifts the oxygen mask back over her face and adjusts the straps. “There you go. All better.”
Elise can’t catch her breath, and she searches her pockets for her inhaler. Someone’s hands come down on her shoulders. They hold her steady. Darren, his big bland face staring into hers. “Come on,” he says, “let’s get you out of here.”
*
Mindy was right about the cafeteria. It’s been remodeled, and the greasy smell of fried food that Elise remembers is gone. Now, it’s all gourmet coffee and smoothies, breakfast wraps and yogurt. She tells Darren she wants a decaf, nothing else, and sits at a table in the far corner. On the wall, a TV’s playing the Food Network. A blonde woman’s sprinkling chopped herbs into an expensive-looking pot and lowering her face into the steam rising off it.
Darren carries over a tray with two coffees and two chocolate muffins. He pushes one of the muffins toward her. “You need to get something inside you,” he says.
Between her fingers, the muffin feels unpleasantly soft, as though it’s about to fall apart. She sets it down and takes a sip of coffee instead. “You need to tell me what the hell that was all about.”
Darren takes a bite of his muffin and crumbs scatter across the table. With one finger, he sweeps them into a tiny pile. “Elly, she’s not in her right mind, we told you that.”
“No, she meant every word of it.”
He sighs and glances up. “Some things are best left alone, don’t you think?”
“I came all this way to say good bye. I’ve never been close to her—there was no chance of that when she spent half her life shut away in her room.” Elise leans forward. “And now, all of a sudden, she can’t stand the sight of me.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Wouldn’t you? She said she should have gotten rid of me.”
“For crying out loud, she’s doped up on morphine—”
“She was getting something off her chest,” she says, “and you know exactly what it is.”
Darren stares over at the TV where the blonde is ladling soup into dainty bowls. “Elly, come on—”
“So you’re not going to tell me? I’ll guess then.” Elise takes a sip of coffee and settles back in her chair. “Let’s start big—did she cheat on Dad, and I’m not his?”
He chews his muffin and keeps his eyes on the TV, and the moment passes when he should have looked back at her and said something like, Don’t talk crazy. She stares at him as if she can force him to turn around. Something gleams through the graying mass of his hair. Skin, she realizes—he’s starting to go bald. Maybe he hasn’t noticed yet, and it feels strangely intimate to know that about him. She says more gently, “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Now, he glances at her. There’s a dark crumb at the corner of his mouth, and she wishes he’d wipe it away. “Elly, it’s not what you think.”
It feels so ridiculously tawdry. A wife who cheated on her husband, and that husband bringing up a child he didn’t father. Did Dad even know? The one person in the family who’d really been there for her, fooled into doing it? The summer she’d been in this very hospital after getting knocked over outside school, a whole summer confined to bed in a stuffy room, her one joy was the end of every afternoon when Dad came. He’d read to her, or play checkers, shirt sleeves rolled up because he said he meant business, then he’d let her win, or cheat so badly they both ended up in fits of laughter. Later, he was the one who’d gotten up early to drive her to swim practice, who’d visited universities with her, who’d driven hundreds of miles to be there when she graduated, then had an aneurysm in his fifties and dropped dead. Not Mom, who’d spent years in bed hoping for her own medical drama, as though it would erase what she’d done. Why hadn’t Mom been the one to die young? Why not her, the bitch who’d cheated on her husband?
This nastiness scares her. This isn’t who she is, Elise tells herself. Then again, she’s not who she thought she was. She’s breathing hard. Her lungs are trying to seize up despite the medication. She’s not her dad’s daughter. She feels unmoored. She should cry, but she’s not going to let herself.
Darren’s watching her. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he says, but she pulls her phone from her bag. There’s no point saying goodbye to that woman, or waiting around for her to die. No, what she needs to do is fly home where she belongs.
*
Mindy wouldn’t take no for an answer, so the two of them are outside in the wind and the snow, Mindy in her thick blue coat, Elise, to her annoyance, in Darren’s, one hand freezing because she has to hold up the hood when the wind gusts.
Elise had been in the middle of booking her flight home, for god’s sake. She didn’t want to stay a little longer, she didn’t want to talk, and she most certainly did not want to take a walk. Yet, here she is, and there’s nothing to focus on except putting one foot in front of the other in this brutal wind.
At the end of the block, Mindy leads her through a doorway and down a narrow escalator. In the building’s basement, there’s a small mall with a convenience store, a shoe repair, a tiny florist’s, and a used-book store. So this is why Mindy brought her here. To distract her. To turn her thoughts away from what she’s just discovered.
Anger’s burning in her chest. There’s a flight out at two thirty, and she wants to be on it.
Mindy’s saying, “If you don’t want to go in, we can sit and talk, if you like.” She nods toward a bench outside the shoe repair.
“When this is something we should have talked about years ago? Now there’s nothing more to say.” Elise pushes open the door.
The store turns out to be much larger than she thought, with a room in the back, and a third room behind that. It’s in this last room that she finds a section of Victorian fiction. This is her life—this is who she is. She scans the shelves. Braddon, the Brontës, Carroll, Collins. A whole row of Dickens. All those complex plots with secrets at their heart. It makes her guts twist to see them, as though it’s her story they’re telling.
Mindy’s trailed in behind her. She sits down on a step stool, says, “You see anything good?”
“Oh, it’s all good.” Elise runs a finger along the books’ spines.
“You know, Elly, it’s not what you think.”
Her fingers have come to rest on one book as though she plans to pull it out and leaf through it. Great Expectations. Sad and bitter Miss Havisham who shuts herself away in her mansion after being jilted at the altar. There are passages Elise can recite by heart. She glances down at Mindy. “Mom had an affair and I’m the result. I get it.”
“No,” Mindy says softly, “that’s not what happened.” Her wide face has flushed. “You have to listen to me.”
“It won’t change a thing.”
She sniffs. “You should know the truth. You owe us that much.”
Elise sighs and unzips Darren’s coat. “I’ll listen, but only if you drive me to the airport in an hour. There’s a flight home at two thirty.”
*
The call comes that evening as they’re clearing the dinner dishes off the table. Snow’s been falling all day and the roads are slick and difficult. It takes an hour to drive back to the hospital.
A nurse leads them to the private room where they’ve moved Mom. She’s not going to last the night, Elise realizes, these private rooms are to avoid a death upsetting the other patients. Tubes and cords web out from where Mom lies in the bed. The mask is gone, and her face is tinged gray. While they were eating dinner, this woman retreated into her own head, the last stop before she leaves the world entirely.
“Come,” says Mindy. She moves a chair close to the bed for Elise and lays Mom’s hand in hers. It’s limp and barely warm.
Darren brings in a third chair while Mindy fusses, smoothing the blankets, eyeing the morphine drip. Elise thinks, she’d have made a fine nurse, then corrects herself—Mindy has been a fine nurse, looking after Mom all these years while she was free to live her own life far away.
Soon, Mindy settles herself in a chair, and the three of them sit in silence. To talk about the larger world when this woman is slipping away from it feels wrong, so they watch her chest gently rise, then fall, over, and over. Time slows, teetering, as though any moment now it will halt with this woman’s last breath.
This woman, who early one winter night forty-three years ago picked up groceries then walked two blocks to fetch her daughter from ballet class. A heavy snow had started during the afternoon. Then, traffic was inching along, wheels sliding, wipers trying to clear windshields. The woman bunched the grocery bags in one hand and held tight to her little girl with the other because the churned-up snow of the sidewalk was slick, the street-crossings treacherous. Off to their right lay a park, a sketchy place she avoided after dark, but that night the snow had turned it fresh and clean. A shortcut home, and how quiet it was, nothing but their boots swishing through the snow, the rustle of the plastic grocery bags against the woman’s legs. They were nearly at the far gate when the man rushed at them. He caught the woman around the neck and dragged her into the bushes, where he raped her. The woman didn’t scream, so her daughter didn’t either, and after a few minutes—that’s how long it lasted—he calmly strolled away. The woman hauled herself to her feet and gathered up the bread, the apples, the ground beef in its plastic wrap, the carton of milk that miraculously was still intact, and then she and her daughter walked home. No call to the police, because imagine the shame of it. Instead, she shut herself into the bedroom. Her husband tried his best to comfort her, but he couldn’t undo what had been done. Nine months later, the woman had a baby girl that felt like an accusation every time she looked at her.
Snow dashes past the window, and that chest is still rising and falling. Elise presses her mom’s hand to her cheek. She wants to tell her it’s not her fault they’re all a little broken, that now the burden is hers, too, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. For the time being, there’s nothing she can do but sit here and keep watch. Soon enough, the world will come rushing back in, but not yet, not yet.
Gerri Brightwell’s fourth novel, Turnback Ridge (Torrey House Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Foreword Indies Award (adult thriller & suspense). Her short work has appeared in many venues including The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, Alaska Quarterly Review, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, Redivider, and BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.