by Lara Hayes
Reflecting on all of this, it takes all the energy I have left to turn away from the blinding sunrise this morning and hunker down beneath my comforter, though I really should get up and check on Mother. Constant fatigue is nothing new for me, but the addition of heightened skin sensitivity is. I can hardly remember what eight hours of unbroken rest feels like. Acquaintances at work have commented, a few patients too. I’ve lost six pounds and the dark circles under my eyes have brightened to a frightening new shade of violet, tinged yellow at the edges. My wasted state is Mother’s favorite breakfast topic.
“Elizabeth, the nineties may be in vogue again, but that doesn’t mean Heroin Chic is a trend worth resurrecting.”
“Please tell me it’s depression and not drugs.”
“Is this some sort of rebellion? Or are you conducting an elaborate social experiment?”
“For god’s sake, Elizabeth, wash your hair or so help me I will drag you outside and hose you down like an animal.”
I don’t have the energy to spar with her, and that upsets her most. All her sharp wit, just wasted, and the best I can muster is: “What was that?” “Have you eaten?” “Of course, Mother. Of course.”
The truth is it hurts to look at her. My heart breaks for the simple fact that none of it will matter when my mother draws her last breath.
Work is a different story. I find myself approaching patient care with near religious fervor, believing in the face of the most condemning diagnosis that I can wrestle these unwitting passengers back from the edge. My floor hasn’t lost a patient in almost a week. I have been commended for my unwavering zeal as often as I have been questioned about my health. That is, by everyone but James. Twice he’s cornered me at the nurses station, opened his mouth to speak only to shake himself as though he’d fallen asleep standing up, and both times he promptly disappeared for the remainder of my shift.
In the quiet moments, I imagine what the hospital could accomplish with just a few pints of Stela’s blood on hand: bullet wounds and burns wiped away, bones setting themselves, muscles stitching themselves back together. But this is precisely the reason she maintains her anonymity. Humankind would want exactly three things with the Strigoi: to join, harvest, or eradicate them.
“Elizabeth!”
My mother’s battle cry. I won’t answer her. I don’t have the strength to leave my bed before eight on my only day off. I barely have the energy for my early morning musings. My hand reaches out across the mussed sheets, but there is no one beside me. My mother calls again, louder this time, her voice echoing over every kitchen tile. I flip over onto my stomach and clamp a pillow over my head.
My mother’s steps are slow and measured on the stairs, intentionally pronounced. The bed shakes as she stumbles into the room, throwing the curtains open.
“Go away, Mother. Sleeping.”
She rips the pillow from my face and tosses it toward the dresser. “I won’t have you lying about all day. Now get up. I’ll start a fresh pot of coffee.”
“In a little while, Mom, please. I’m exhausted.”
“That’s enough. I am taking you to the doctor, and I don’t want to hear a single protest, Elizabeth. You can’t keep moping about like this.”
Squinting against the searing sunlight, I wave her away with an open hand. “I’m just tired.”
My mother wraps a commanding hand around my left arm, which is still sensitive. I jerk the arm away with a curse and cover my scar.
“What is that?” she demands. “Are you injured?” She leans over me, attempting to pry my hand away. My completely misdirected anger boils over in an instant.
“Worry about your own goddamn health! I said I’m fine!”
I have never once sworn at my mother. Her expression steels over immediately, but not quickly enough to mask the pain. I grope the air for an apology, both of us stunned. Her hurt vanishes beneath her trademark indifference. She lifts her chin, presses her lips in a tight line, and there isn’t a doubt in my mind that she will hold this outburst over me forever.
Mother turns sharply and storms out of the room, with my profuse apologies falling impotently at her heels. I hear it the moment my feet plant themselves on the floor—a missed footfall on the stairs. A single, staggered beat that has me out of bed in the breath before the ensuing crash.
“Mom!”
She’s still falling when I reach the stairs, a tangled bouncing heap of sprawled limbs. The smack of skin against hardwood is sickening.
No.
No.
No.
My scream is so loud that its echo startles me into believing we’re not alone in the house, and I turn, expecting the presence of another aghast onlooker. I take the stairs two at a time, but the damage is done. The blood has already begun to pool around her head forming a shallow red pond. I grab her shoulders and catch myself a second before I begin shaking her. Instead, I place a finger to her thready pulse. I fetch a clean towel and my cell phone. I leave the phone on speaker to keep pressure on the wound. The operator is a weary young woman with a child-like voice.
She attempts to lead me through triage, but I bark over my shoulder for her to be quiet. Mother is breathing, but that’s all that can be said. She isn’t conscious. She doesn’t register my touch or my voice. I hold her head in line with her spine, in case she jerks awake and out of my hands. Blood seeps through the towel. The disembodied voice of the responder on the other end of the call assures me that help is on the way.
Fractured skull, probable spinal injury, subarachnoid hemorrhage, subdural hematoma, extradural hematoma.
She looks so small in her dressing gown.
“Please…” the operator stops spouting reassurances. “They have to hurry. I can’t stop the bleeding.”
“They’re coming, Elizabeth.” Did I give her my name? “Help is on the way.”
“I yelled at her.”
“You’ll hear the sirens soon,” the operator promises.
Low at first—like a fussy infant—the sound of sirens climbs up the block, the distant howl sharpening into shrill screams the closer they get.
“I can hear them,” I manage between heaving sobs. “Mom? Mother? They’re almost here. Please, stay with me.”
Two EMTs charge across my mother’s immaculate living room in a flash of stiff navy cotton and heavy black boots. I frown at their muddy trail on the Oriental rug. She’ll be so displeased.
“Elizabeth, move.” A short, stocky woman shoulders me back and cradles my mother’s sticky head in her gloved hands. “Let us take care of her.” Her partner, a tall, broad man, all shoulders, straightens Mother’s limbs and prepares the spinal board. They work side by side as one four-armed beast. My mother’s face only visible above their bowed backs, and further obscured by the oxygen mask.
“Can you tell us what happened?” The female technician never takes her eyes off my mother. The tall man fastens a neck brace.
“We had an argument. She was angry. Parkinson’s. She isn’t steady on her feet. It was too fast—she was going too fast. She missed the step. I heard, she was still falling when I got there. She didn’t even cry out.”
In unison they hoist my mother onto the gurney, thick black straps across her limp arms and legs. “Elizabeth, we have to move now.” The technician turns and I recognize that she’s Beth. The tall man, her partner, is Allen. We were friendly when I first started at the hospital, working in Emergency. Faces I have only ever seen at work, faces that do not belong in my mother’s home.
“I’m coming with you.” Beth spins to stop my first step. She shoves a forbidding, blue latex hand at my chest, which lingers in the air without touching. The blood makes her fingertips appear purple.
“Elizabeth,” she swallows, fighting to maintain eye contact, “you’re naked.”
I look down. The blood is so thick on my knees and calves it’s hard to believe it’s not mine. My chest and arms and underwear are smeared with it.
“Get dressed. Meet us at the hos
pital. We have to take her now.”
This would be mortifying if I could feel anything but horror. Beth and Allen depart as they arrived—in a rush through the front door, leaving a trail of blood behind. I stand at the closed door, peering through the curtains as they load my mother into the ambulance. Half the block has turned up, cell phones in hand. The second they shut the door on my mother, I collapse in violent sobs, heaving yellow bile all over my mother’s ruined Persian rug.
* * *
Stela doesn’t come the first night.
Hordes of attending physicians and nearly all my fellow nurses stop by to check in with us. They bring me coffee, new magazines not yet relegated to the waiting rooms, the heaviest disposable blankets in our arsenal, clean pillows from the On-Call rooms, food that I accept but don’t eat.
Mother has a private suite—naturally—with a view of the harbor. Something she wouldn’t appreciate awake or asleep. And Arthur checks in every hour, on the hour, though he can’t be Arthur to me now. He is Dr. Richmond, acclaimed neurologist.
Mother is in surgery for hours. She has a fractured skull, two bulging discs, four broken ribs, compression fractures in vertebrae C three to six, an acute subdural hematoma that resulted in a stroke, and a shattered femur.
When they wheel her into recovery she’s swollen and partially mummified in braces, sterile gauze, a full leg cast. Her face is so bruised she’s nearly unrecognizable, and for a fleeting moment I fear that this isn’t my mother at all—stranger mistakes have happened. But the broken body is wearing my mother’s wedding ring.
I tilt the diamond toward the setting sun and bursts of square rainbows splatter across my face and chest. I am assured that the surgery was a success. There was a clot, but it has been successfully removed. The next seventy-two hours are critical. They will keep her in an induced coma. After that we can discuss further surgery, next steps.
Stela doesn’t come the second night either, but around three p.m. a beautiful bouquet of white calla lilies is delivered without a card. The arrangement is too extravagant, and the flower choice too morbid to attribute to anyone else. While I admire a bloom, a shadow falls over the foot of my mother’s bed. Helen’s short strong figure in the doorway is a gift and a wound all at once. She’s so many things: steady bracing arms, a warm heart, and a thorn that digs into my guilt. I don’t deserve her comforting words, her optimism or her company, but she gives all three freely.
Helen spends the evening regaling me with stories of my mother, and the humorous tantrums Helen tolerated in private so as not to add to my growing list of troubles. She smiles fondly at her tormentor, as one would a co-conspirator.
“You didn’t have to come.”
Helen squeezes my forearm. I keep my fingers wrapped around my mother’s wrist. Her steady pulse is soothing, the familiar throb that reminds me she hasn’t left.
“Yes, I did.” Helen nods. “She made a difficult patient, but when she wasn’t busy testing boundaries she was a true friend.” Helen speaks with such assurance and respect. I would call my mother many things: a mentor, a tyrant, a parent, a strict disciplinarian, an inspiration, but I would never consider her a friend. Not to me, or to anyone else.
The monitors chirp their slow lullaby and I take my mother’s hand. She doesn’t move. “I’m sorry.”
Helen stands on stiff legs and kisses the crown of my head, wrapping her arms around my shaking shoulders to stifle my fresh round of tears. “Elizabeth, she was weak, unsteady on her feet. She could have fallen on my watch, and she did several times. You have nothing to apologize for.”
I shake my head at her, and my own selfishness.
“You should go home,” Helen suggests. “Sleep in your own bed, have a shower. I can stay with Claire tonight.”
I straighten in my uncomfortable seat, and my back cracks so sharply that Helen grimaces. “Thank you, but I really can’t leave her.”
Helen rubs small circles between my shoulder blades and sighs. She finally checks the monitors. “I could run home for you,” she offers. “Pick up a change of clothes, something to read, whatever you like.”
“That’s very kind, but I don’t want you to—”
“Elizabeth, it’s no trouble. I’m a blundering old retiree, with nothing but the morning paper waiting on me. Put me to work.” She nudges me playfully, and I smile for the first time in days. Helen said the exact same thing to me a year ago when she first offered to give me a hand with Mother.
“That would be wonderful.”
* * *
The walls are black as ink and the sticky linoleum under my bare feet stretches out in front of me, like a pale yellow street. The nurses station is strewn with papers and the computer monitors are blue-screened with scrolling white lines. The patient rooms are vacant, and the doors ajar. There isn’t a soul left on the fourth floor.
The absolute silence is as unsettling as the dark. I know that I’m in danger, but I walk the echoing hall. The emergency exit glows a menacing red.
She’s here. Close, but concealed. Why is she hiding? Why draw me deeper into this wasteland after her? The pull of her presence grows stronger with each step and the silence bears down upon me as though I’m sinking to a great depth. I open my mouth to call to her, but nothing happens. Beside me, room four-twelve radiates portent.
The hall is so dark that I’m amazed I made it this far in my journey. There are three open doors to choose from: four-twelve on the left, the waiting room to my right, and the exit in front of me. I am compelled to room four-twelve, though I know neither escape nor safety await me. The room itself sucks me inside with a greedy breath, and the door slams closed at my heels. She isn’t here, but something else is waiting.
The air is sour, oddly stale. There is an unaccountable humidity, a permeating dampness, like a rancid sauna. My hands stretch out in front of me, groping for the wall or the bed, but before I can ground myself with either, my foot slides out from underneath me and I land sprawling on my back. The dampness isn’t confined to the air. The floor is warm and wet, seeping through my clothes, soaking into my hair and coating my palms. The smell is everywhere at once, sharp and unmistakable. I slither backward on all fours, reaching for the door handle, screaming her name, but only a rush of breath escapes my lungs. The thick air closes around me, pressing down to seal me inside. I scramble to my feet, the door handle slipping between my slick fingers, and stumble back out into the hall.
Laughter—not mine—bubbling up from the bowels of the hospital. I slink toward the emergency exit and the flickering red confirms my fears. The blood is a deep purple on my hands and feet, black on my scrubs. I lunge for the exit, but my attempt to cross into the stairwell is rebuffed. The exit isn’t real. A projection. I touch the surface of the screen, the edge of the door, and the image wrinkles around my fingers.
Behind me, the floor settles under foreign weight, and the next thing I register is a soft light spilling across the tile.
The waiting room door stands open with the small table lamps lit and inviting. I should be furious with her. I should be frightened, but I am so relieved not to be alone that I rush into the room. But I don’t find Stela.
There is a man, tall and broad-shouldered, in a workman’s coat and jeans. He’s in the center of the room facing the wall, his back to the door. His black hair is slicked back, his fists downed with dark brown fur. I want to turn and run, but I can’t. There’s nowhere to go, and I understand that he’s the one who brought me here—not Stela. Slowly he turns around. His face has bright crimson tendons and blue veins that curl around a mouth without lips—all pink gums and crooked teeth. The eyes are what hold me—lidless, naked, grotesquely wide. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t make a sound.
The waiting room door slams shut at my back.
All my panic culminates around the sound. I attack the closed door with all that I have, rattling the handle, pulling at the hinges. I pound the wood with my fists until the bones in my wrists splinter from the force of m
y frenzy. A fur-covered hand curls around my shoulder, and I find my voice long enough to release a scream that had been building inside of me my whole life.
“Elizabeth?” I have a fistful of Helen’s polyester coat in my hand when I open my eyes. “Easy now…Hey now. You’re all right. It’s just me.” The recliner that I’ve lived in for nearly three days sticks to my spine and the back of my legs, covered in cold sweat. A bead of perspiration trickles down my temple. Helen stares down at me tenderly.
Helen leaves my side to answer the door and explains away my outburst to a herd of concerned fellow nurses.
“Here. Have some water.” My voice is harsh when I thank her. “That must have been some nightmare.” Helen attempts a reassuring smile. “You wanna talk about it?”
“No. I don’t.”
Helen nods and slumps down on the foot of Mother’s bed. “I brought you some clothes,” she says, running a thumb over my folded shirts. “I couldn’t find the pants you asked for, or the book, or your overnight bag for that matter.”
My thundering pulse slows. I clear my throat. “It’s fine. Thank you for bringing what you have.”
Helen holds the bags tightly and won’t meet my eyes. I pull the bags out of her hands. “It’s late, Helen. You should go home. We’ll be fine.”
Bewildered she rises from the bed shakily, and fixes me with a peculiar stare. Helen braces herself with the foot of the bed, cinching the front of her coat closed. “Where did you say your mother fell?” It’s a simple question.
“The stairs. I told you that.”
Helen silently agrees, tapping her fingers against the molded guardrail of the bed. “The basement stairs?”
“The first-floor stairs, Helen. Why would she be in the basement?”
Helen moves around the side of the bed in a distracted daze, tugging the purse strap at her shoulder. “Did you clean before you came to the hospital?”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was no blood.” Helen shrugs, what should be a casual gesture but there’s no hiding her intense interest. “Not on the stairs. Not at the foot of the stairs.”