She says, “I don’t want to leave my room at the home. I do not want to move into the other building. Please don’t let them move me.”
My mother’s appearance does not match up with that of the woman I had pictured sitting in her room, manipulating my life. This frail-looking patient couldn’t have known what I was doing two towns away. She probably wasn’t even thinking of me when she fell to the floor. Her accident wasn’t a moral message; it was simply an accident. I think that perhaps my mother is finally getting old.
“It’s all right, Mother,” I say, using the same soothing tone I used when my daughters were babies. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Apparently that tone, as rusty as it is, works, because at that moment my mother closes her eyes and falls either to sleep or unconsciousness.
I sit with her for a minute. I watch her breath. It occurs to me that I have never seen my mother sleep. That is something you do with your children, not your parents. This state of affairs is organically wrong. My mother should not be lying, tiny and injured, in this bed before me. She should have called for help instead of lying on the floor of her room. I should not have to sit and watch her rest with her head tipped back, her mouth slightly open. My mother in her right mind, off of drugs, would never allow me to see her in this condition.
When I go back out into the hallway, I don’t see Louis right away. He is standing halfway down the corridor, his arms crossed over his chest. He is staring in the direction of the nurses’ station. He turns when he hears my high heels click on the linoleum floor.
“How does she seem?” he says.
“I’m going to stay with her in case she wakes up. I’ll call my brothers and sisters and let them know. Will you call the girls?”
He nods. “I’ll wait with you.”
Anger crashes over me, so strong I have to grit my teeth. “I’d rather be alone with my mother,” I say. “I’ll see you at home later. Tell the girls everything is going to be fine.”
Only when Louis turns the corner at the end of the hall and his broad back has disappeared from view do I calm down. I abide by the NO CELL PHONES signs on the wall and find a little booth with a bench and a pay phone inside. As I step in and close the glass door behind me, the setup reminds me of a confessional. My mother used to insist as children that we confess every Wednesday and every Sunday. She would load us all in the car in our good clothes and then line us up outside of Father Brogan’s confessional stall. She would use her hand to smooth our hair into place. She would warn us that omission was as big a sin as lying, and then she would give each of us a small shove toward the velvet curtain. Inside the dark spartanlike box, on my knees with the priest’s voice and, even worse, the sound of his breathing seeming to come at me from every side, I would pore over the four days since I had last confessed, trying to find any sins. I suspected that Father Brogan was bored on his side of the stall, and hoped I would come up with something good and challenging for him, a real Commandment breaker like murder or coveting your neighbor’s wife. But I was a very good child, and usually the only bad acts I could think of had been committed by my brothers and sisters. Most afternoons, for lack of anything better to offer, I would end up telling on them. The priest seemed to enjoy that. He would give a soft chuckle and dismiss me after assigning one Hail Mary for tattling. He would then call back in one or more of my siblings who had already confessed that afternoon. Meggy and Johnny spent most of our childhood muttering Our Fathers and Hail Marys under their breath in penance for their sins. I wore constant bruises on my shins for turning them in.
I call Theresa, and she sobs the entire time I am on the phone with her. Finally Mary has to pick up the extension and write down the surgery time and room number.