FIELD JOURNAL ENTRY
MAY 5
NOTABLE LOCATION: THE NEW NORMAL?
The hospital never called overnight. Mom woke up pissed.
“Are you sure you didn’t miss a call?” she said.
“Mom, it’s a cell phone. If I did, you’d be able to see it,” I said. “Would you like some oatmeal? A full stomach might help!” My plan of Everything Will Be All Right if We Will It to Be was in full effect.
“But you could have erased it. To cover up your mistake?” She ignored my offer of breakfast.
“Why would I do that?” I said. If Mom only knew my real mistake with Gran, what would she do?
“How would I know, Laurel?” Mom said.
“Should I stay home from the Nature Center today? I don’t have to go in on the weekend,” I said.
“Just tell me now if they called.”
“Mom, of course they didn’t call. I would have told you.” I tried to hand her the phone. “Call them and see what’s going on.”
She looked like she wanted to throw the cell at something. Or someone. I slowly backed out of the kitchen before I said something to annoy her.
I texted Sophie.
I’m living in peak Mom meltdown mode over here.
Laurel! OMG I was so worried! How is your grandma?
Don’t know. No word, I typed.
Well, that’s probably good, right?
I don’t know. I think they would have let us know if she woke up? Maybe?
Sophie sent back a frowning face.
I texted, But they also would have called if she got worse. You know Gran. She’s tough. She’s going to make it.
Truth, she wrote back.
As Brian Michael Warbley once wrote, “Birds aren’t born knowing how to fly, but the ability is still there within them. Make manifest what’s inside you.” That’s what I could do for Gran. Make manifest her ability to wake up, and make Mom feel like everything was going to be okay.
On the other hand, I was the one responsible for Gran’s condition in the first place. That might negate all the good energy I put out. That thought pecked on the thin veneer of my cheerful outlook. I shoved it as far from my mind as I could.
But I felt it there, guilt’s sharp little beak.
“Laurel,” Mom yelled from the kitchen. “Be ready to go in five.”
Her words ricocheted against the exposed wooden beams, sending splinters flying in all directions that landed straight into my skin. I sighed. There was nothing else to do when she was like this but to listen.
Mom drove to the hospital, sometimes casting little glares over at me.
“What?” I finally said.
“They didn’t call because they hadn’t moved her. But she has a bed now. We can see doctors while they are on rounds. Or something.”
“Are you mad at me?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“You seem like it.”
“I’m just under a lot of stress. My mother and all.”
“My grandmother,” I thought sadly. But I realized I had accidentally said it out loud.
Mom wilted a little. “I know, baby. I know. I’m sorry. I just … I don’t understand how she ended up like this. I don’t know what we’d do without…” She trailed off.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I know Gran. This is a setback, but if anyone can come back from something like this, it’s her. She needs us to be in her corner!” I almost meant the confidence in my voice.
“Okay, sweetheart,” she said.
When we got to the hospital, we were shuffled off to another floor. They had just moved Gran to another pod, with her own nurse. Her wires and monitors were all still present and accounted for, but now she had these fancy socks that expanded and contracted, massaging her every few minutes. Her bed moved like ocean waves underneath her.
“Fancy,” I said to her. “It’s like a spa, but with drugs.”
Gran’s face didn’t change.
Beep. Click. Whir.
Doctors came and went. They took Gran; they brought her back. Hours passed like this. There was no news to report, doctors said. Gran’s brain was damaged, but it was too early to tell. She’d survived, and seemed to be fighting. That was good. But her response to stimuli was not.
It was dark when we left. Mom had fallen into a deep place of silence.
“Should we get takeout?” I said.
Nothing.
“I could make chicken. We should probably do Crock-Pot stuff for a while. I’ll find the recipe file.”
Silence.
“Did I tell you about the red-tailed hawk’s nest we found? They usually like to be downtown, but they’ve moved to the burbs!” My chatter reached out again and again over the mile to our house, but it couldn’t cross to where Mom was.
In a fortunate turn of events, however, I didn’t end up needing to worry about food. Casserole dishes had shown up on our stoop like they did after Grandpa had died when I was ten. Gran was well known and word traveled fast around my town. The birders and the leaf peepers and the sewing circle represented in full fucking force.
I should probably stop making fun of Gran’s terrible needlepoint. Those people made the best tuna noodle a girl could ever hope for.
I feel guilty eating chicken, I texted to Sophie later. Gran would have ten thousand duck fits.
Wouldn’t they be chicken fits? she said.
Fair point.
Try to get out tomorrow. To the pond or woods. Take some pictures. I think it’d be good for your mental state.
Yeah, I said. I had brought my portfolio to the hospital, thinking that I could go through it again next to her. That that might wake her up, somehow. Or that I could borrow some of her winning Fauna photography powers. I had a bunch of rock and icicle ones from the past winter that might count as still life.
It struck me that Gran was now a still life.
The doctors had declared there had been swelling in her brain. Or bleeding. Or both, maybe. But she was breathing on her own, though. She was hanging on.
As Brian Michael Warbley said, “Even in the silence of still life, there is life, still.”
Mom stayed in her silent weirdness. It was starting to freak me out. This had happened once before, after Dad left. Dishes went unwashed, bills unpaid, groceries unbought. Mom didn’t have that much sick time. She could take off of work unpaid, but the whole unpaid situation would be pretty bad. Intervention had to come early this time.
“Mom, we can’t live like this,” I said that night.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said.
“We have to make a plan,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm,” she repeated.
“Are you even listening?”
She stared at me. She blinked. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“What are we going to do?”
Mom sighed. “What we always do, Laurel. I’ll go to work. You go to that bird place. We’ll take turns visiting Mom. We’ll figure it out somehow.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m going to bed. Night,” she said abruptly.
“Night,” I said. I slumped onto the couch. The whole system Mom and I had only worked if Gran was involved. She was the glue. Without her … what? I didn’t even know. So there was only one possible solution. We needed Gran.
Something crashed from upstairs.
I jumped. I bolted up the steps.
In Mom’s room I found her on the floor next to a shattered glass vase.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I got it out. To look at it. It was a wedding gift. From Grandma. I wondered…” Mom sat down on the floor, in the middle of all the shards.
“Don’t do that!” I said. “I’ll get a broom! Get on the bed, Mom!”
But she wouldn’t budge. I swept as best as I could around her. I convinced her to go into the bathroom, where I watched her wash off her hands. I brushed her jeans off into the garbage can. I still wasn’t sure I’d gotten it all.
“Don�
��t walk in bare feet, Mom.”
She nodded. But then she walked into her room and closed the door.
The whole “breaking” and “falling apart” nature of Mom’s act was a little too on the nose. I went downstairs and cleaned up the last few days of cleaning neglect.
I was older this time than when Dad left. I could fill in as glue for Gran’s temporary absence.
At least. I hoped I could.
FIELD JOURNAL ENTRY
MAY 6
I decided I had to try to go back to the Nature Center. Being at the hospital so much was beginning to get to me. Birding with toddlers served as a solid distraction. They were a lot like squirrels, but they were also enchanted with every blade of grass and snail and slug nature had to show off. So they weren’t that bad.
When the Center quieted down, I went out onto the small back porch and sat on the ancient wooden swing. The leaves on the oak and spruce glowed vibrant in the afternoon light. Green peeked out of the forest floor corners and rows, curling the sunlight into warm brown rock. A robin flew up and landed on the banister. He twitched his head at me suspiciously.
“Feeding you would be terrible birder behavior,” I said.
He chirped.
“Yeah, I know. This hurts me more than you.”
He hopped along the gray chipped paint. He called out and another robin answered him.
“Honestly, worms are a lot better for you.”
His beady eyes gleamed a solid “piss off, apex predator” at me, and then he took flight to meet his robin buddy off in another tree. Birds kind of had middle fingers in their wings. Or middle toes, at least. They were definitely experts in communicating their disgust with you.
I grinned. Maybe that’s where we got “flipping someone the bird.” I’d have to ask Gran.
Gran.
I thought about her garden and her plants and her mail. Was anyone bringing in her mail? No. Who would? Mom had barely been taking care of herself, let alone that kind of thing. I should do that. Get the mail, at least.
After co-op, I got on my bike and rode over to Gran’s house. Sure enough, a packet of letters and catalogs for outdoor gear sat in the metal curls jutting from a packed mailbox. I pried it out and piled it neatly on her table inside the door. I checked her fridge and bagged a bunch of rotting fruit and vegetables. She would be so, so ticked off that all that food went to waste. I checked the basement. It only ever flooded in the early spring, but this gave me a sense of purpose. No windows had been left open, no faucets running, no burners heating. The house was fine, aside from the fridge and mail, which had been quickly addressed.
I took the garbage down the stone path through to the edge of the yard. They’d pick it up Wednesday or Thursday. I looked down the abandoned alley. Shards of broken glass sparkled like diamonds, mixing with the stones blacked by passing tires and oil-slick rainbows until the alley dead-ended into the Jenkins Wood’s path. It was serene and sad and made me wish desperately that Gran were there with me, yelling at me to hurry up with the damn chores, already.
I turned back toward the house. Mom would soon show up at the hospital and wonder why I wasn’t there. I wondered if I should come over and mow the lawn on Saturday. It was getting frowsy, as Gran would say. I walked to the side of the porch to check if the weed whacker still lived under there. As I peered into the dusty shadows, I heard it.
Two short, high-pitched bursts. One long melancholy song.
The mystery bird.
I backed out of the porch hole and looked around wildly. It sounded again from Gran’s spruce tree.
“Where are you?” I asked the sound. “Just hop down, would you? So I can get a look at you. Wait for me!” I grabbed my phone. Maybe if I could get a picture of it, I could get Gran to …
Maybe I could look it up in a field guide.
Again and again he called. He moved to a tree by the garbage. I followed. He moved three trees down, high on the uppermost branches, hidden from sight. Over and over he moved until the call was lost amid the woods.
I went back to my bike. My phone buzzed with a dozen texts at once.
Where are you? Are you okay? Why aren’t you with Gran? Where are you, where are you, where are you?
I hit Mom’s name in my favorites.
“You scared me to death, Laurel, not being where I thought you’d be,” Mom started before even saying hello.
“I’m over at Gran’s house. Thought I should get the mail,” I mumbled.
Silence.
“Oh,” Mom said. “Oh. That’s a good idea.”
“I cleaned the fridge, too,” I said.
“Oh,” she said.
“I’ll come over now.”
“Okay.”
I looked up at the sky, thanking the birds that Mom accepted this excuse as legit. I bumped down Gran’s path on my bike, following the mystery bird’s route on my way to the hospital.
But I didn’t hear him again.
FIELD JOURNAL ENTRY
MAY 8
It didn’t take long for the sameness of the hospital to settle on you like the ache of sitting too long in one position trying to photograph foxes.
Gran had been moved to a step-down unit. She wasn’t any better, but everyone seemed to agree she wasn’t dying. Her brain didn’t register the activity of a person who was walking around yelling at the nightly news and following granddaughters out into the chill spring morning to add birds to a life list. But it hadn’t given up yet, either.
“Heard the bird again, Gran,” I said during my afternoon with her. “Still couldn’t get a look at him. It was getting dark, though. I’ll go back. I think he likes your yard. Probably because you are so close to the pond and woods and stuff. But he’s clearly a canopy bird, which helps with behavior identification if not so much with visuals.”
Gran’s eyelids fluttered.
I leaned in until my nose was almost touching her face.
“Did you hear that?” I asked her. “Did you understand what I said? You’re surviving because of that bird, aren’t you? You must want to know what it is, right? It’s still out here, Gran. We could figure it out. You just have to wake up. Louise could know, Gran, and you wouldn’t. Louise.”
Her arm twitched.
I sat back excitedly. Mom came in then, looking a kind of tired that no amount of Red Bull could touch.
“Mom. Mom! Look!” I leaned toward Gran again. “Maybe we’ll be able to identify a whole new species! Maybe it’s not a pet at all, but some weird lost kakapo! Or, well, something else rare because I think kakapos are flightless.”
Twitch. Flutter.
“See!” I said to Mom. “I think she can hear us!”
Mom sighed.
“Laurel. The doctors talked to us about this. Bodies move, sometimes. It doesn’t mean…”
“But she moved when I said things that would be interesting her.”
“Responses are often involuntary and don’t…”
“But it could mean something, Mom. It could, right?”
Mom looked at me for a second. “Sure, baby. I guess. I just don’t want you to—you know—get your hopes up.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Just in case.”
“Mom!” I said, aghast. “We can’t think like that!”
“We might have to.” Mom sat down on the opposite side of Gran. “I don’t want to lose her, either. She’s … she’s my world. Always has been. But. The doctors…” She trailed off, staring at all of Gran’s beep-and-click machines. She rubbed the soft, thin skin of Gran’s cheek. “Listen, I wanted to talk to you about Gran’s house.”
“What about it?” I demanded. I checked Gran for signs of similar indignation. She didn’t move.
“Well. Even if she wakes up, I don’t think she’s going to be able to go back there. She’d go to rehab, and maybe a long-term care facility. And then…”
“You are going to put her in a home?” I said. “Like, for old people? She’s barely even seventy!
Or seventy-ish, anyway. Those places aren’t for her. She’d hate it there.”
“Laurel, I’m sorry I brought this up, now. Maybe we should talk about this later,” she said.
“NO. You brought it up now; we talk about it now. I’ll go over there. I’ll do everything. You don’t have to worry about it.” I did so much of it at home, what’s another house? Maybe I could move in there, actually. It’s right next to co-op; it might be better.
“There will be bills to pay, honey. You have to heat a house so pipes don’t freeze in the winter. And property taxes. Houses need to be lived in.”
“Then get rid of ours,” I said. “Winter is ages away. We’ll live at Gran’s, and when she comes home, we can make a bedroom for her in the dining room. No one eats in dining rooms anyway.” I would make this work.
“She is probably going to need ’round-the-clock care.”
The squawk in my head reminded me that this was my fault. “You did it, you did it, you did it,” it called.
“You don’t know that. It hasn’t been that long! She looks way better than she did last week.”
She didn’t. But the lie needed to be told in that moment.
Gran’s eyelids fluttered.
“See!” I said, pointing. “She totally agrees with me.”
“Members of Shunksville city council have been approaching her for months now. They want to develop that area and would give us a great price for the land. It would be enough to make sure she has excellent care. You are just a kid, honey. I know I’ve always put a lot on you because … well, I just have. It’s how it is. This would be too much. You have the bird place and friends and your photography. Those should be your job right now.”
“Since when do you care about my photography?” My voice rose involuntarily.
A nurse peeked her head in. “Um. Everything okay in here?” she said.
“No,” Mom said. “But we’re trying. I’m sorry.”
The nurse looked at Mom, to me, to Gran, and back to Mom again. She smiled at me. “Understood.” She left.
“Let’s go home,” Mom said. “Honey. Again. I’m sorry. I’m not thinking straight these days.”
I sighed. “I know. I’m sorry, too. This all sucks.” The world had flipped over even though I was clinging to the branch of life as I had known it; gravity itself was shaking me hard to let go. I figured I had a better chance of talking Mom out of her stupid “sell Gran’s house” plan if I didn’t yell in the not-quite-intensive care unit.
The Confusion of Laurel Graham Page 4