Maid - Stephanie Land Page 0,59
seen them. I wondered if she’d helped them, too.
Her small talk passed the time that Mia was in surgery. I’d read a lot of articles online about what to expect from little children waking up from anesthesia, but I still wasn’t prepared for it emotionally. It was nice to have the distraction, someone to keep me company, to keep me breathing. Losing my child, her not coming out of anesthesia, something going horribly wrong, were all thoughts I had to keep at bay in order to stay strong, if not for me, then for her. Neither of us needed the added stress.
Mia came into the room at nine a.m., wheeled in on a gurney with gauze stuffed in her mouth. Her face was soaked in tears, red with anger, and her eyes looked around, wide with terror, like she couldn’t see. They pushed the gurney she was on over to the fixed bed in the room so she could crawl from one to the next. I leaned over to her, placed my hand on her back, and started whispering into her ear, not knowing how well she could hear me, wondering if her ears were sore, what they’d done to her in there; what fear she must have felt without me there to hold her hand. “It’s okay, sweet girl. It’s okay.”
Mia flexed her whole body, lying on her side, completely rigid, then started writhing, growling, and pulling at the tape holding needles in her arms. A nurse and I intervened as best we could. Mia went up on her hands and knees, spitting the gauze out of her mouth, then sat up on her knees. She reached for me, her arms lifting the tubes attached to them. I looked at the nurse and she nodded, allowing me to wrap my arms around my daughter, picking her up enough to put her in my lap so I could cradle her, rocking from side to side, repeating my promise that everything would be all right.
“I want some juice,” she growled at me, collapsing into me at the effort and possibly the pain it took to form words and voice them. I heard her whimper. The nurse handed her a sippy cup. Mia sat up to drink half of it, then tucked herself back into my arms again.
Within an hour, I stood in the parking lot with Mia dressed but still wrapped around me, not ready to put her in the car seat to drive the few blocks to get home. They’d rushed us out, loaning us a humidifier that was shaped like Mickey Mouse. “Yup, we do things quick around here,” the nurse said after placing it on the hood of my car. I stood there like that in the parking lot for another fifteen minutes, holding my daughter, staring at the building, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt before. We’d made it through that morning, Mia had survived the surgery, but in that moment a sort of cloak fell over me. This wasn’t a moment of empowerment or a celebration that we’d done it; this was a saturation into a new depth of loneliness that I now had to learn how to breathe in and out in. It was a new existence. Where I’d wake up and go to sleep.
* * *
Before I arrived first thing the following Monday for her monthly clean, the owner of the Plant House moved everything she could off the floor. She rolled up rugs, put stacks of magazines on chairs, and piled books, workout equipment, and shoes on the bed. Her instructions were militant, the most specific of all my clients: deep clean all floors, the kitchen and the bathroom, and inspect windowsills and frames for black mold.
The Plant House owners were empty nesters. Their son’s room hadn’t seemed to change much since he moved out. His trophies still stood on the windowsill behind his bed. They’d moved in a desk and a large keyboard where the wife gave piano lessons. I wondered if it was easier to use than the upright piano by the front door. The husband was some kind of pastor or maybe worked at a church. They had prayers written out and framed instead of pictures on the walls.
The wife had huge plants on wheels that I rolled around to sweep and mop beneath. Each window in the living room had a half dozen spider plants perched on the sill or hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Christmas