Olive closed her eyes.
“Do you know where you are, Mrs. Kitteridge?” The voice was getting annoying. “Mrs. Kitteridge, you’re in the hospital.”
Olive opened her eyes. “Oh,” she said. She considered this. “Well, hell’s bells,” she said. The beeping sound continued. “Phooey to you.”
Now a woman leaned down. “Hello? Mrs. Kitteridge?”
Olive said, “It was awful nice. Just awful nice.”
“What was nice, Mrs. Kitteridge?”
“Wherever I was,” said Olive. “Where was I?”
“You were dead.” This was the man’s voice.
Olive kept looking up at the lights. “Did you say I was dead?” she asked.
“That’s right. You had no pulse.”
Olive considered this. “Petunias,” she said, “are such a nuisance.” She said this because she thought the word “deadhead.” To deadhead petunias was a constant job. “Godfrey,” she said, thinking of lavender petunias. “All the time,” she said.
“All the time, what? Mrs. Kitteridge?” This was the woman, who kept appearing and then disappearing.
“Petunias,” said Olive.
And then the voices lessened, they were chatting among themselves, and the beeping sound continued. “Can’t you get that to stop?” Olive asked the ceiling.
The woman’s face, a plain face, came back into view. “Get what to stop?”
“That beep-beep-beep-beep.” Olive tried to figure out who this woman was; there was something familiar about her.
“That’s the heart monitor, Mrs. Kitteridge. That lets us know your heart is beating.”
“Well, turn it off,” said Olive. “Who gives a damn?”
“We do, Mrs. Kitteridge.”
Olive thought through everything that had happened so far. “Oh,” she said. And then she said, “Oh, shit. Honest to Christ,” she said. “For fuck’s sake.” The woman’s face went away. “Yoo-hoo,” said Olive. “Hey, yoo-hoo. Excuse me, I have no idea why I said ‘shit.’ I never say ‘shit.’ I hate the word ‘shit.’ ” No one seemed to hear this, though she could hear voices nearby. “All right,” said Olive, “I’m going back now.” She closed her eyes, but the beeping continued. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said.
The man’s face returned. Olive liked the man better than the woman. He said, “What is the last thing you remember?”
Olive thought about this. “Well,” she said, “I can’t say. What should I say?”
“You’re doing fine,” the man said.
What a nice man. “Thank you,” Olive said. Then she said, “I would like to go back now, please.”
The man said, “I’m afraid you won’t be going home for a while, Mrs. Kitteridge. You’ve had a heart attack. Do you understand?”
When she woke up next, a different man was there; he seemed almost a boy. “Hello,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Jeff,” said the fellow. “I’m a nurse.”
“Hello, Jeff,” said Olive. “Now tell me why I’m here.”
“You had a heart attack.” The fellow shook his head sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”
Olive moved her eyes to look around. There were many machines, and many little lights, and still that beeping noise. Then she looked at her arm and saw there were things attached to it. Her throat felt funny, kind of achy. She looked back at the boy. “Uh-oh,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, with a shrug. “I’m so sorry.”
Olive pondered this a while. “Well, it’s not your fault,” she said. The boy had brown eyes, and long eyelashes. A lovely young man.
“Oh, I know,” he said.
“What’s your name again?”
“Jeff.”
“Jeff. Okay, Jeff. How long do you think I’ll be in here?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t even think the doctor knows.” Jeff was sitting in a chair, she realized, that was pulled up right next to the bed she was lying on.
She looked around, without raising her head. “Am I alone?” she asked.
“No. You have two roommates. You’re in the ICU.”
“Oh hell.” After a moment Olive said, “Who are the roommates? Are they men?”
“No. Women.”
“Can they hear me?”
Jeff turned his head, as though to look at someone. He turned back and said, “Dunno.”
Olive closed her eyes. “I’m very tired,” she said. She heard the chair being pushed back. Don’t go, she wanted to say, but she was too tired to say it.
When she next woke, her son, Christopher, was sitting by her bed. “Christopher?” she said.
“Mom.” He put his hands in front of his face. “Oh, Mommy,” he said, “you scared me to death.”
This was more confusing to Olive than anything that had happened so far. “Are you real?” she asked.
Her son’s hands came away from his face. “Oh, Mommy, say something else. Oh please don’t have lost your mind!”
For a few moments Olive was silent; she had to gather her thoughts. Then she said, “Hello, Chris. I haven’t lost my mind at all. I’ve—apparently—had a heart attack, and you have—apparently—come to see me.” When he didn’t say anything, she demanded, “Well? Did I get it right?”
Her son nodded. “But you scared me, Mom. They said you were swearing. And I thought, Oh God, she was swearing? Then she’s gone absolutely dippy, and I thought, I’d rather she be dead than dippy.”
“I was swearing?” Olive asked. “What kind of swearing?”
“I don’t know, Mom. But they got a kick out of it. When I asked, they just laughed and wouldn’t tell me, just that you were really angry.”
Olive considered this. Her son’s face seemed quite old to her. She said, “Well, never mind. I was someplace gorgeous, Chris, and then they brought me back here and I guess I was mad, I don’t remember, but ask me anything and I’ll show you I’m not dippy. God, I hope to hell I’m not dippy.”
“No, you sound better. You sound like yourself. Mom, they said you were dead.”
“Isn’t that interesting,” Olive said. “I think that’s awful interesting.”
Dr. Rabolinski held her hand when he spoke to her; she did not remember that he had done that before. But his hand was smooth and yet a man’s hand, and he held her hand in both of his, or sometimes just one of his hands would hold one of hers as he spoke to her. He had glasses that were fairly thick, yet she could see his eyes behind them; dark and penetrating, they looked at her as he spoke, holding her hand. She was a strong woman, he said, and gave her hand a little squeeze. She’d had a stent put into her artery, he said. She had been intubated; Olive did not know what that meant, and she did not ask. He told her again that she had had a heart attack in the driveway of the woman who cut her hair. She had fallen forward onto her car horn, so the woman came right out and called 911 immediately, and this was why Olive was alive, even though she had had no pulse when they came to get her. But they had brought her back to life.
Looking into Dr. Rabolinski’s eyes while he held her hand, Olive said thoughtfully, “Well, I don’t know if that was such a good idea.”
The man sighed. He shook his head slowly. “What can I say,” he said, sadly.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing to say to that.”
She had fallen in love with him.
Olive stayed on in the ICU unit; pneumonia arrived because of the intubation. These were days when she knew very little of what was happening to her, she had the sense that she was a huge chunk of smelly cheese and every so often someone seemed to mop her up, turning her one way, then the other. She drifted in and out of sleep, and then she seemed to not be able to sleep at all. A deep sadness gripped her, and she could only stare at the ceiling, or try to talk to Christopher—who showed up, she thought, quite a lot�
��sitting by her bed, talking to her, sometimes looking so anxious that she wanted to say, “Please go now,” but she didn’t say it, she was old and tired and her son was there to be with her. It seemed to her to be one of the few times in her life when she didn’t say what she thought. But when he wasn’t there her sadness deepened, and she understood after a while that she was probably not going to die, but that her life would be very different.
She said this quietly to Dr. Rabolinski when he came to see her and sat on the bed and held her hand. “Your life is going to be very much what it used to be,” he said to her. “You just need to recover, and you will.”
“Ay-yuh,” she said, and she pulled her hand away.
But he stayed seated. Oh, what a nice man he was. She flopped her hand back over to where he could hold it again if he wanted to, but he didn’t, and in her foggy state she understood that she had made it impossible for him to do so.
“Hold my hand,” she said. “I like it when you hold my hand.” And so he held her hand again, and told her that she was being given intravenous antibiotics and they were helping and soon she would be out of here.
And then she was out of there, and into a regular hospital room. She stayed in the hospital room for a few days, later she found out it had been seven days, and when she thought of it she thought it had seemed longer than that, and also shorter. In other words, time had become something different. She was moved to a room where her bed looked out a window onto the trees—it was autumn and she watched the maple leaves fall off one by one, sometimes two or three of them would flutter downward—and she liked that. She didn’t like the woman she shared the room with, and she asked that the curtain be drawn between the two beds, and someone did that for her, and Olive said, “Now let it stay that way.”
At night it seemed to her she did not sleep and yet she did not seem to care, or perhaps she did sleep; Christopher had brought her little transistor radio to the hospital for her and she clung to it, held it to her cheek, like it was a stuffed animal and she was a child. In the early mornings, she watched it get light through the window and the sky was astonishing as it changed from pale gray to rose to blue; it backlit the tree tops and then penetrated them; Olive really felt astonished by this. Beautiful! And then—so early the sun had barely come up—Dr. Rabolinski appeared, saying, “Hello, Olive, how’s my favorite patient today?”
“Oh hell,” she answered, “I want to go home.” Except she didn’t want to, because she was in love with this man. Privately the shame of this seared her. But she could do nothing about it.
When he asked if she had moved her bowels, she almost died. “No,” she said, looking away. When he asked if she had broken wind, she said, “Don’t know.” And he said, Okay, but let him know when this happened. He sat down on the bed and took her hand. He said she was doing very well, that she could go home in a few days.
“I’m an eighty-three-year-old woman,” she said, looking at him. His eyes behind his thick glasses looked back at her.
And he shrugged and said, “In my world, that’s a baby.”
But when they brought in the breakfast trays and the hospital day started she would become querulous and want to go home. Christopher—who had returned briefly to his home in New York City but was now back—showed up, sometimes while she was poking at her scrambled eggs, or sometimes later, but he looked tired, and she worried about him. “I’ve arranged for home healthcare,” he said to her. “Someone will be with you around the clock for the first two weeks.”
“I don’t need that,” Olive told him. “Phooey.”
But truthfully, the idea of being alone in her house made her afraid.
In the afternoon, the nurse Jeff came to see her before he started his duty in the ICU. “Hello, hello,” she told him. “I’ve been walking around the halls, I’m ready to go home.”
“You’re amazing,” he said. And one time he took her arm as she walked the halls with him, her cane in her other hand.
“So are you,” she said.
Dr. Rabolinski asked her again if she had moved her bowels, and she considered lying about it, but she did not. “Nope,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You will.”
And then that afternoon—oh ye gods! Olive broke wind, and broke it some more, and then she began to leak from her back end. She didn’t understand at first what was happening, but as she raised herself from the bed, she stared at the mess that was there. She rang for the nurse. The nurse did not come. She rang again. The nurse finally arrived and said, “Oh dear.” And that made Olive feel worse.
“I should say so,” Olive said. “This is horrible.”
“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “It happens.”
“It does?” Olive demanded, and the nurse said, Yes, sometimes it did, it was the antibiotics she’d been on for her pneumonia, let’s get you into the shower and she’d change the bed, and when Olive came out of the shower the bed was changed and on the bed was a huge papery diaper.
When Dr. Rabolinski showed up the next morning, Olive waited to see if he had heard of her horror, and when he did not mention it, she finally said, “My bowels moved with a frightful ferocity.” She made herself look at him when she said that. He said, “It’s the antibiotics,” and gave a small shrug. So she relaxed a tiny bit and asked when she could go home, and he said, Any day now. He sat on the bed after that, without saying anything, and Olive gazed out the window. For a few moments she felt something close to bliss, but it was more as though time had stopped—just for these few moments time had stopped—and there was only the doctor and life, and it sat with her in the morning sunshine that fell over the bed. She put her hand on his briefly, and still looking out the window she said, quietly, “Thank you,” and he said, quietly, “You’re welcome.”
Back home, Olive felt awful. She couldn’t understand how she had lived in this house—Jack’s house—for so many years, it seemed very different to her, and she worried that it would always feel that way. It was chilly, and she turned the heat up high, which she had never done before. The living room seemed huge, she felt she could barely walk across it, and she slept in the guest room downstairs. But Betty showed up—the first home healthcare aide—and she was a big person. Not fat, just big. Her maroon cotton pants were tight on her, her shirt barely closed; she was probably fifty years old. She sat down immediately in a chair. “What’s up?” she asked Olive, and Olive didn’t care for that.
“I’ve had a heart attack and apparently you’re supposed to babysit me.”
“Don’t know that I’d call it that,” Betty said. “I’m a nurse’s aide.”
“Fine,” said Olive. “Call yourself whatever you want. You’re still here to babysit me.”
When Olive, walking to the kitchen a few minutes later, looked out the window at the truck that Betty had driven over in and saw on the back of it a bumper sticker for that horrible orange-haired man who was president, she almost died. She took a deep breath and walked back to where Betty sat, and she said to Betty, loudly, “Listen to me. We will not talk about politics. Do you hear me?” And Betty shrugged and said, “Okay, whatever.” Olive shuddered every time she thought about that bumper sticker.
But after a few days of Betty, Olive sort of got used to her. It turned out that Olive had had the woman years ago in Olive’s seventh-grade math class; she had forgotten until Betty reminded her. “You sent me to the principal’s office a lot,” Betty said.
“Why?” Olive asked. “What could you have done?”
“I wouldn’t stop talking in class. I was mouthy.”
“And I sent you to the principal’s office?”
Betty nodded. “I’d do it on purpose. I had such a crush on him.”
Olive watched her from across the room.
“Oh, did I have a crush on that man,” Betty said. “Mr. Skyler. Whoa.”
“Jerry Skyler,”
said Olive. “He was a nice man, I liked him myself. He’d always say to people, ‘You’re doin’ excellent.’ He’d been a coach.”
Betty laughed. “You’re right! He’d always say that. Well, I really liked him. You know, I was skinny back then,” and she ran her hand down in front of herself. “And kind of cute. And I think he thought I was kind of cute. Who knows. But, boy, I was crazy about that guy.” Betty shook her head slowly, then pointed a finger at Olive and said, “You’re doin’ excellent.”
At four o’clock a different woman would show up; her name was Jane, and she was pleasant but Olive found her bland. Jane made dinner for her, and Olive told her she would like to be alone, so Jane went upstairs. And then when Olive woke up in the morning yet another woman was there, but she left soon and Betty came back.
A few days later, around four o’clock—when it was time for Jane to show up—Betty answered the door, and Olive heard her say “Hello,” but she heard something different in Betty’s voice, it was not as pleasant as it usually was. Olive got up and walked out into the hallway, and standing there was a young dark-skinned woman wearing a brilliant peach-colored headscarf, and a long robelike dress that was a deeper peach color. “Well, hello, hello,” said Olive. “Look at you! You look like a butterfly, come on in.”
The young woman smiled, a row of brilliant white teeth showing across her face. “Hello, Mrs. Kitteridge,” she said. “My name is Halima.”
“Well, just come right on in. Very nice to meet you,” Olive said, and the woman came into the living room and looked around and she said, “A big house.”
“Too big,” Olive said. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Betty left, without saying a word, and Olive was disgusted by that. But Halima took right over; she got to work in the kitchen, asking Olive what she ate, and then she made the bed in the guest room, even though it was five o’clock, while Olive sat in the living room.
“Come sit,” Olive finally called to the woman, and so the woman came in and sat down and Olive thought again that she looked beautiful. “I’m going to call you Butterfly,” Olive said, and the woman smiled with those bright white teeth and shrugged and said, “Okay, but my name is Halima.”
Olive, Again (ARC) Page 24