Unbreathed Memories

by Marcia Talley

  Mother gazed at the spectacle of her youngest daughter with sad eyes. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  Georgina, who must have noticed our mother beginning to cry, ignored it. “And that part about my having been a happy child is a crock! I wanted to die, Mother!” She slumped back against the doorjamb. “Sometimes I just wanted to die.”

  Mother rose from her chair, supporting herself by holding on to the table. “Why did you tell the police that your father abused you, Georgina? I just want to understand.”

  “Because he did!”

  “How can you say these terrible things about your father? He never harmed a hair on your head.” She turned to me. “Tell her, Hannah!”

  But Georgina didn’t give me the chance. “You can believe that lie if you want to, Mother. But it happened. I was molested. And your denial is not going to change that fact!”

  Mother took a step toward my sister, her arms outstretched. “Georgina …”

  But Georgina backed away. I stood there, helpless, wanting to intervene but not knowing what to say. When Georgina spoke again, her voice was laced with venom. “The day I came home from the hospital after getting my tonsils out, Daddy came into my room, ripped the covers off my bed, and raped me.”

  Mother fell back against the table. “Oh, my God!” Mother’s eyes were pleading. “How can she say that, Hannah?”

  “Georgina!” I grabbed her arm and squeezed it, hard. “Stop it! Can’t you see how much you’re upsetting her?”

  “She’s upset! Ha!” Georgina leaned toward Mother, pulling away from me. “You were supposed to protect me, Mother, but you didn’t. You just stood by and let it happen. You had to have heard my screams.”

  Mother’s eyes had not left my face. Suddenly she moaned and slipped to the floor.

  “Mother!” I let go of Georgina, rushed to Mother’s side, and knelt down. Perhaps she had fainted. I grabbed Mother’s hand and rubbed it briskly, trying to coax some warmth back into it. “Mother!” The tips of her fingers were blue, and so were her lips. What was happening?

  “Oh, God, Georgina. Call nine-one-one! I think she’s having a heart attack.” I desperately tried to remember what I had learned in CPR. I felt for a pulse in my mother’s neck. At first there was nothing, no movement at all under my fingers. Then I felt a flutter. Then another. But Mother remained unconscious, and her hands were cold, so very cold. I looked around the kitchen for something to throw over her. Georgina hadn’t moved, but was backed up against the wall, her eyes wild with panic.

  “Give me your coat, Georgina.” Georgina seemed frozen. “Give me your coat!” I screamed. “And call nine-one-one. Now!”

  Georgina snapped out of her daze, slipped out of her coat, and threw it to me. I laid it over my mother, tucking it around her sides to separate her body from the cold floor. Behind me I could hear Georgina, stirred to action at last, giving our address to the operator. In less than two minutes, I heard the reassuring wail of an ambulance coming from the fire station a short distance away.

  When I looked again, Georgina was sitting on the floor under the telephone, her knees to her chin, rocking back and forth, wailing. I kept checking Mother’s pulse, praying that her heart would keep going until the ambulance arrived. “Mother,” I crooned. “Hang in there. You’re going to be all right. The ambulance is coming. I can hear it now.”

  “It’s all my fault!” Georgina wailed behind me. Great sobs racked her body. She buried her face against her knees. “She’s going to die, and it’s all my fault!”

  I had to agree that it was Georgina’s fault, but I didn’t see how it would help the situation to tell her so. I stroked my mother’s cheek and continued to speak soothingly to her. The world had telescoped to just me and my mother on a cold kitchen floor. “They’re coming, Mother. You’re going to be fine.”

  I turned to Georgina. “Go open the front door.” She raised her head and looked at me, streaks of mascara running down her cheeks. “Now!”

  Georgina crawled to her feet and scrambled out of the room, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. I heard the front door open and, a few seconds later, the thump of heavy shoes clumping across the dining room.

  Two paramedics burst into the kitchen carrying a stretcher on which were balanced several pieces of boxlike equipment. I stood and moved away from my mother’s side. “I think she’s having a heart attack,” I said. “She’s got a pulse, but it’s very weak and irregular.”

  I stood by, helpless, while the older of the two took her pulse, nodded to his colleague, and with swift efficiency, hooked Mother up to one of the boxes—a heart monitor. He flipped a switch and studied the digital display for a few moments. “V-tach,” he muttered. “We need to shock her out of it, pronto!”

  I was aware of Georgina behind me when I heard her ragged breathing. We watched silently while the paramedic ripped my mother’s shirt open and tore it away from her chest. A single button popped and rolled away across the floor. I followed it with my eyes until I lost it under the refrigerator.

  The younger paramedic, his hair cut in a blond buzz, squeezed gel from a tube onto a pair of electric paddles, then rubbed the paddles together vigorously. He laid them against my mother’s bare chest.

  “Clear,” the older one shouted.

  Mother’s body arched and fell.

  He consulted the monitor, then shook his head. “Again. Clear.” I watched the electricity course though my mother once more.

  What he saw on the monitor this time pleased him. “Better,” he said. He looked up at me. “We’ll need to take her to the hospital and get her stabilized.”

  I nodded, numb. “Can I go with her in the ambulance?”

  The blond one nodded.

  While they bundled Mother onto the stretcher, I turned to Georgina. “Go around the corner to Galway Bay and find Daddy and Paul. Tell them what’s happened. Ask them to meet us at the hospital.”

  Georgina nodded, mutely, picked up her coat from the floor, and disappeared through the back door. I trailed after the stretcher as the paramedics carried it through the dining room, into the hall, and down the front steps. Outside our house, the ambulance had drawn a small crowd. A clump of tourists clustered across the street on the sidewalk in front of the William Paca House, gawking. I barely noticed. I climbed into the ambulance and held my mother’s hand, still cold, as the ambulance screamed down Prince George to College Avenue.

  Everything was a blur after that. I remember the bright lights of the emergency room as they wheeled Mother through the automatic doors and away from me. I remember a nurse asking me questions. Name. Address. Next of kin. I didn’t break down until they asked for her social security number. “How the hell am I supposed to know that?” I shouted at the nurse. She handed me a tissue and waited, her fingers poised patiently over her keyboard, until I had calmed down enough to continue. “My father will be here soon,” I assured her. “He’ll know.”

  After about ten minutes, Daddy burst through the door with Paul at his heels. An orderly was just passing, an instrument tray covered with green surgical cloth in his hand. Daddy grabbed his arm. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Where’s my wife?”

  “Daddy!” I ran to his side. “They’re taking care of her in there.” I pointed toward one of the emergency cubicles. “She’s got an irregular heart rhythm, Daddy. Ventricular tachycardia, someone said.”

  Daddy rushed off in the direction I had pointed, but Paul hurried after him, stopping him short with a hand on his shoulder. “George, come on. Let’s sit down. I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.”

  Daddy shrugged Paul’s hand away. “I need to see her. She needs to know I’m here.”

  Paul approached the nurse I had just been speaking to. “This is Captain Armstrong. His wife’s just been brought in. Can he see her?”

  The nurse looked up from her computer screen. “I’ll find out for you.” She tapped a number into the telephone, whispered into it, listened for a while, nodded, and hu
ng up. “Please have a seat. Someone will be out to see you in a few minutes.”

  “Oh, God!” I threw myself at Paul and melted into the circle of his arms. “That sounds bad, Paul.”

  He led me to a chair, then sat down next to me. Daddy refused to sit. Straight-backed and sober, he continued pacing. “Tell me what happened,” Paul asked me. “Georgina was hysterical. I couldn’t get a sensible word out of her.”

  So I told him.

  “That little bitch,” he said.

  “It’s not her fault. She’s confused.”

  “That’s no excuse for what she just did to your mother.”

  A doctor wearing a blue shirt and a red tie under his lab coat pushed through the swinging doors. Daddy ambushed him. “How’s my wife, Doctor?”

  The doctor took my father by the arm. “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

  I gripped Paul’s hand in terror, knowing the news couldn’t be good.

  “Your wife’s got an enlarged heart, sir. She’s very weak. We’ll need to keep her here for a while and start her on some medication to stabilize her heart rhythm.”

  “Will she be all right?” I asked.

  “It’s too soon to tell. There appears to be considerable damage to the heart muscle, but with rest and medication, there’s a chance she’ll recover.”

  “What are you doing for her?” Paul inquired.

  “We’ve started her on amiodarone and wheeled her down to the coronary care unit.”

  “When can I see her?” Daddy demanded.

  “Shortly. Be patient. I’ll send for you.”

  As I watched my father’s face, the last word that came to mind was “patient.”

  The next time we saw Mother, she lay on a bed in the coronary care unit in a small glassed-in cubicle near the nurses’ station. An IV disappeared into her arm, a monitor beeped next to her bed, and oxygen hissed through a tube into her nose, but she was awake.

  “Hannah …” she whispered.

  Daddy took up a post next to his wife and held her hand.

  “They say you’re going to be fine, Mother.”

  “What a liar!” Mother managed a weak smile.

  “Your heart’s enlarged,” I told her.

  “I guess this means I have to give up cigarettes again.”

  I looked at Paul. “All is not lost. The woman still has a sense of humor.”

  A nurse appeared. “I’ll give you five more minutes. But she really needs to rest.”

  “Can I stay?” My father’s face was lined with worry.

  The nurse softened. “Of course. I’ll just bring you a chair.”

  I kissed my mother good-bye, hugged my father, and walked down the corridor to the snack bar, where Paul bought us each a coffee. I was halfway through it before I thought to ask. “Where’s Georgina?”

  “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  I knew Paul was just trying to cheer me up, quoting Rhett Butler like that, but suddenly it all came crashing down on me. My mother’s health; my father’s reputation; Georgina’s mental state; my own upcoming surgery; and the mess I had left in the kitchen back home. The floodgates opened. I put my head down on my arms and began to sob. I felt Paul’s hand, soft upon my back, his gentle breath against my ear. “Hannah, Hannah, it’s going to be all right.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I wailed. “It’s all turned to shit! And on top of everything else, I’ve ruined the lasagna.”

  chapter

  15

  The next week was a blur. Just when we thought everything was going well, Mother’s heart went wild again and she had to be shocked back to life. Soon after that, her doctor transferred her by ambulance from Anne Arundel Medical Center to the coronary care unit at University Hospital in Baltimore. I spent my mornings at St. John’s, trying to lose myself in the worlds L. K. Bromley had created. The afternoons were spent visiting my mother. Daddy was at her side day and night. Nobody had seen Georgina.

  All day Monday I tried to contact Ruth in Bali. The only thing I remembered about the resort was that it had “Ubud” in the name, but I recalled that she had found it on the Internet, so it wasn’t long before I came up with a list of possibilities. When I finally found the hotel where “Missy Gannon” was staying, she had already left on a bus trip to Mount Batur and Uluwatu Temple, but a woman with a voice like temple bells promised to deliver my message as soon as the tour group returned.

  Needless to say, I didn’t make it to All Hallows on Wednesday. I telephoned Mindy and told her why. She made sympathetic noises and hoped I’d be back the following week. I said I didn’t know. I was supposed to be having surgery myself.

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Oh, no,” I lied. “Just routine.” I hadn’t mentioned the breast cancer before, so I thought it’d seem a little strange to bring it up now.

  Frankly, I didn’t know what to do about the reconstruction. With Mother so sick, no one could fault me for canceling. But after they moved her to Baltimore, her condition stabilized and it looked like she might be coming home before long.

  Paul encouraged me to go ahead, effectively erasing his prior claim of impartiality. Maybe he’d been looking at the photo of me in the yellow bikini, too. “Your mother couldn’t be in better hands,” he said reasonably. “There’s absolutely nothing you can do for her that isn’t already being done.”

  “But I won’t be able to visit her in the hospital,” I complained.

  “Why don’t you ask her what she thinks,” he suggested.

  So I did. Mother let me know in no uncertain terms that she’d be seriously annoyed if I didn’t go through with my surgery. “It’s the next step in the healing process, Hannah,” she said.

  The nurse had propped Mother up in bed so that I could comb her hair. I took the brush, eased the tangles out of the back where the hair had become matted from rubbing against the pillow, and fluffed up the flyaway wisps that framed her face. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.” She touched my cheek. “You’ve been looking forward to this for so long. You must go ahead with it now.”

  “You won’t miss me?”

  “Of course I’ll miss you, sweetheart. But, trust me, you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t follow through with your plans. And neither will I if you let my little”—she raised the arm that was connected to the IV—“my little inconvenient illness stand in your way.”

  So on Thursday I returned to Anne Arundel Medical Center, where they x-rayed my chest, drew my blood, had me pee into a plastic cup, and pronounced me fit for surgery the following Monday.

  That night, Ruth called collect. Through a poor connection that echoed everything I said into my ear two seconds after I had said it, I explained the situation. When she heard the news, she panicked. She’d book a flight right away; but who would arrange it? Her ticket was nonrefundable; what would she do? She had paid for everything in advance; how would she get her money back? The waiting list for the workshop was two years long; when could she ever come again? I had to put Paul on the phone to calm her down. Eventually we decided that since Mother’s condition had stabilized, Ruth would stay in Bali for the time being. She gave us the number of the hotel’s fax machine and we promised to send her daily progress reports.

  I spent that weekend in Baltimore, reading to Mother from Queens’ Play. Escaping to sixteenth-century France with Dorothy Dunnett’s dashing Scotsman, Crawford of Lymond, was just the diversion we both needed. On Sunday afternoon I laid aside the book, smoothed back her hair, and kissed her forehead, leaving her sleeping peacefully. Take care of her, I prayed. Please take care of her until I get back.

  And I checked myself into the hospital, as planned.

  chapter

  16

  It must have been the clattering of the breakfast carts and a gnawing hunger that awoke me. Gradually I became aware of my surroundings. First the sheets and lightweight blanket in which I was cocooned; the pillow, just one, so my head was lower than I was accustomed to
; the walls, illuminated by the light slanting in from the hallway; a TV mounted high on the wall. Katie Couric was interviewing a dark-haired woman, her mouth working silently.

  I looked toward the window and saw that it was still dark. They’d taken my watch, so I didn’t know what time it was, but if The Today Show was on, it must be at least seven. They’d taken my jewelry, too, but I wouldn’t let them touch my wedding rings, so they’d taped them to my finger with adhesive tape.

  In a chair in the corner, a shadow stirred. “Honey?” Paul must have stayed with me all night. I turned my head on the pillow to face him.

  Paul unfolded from the chair and crossed to my bed. He took my hand where it lay on top of the cover and covered it with both of his.

  I started to shiver. “I’m cold.”

  “It’s just something in the medication they gave you.” He leaned over and covered me with his body, his arms parallel to mine, his lips against my neck. Paul’s face was hot and his ear was cold, as if he’d just come in from outdoors.

  “Morning.” The word stuck in my throat. “God, I’m thirsty!” I pointed toward a cup on the windowsill. “That coffee?”

  Paul smiled. “Was. I finished it last night.”

  “Damn.” I grumped.

  He reached out and drew a finger across my forehead. “You couldn’t have it anyway, sweets. You’re NPO today. Nothing by mouth.”

  Speaking of mouth, it was dry as a desert. I felt as if my last meal had consisted entirely of sand. “That’s cruel and unusual,” I muttered. I listened forlornly as the food cart rumbled past my door without stopping. Pancakes this morning, from the smell of it. And bacon. I nearly wept.

  A nurse appeared, a relentlessly cheerful grandmotherly type I hadn’t seen before carrying a blue foam plastic tray. “Good morning, Mrs. Ives!” Paul straightened and stood by the side of the bed, but didn’t let go of my hand.