“Who do I talk to?” she asked. “You’re a reporter.”
“Alison, you don’t want to draw any more attention to this. Seriously. It’s just junk on the airwaves.”
“If they’re allowed to put junk on the airwaves why can’t I put junk on the airwaves?”
“You can, but it will make it worse. You have to let other people take care of this, Alison. I mean it.”
“I’m not even allowed to say this is bullshit?”
“That makes you sound defensive.”
“Defending myself makes me sound defensive? That’s terrific, Seth, I never thought of it that way! Let’s NOT defend ourselves then. Wouldn’t want anyone thinking that DEFENDING YOURSELF WHEN YOU’RE ATTACKED IS A GOOD IDEA.” He had never seen her like this. The size of her anger was impressive as hell: She was a titan. The idea of wrapping all that up and putting a little bow on it suddenly struck him as the height of absurdity. They don’t know what she is, he realized. They never did.
“You have to let someone else do it,” he started.
“I ASKED you to do it, and you said no,” she retorted. “I think that was like a minute ago, I ASKED you to do it—”
“I can’t do it, because I almost got fired for sexually harassing you, remember?”
“That’s why you should do it!”
“Schaeffer will do it. You don’t even have to ask him. He’s probably already done it.” She was about to spit something back at him, but her complete faith in Schaeffer silenced her. It was weird, and touching. The mere mention of Schaeffer seemed to spark a fragile hope somewhere in her that everything would be all right. Schaeffer to the rescue, he thought. And why not? “He was the one who planted all those pieces that saved my job,” Seth reminded her. “After you almost got me fired for sexually harassing you, which need I remind you I didn’t do.”
“I never said you did!”
“You got me in big trouble.”
“You got yourself in big trouble.”
She was coming back, inch by inch. “Well, Schaeffer is the guy who knows this so-called universe. He was the one who told me about it even being out there, otherwise I probably wouldn’t know anything about it because nobody reads that shit.”
“Everybody reads that shit.”
“They read it, and they know it’s junk,” he said. “No one cares, Alison.”
“If no one cared, they wouldn’t have done it,” she told him. “And I worked so hard for them. I showed up on time. I was nice to the crew. I was polite. I never made a fuss when I got the shittiest trailer, or when they kept fucking with my costumes, or when they were mean to me, I was never rude back—no matter how much shit they threw at me, I was good. I was grateful. I always knew my lines. I flirted with everyone, yes, because you’re supposed to, if I didn’t flirt with everybody, you know what they would say about me? She’s cold. She’s stuck up. And I don’t care—I don’t—but what are they so mad at me for? I was good. Like a good person, good.” The breath of something deeper, a profound disappointment, had entered the room. “And I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’ve done bad things. I have, I’m not . . .” She shook her head, trying to get out from something from the past. He wondered what it was she was trying to forget. “But that wasn’t true here. It wasn’t. And even if people don’t believe what they said, in that stupid article? They’ll believe I did something bad, something that made them hate me. But what was it?”
She had a point. Sadly, not much of one. “Alison, people just do this shit,” he told her. “They don’t care if it’s true or not. They just do it and it makes them feel good and then they go and do other shitty things and that’s the world,” he said.
“That’s not the world,” she said. “You think that? You think that’s the world?” Behind her, the phone rang.
“Yeah, I do,” he admitted. “You can’t answer the phone—Alison—”
“It’s my sister Megan.”
“Family are the worst,” he warned. “They’ll want to talk about it. They’ll want to try and make you feel better, but it will end up making you feel worse.”
“So, like, the only thing I can do for the next three days is hide in my apartment and drink water,” she noted. “That’s great. Five years of starvation and acting like a Barbie doll and and and being nice to the stupid reporters following me everywhere and wearing all those tight dresses and not acting, none of any of that was real acting, and and and now, now nothing. The only thing I can do is nothing. Because it doesn’t matter that I didn’t do anything wrong. I just I just—fuck it. Fuck all of it. I mean seriously, cheers. Cheers, it’s so much fun being a movie star, seriously, it’s a fucking blast.” She picked up her plain little glass of water and toasted him.
On the side table, her cell started buzzing.
“Don’t answer it,” he warned.
“It’s my sister Megan,” she sighed. “It’s fine. I’m just going to get this over with.”
twenty-five
MOM WAS SICK. Dad was out of town, off fishing somewhere in Alaska of all places; all the kids had chipped in and given him this stupid fishing trip for his seventieth birthday. So they were still trying to get ahold of Dad. And Mom was sick. They were operating.
Alison couldn’t tell how sick Mom was—she was only sixty-eight, her health had always been excellent—but the story that Megan told was not so great.
“It’s something in her colon.”
“Something like what kind of something? Like cancer?”
“No, it’s not cancer. It’s, the whole colon shut down.”
“What do you mean, shut down?”
“I don’t know, Alison, it apparently shut down. She was having like a bad stomachache, and she called last night and we took her to the hospital and they did a bunch of tests and then they said they had to operate because there was a blockage.”
“A blockage is cancer.”
“The surgeon said it wasn’t cancer.”
“Who’s the surgeon?”
“Dr. Webster. Weathers. Wiggans. I’m sorry. I’ve been up for thirty-six hours.” You couldn’t get mad at Megan; she sounded exhausted and there was some baby screaming in the background. At a time like this, you couldn’t get mad.
“I’m coming home.”
“I’m not sure that’s, the doctor said she came through the operation pretty good and they think she’ll come off the respirator today—”
“She’s on a respirator? Sorry sorry I’m not yelling, sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t know if you have the money? But if you want to come home for a few days, that would be good.”
“Who’s at the hospital now?”
“Well—no one,” Megan admitted. “But she’s anaesthetized. They said they’d call when she wakes up.”
Of course there were more specifics than that, but they didn’t seem relevant. Alison took a cab out to LaGuardia and got herself on the first plane home.
It was six in the morning. The flight was fluid, effortless, and before she knew it the air around her dinged and the two tired attendants started to sweep the plane for empty water bottles. Alison was so used to the five- and six-hour flights between New York and Los Angeles, it was startling to hear that they were making their descent after little more than an hour in the air. It was nothing, really, to fly to Cincinnati. By the time she climbed into the rental car she found herself focused and increasingly secure. The highways were open, featureless, easy to drive. Thirty minutes later as she turned into the virtually empty hospital parking lot her brain started to unfreeze. Megan hadn’t really been all that upset on the phone, and no one else seemed to think this situation was serious. It was good that somebody came home to help out until Dad was back, but Mom was surely going to be fine.
Her completely fabricated self-confidence hit a roadblock at the front desk, where hospital ambiance hit her like a ton of bricks. It was like a third-rate casting office—the furniture was lousy, the light a horrible shade of green, the assi
stants peculiarly unhelpful. Rose had come in with Megan to the emergency room, and then gone to surgery, after which she was admitted to the hospital proper. Now, apparently, no one knew where she was. The name of her doctor was also not clear. There was a surgeon and an anesthesiologist, but one was off site and the other was making his rounds and was unavailable for consultation. Alison felt a kind of sick panic rise up in her. After months and years of playing the role of a Hollywood starlet, she knew how to smile her way through bullshit and pretend it was all fine. Smile and gush. Smile and be humble. Smile and listen. But the cruel dismissal of a studio exec who thinks you’re nothing and wants you to make sure you know that you’re nothing paled next to this automaton who didn’t seem to care that her mother was lost somewhere in this grimy fluorescent hospital.
The answer to the mystery was finally solved by a call to Megan.
“She’s in the ICU,” Megan announced. “Tell them she’s in the ICU.”
“She’s in the ICU,” Alison told her nemesis, a severe Indian woman in teal scrubs.
“Ohhh, the ICUuuuuuuu.” The nurse—for that is clearly what she was, a middle-aged nurse just doing her best in fatal circumstances—resumed typing. “She is in room B-two, that is on the seventh floor of the Leugers Pavilion.”
The shock of finding your mother alone on a respirator in the intensive care unit of an understaffed Midwest hospital would be significant no matter who you are or what your history with your mother might be. And now Alison was fried. It had taken her twenty minutes to find the room, because the Leugers Pavilion, as it turned out, was inaccessible from the elevators in the main building; you had to take the elevator down the hallway from the front desk to the fourth floor and then walk down another hallway, take a left, and then enter a second elevator bank on the right. The whole complex had clearly been constructed by some sociopath with a complete axe to grind on sick people and their pathetic relatives. Finally she located the ICU on the seventh floor after going down the hallway to the left of the elevator bank and then taking the first right, where you went through multiple sets of doors and found yourself in a giant room with little pods of people full of mysterious and dire purposes, pushing giant machines around.
Rose was indeed on a respirator; she was hooked up to several machines that were beeping and flickering peacefully over the rasp of the machine that was breathing into her. Her hair was matted and her face so distorted around the mouthpiece of the ventilator that there was a terrible moment when Alison wasn’t sure that this was her mom after all. But on approaching the bed, she saw Rose’s hand, the tiny gold engagement ring and wedding ring she had let her children play with so often, never taking it off no matter how many times they begged, but letting them twirl it around her slender fingers. You’ll have one of your own one day, she had promised her daughters. That dream had evaporated for Alison by the time she was ten and had already been so fully identified as the family’s rebel. Rebels don’t get married. They turn into spinsters, or Hollywood starlets. It didn’t matter. Her mother’s hand was shriveled and claw-like, clutching at the institutional bedsheets, without thought or consciousness or even memory. Where was Dad? Did he even know yet, that Mom was here?
Something was going on. Rose started to move, her body contorting and kicking. Alison, now at the bedside, could see that her mother’s arms were held down by restraints.
“Mom, I’m here. It’s Alison. Do you need something? What do you need, Mom?” Asking Rose anything whatsoever was of course absurd, as she could hardly be expected to speak with a huge ventilator shoved in her mouth. “You want me to call the nurse, Mom?” Rose’s struggling body became angular and unpredictable. The too-thin hospital gown which had been tossed over her bare limbs had ridden up one hip and for a moment Alison could see her mother’s exposed pudenda, white, flaccid, old. She covered her quickly and looked around the bed, desperately trying to figure out where the stupid button was to call the nurse. She had only been there thirty seconds and already she was failing. “Nurse! I need a nurse!” she finally yelled. It was what they did on hospital shows; eventually everyone just started shouting.
And of course no nurse came. Alison had to run out to the nurses’ station, where there were the people pods and the machines, and then it took her forever to find someone to help. The one unoccupied nurse she finally located was named Patricia. Patricia was sort of both young and middle-aged, impossible to tell how old she was, actually, a little stocky, with a bouffant hairdo—an actual bouffant, in a hospital!—and she wore a white uniform, as opposed to the colorful scrubs everyone else had on. But her attitude was exactly the same as the Indian nurse at the front desk. That was another way actual hospitals were different from the ones on television. On television, everyone raced around and tried to help. In a real hospital, none of the nurses got all that jacked up about anything at all.
Patricia was nice enough, but she wasn’t giving out any extra information. She messed with Rose’s machines until she stopped thrashing about, and then talked to her like she was six years old. “What are you fussing about, Mrs. Moore? You’re being a bad girl now, if you manage to tear your sutures I’m going to be very upset with you.”
“What is the matter with her?” Alison asked.
“She just had major surgery, for one.”
“I’m her daughter,” Alison announced. Nurse Patricia glanced up at that one but again didn’t have a comment. “I just flew in, my sister was here with her yesterday during the surgery but she had to go home to be with her kids, so I’m really catching up here. I just I don’t know anything about the surgery or or or—I don’t know really anything.”
“Her doctor will be by in about twenty minutes,” Nurse Patricia told her. The machine breathing into Rose reasserted its mechanical rhythm as the unconscious woman’s distress eased itself. The nurse checked her watch to make sure, then nodded: Twenty minutes, that’s how long it would be before the doctor showed up. “He can fill you in.”
“Can’t you fill me in?”
“He’ll have more facts.” And with that she was gone. Alison assumed that Nurse Patricia had adjusted Rose’s pain meds, and it was that which had calmed her mother down. But she didn’t know for sure.
When the doctor didn’t show up after twenty minutes, and then thirty, Alison called Megan.
“The doctor hasn’t shown up yet,” she told her.
“I think they’re pretty understaffed there.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been here an hour and I haven’t spoken to anyone about what happened.”
“I know, it’s frustrating. You should have been there when I brought her in, she was really a mess and no one would even look at her for four hours and then they were all like, rush her to surgery, it was so scary.”
“She doesn’t look good, Megan.” This news fell like bricks tumbling out into the universe. The significance and weight of it floated away as soon as the words were uttered.
Megan sighed. “Well, what do the nurses say?”
“They don’t seem to want to tell me anything.”
“Did you ask?”
“I did, but—”
“You have to ask them really nicely. They’re not supposed to tell you things, but if you are super friendly and polite, usually one or two will let you know a few things, they know a lot.”
“Okay, I’ll try, but—”
“They think that because you’re so young and you’re a girl they don’t have to tell you, they actually think that. When Dad gets home, he’ll be in a better position to take care of things,” Megan promised.
“Have you talked to Dad?”
“They told me they were getting a message to him, up at that fishing lodge, but he hasn’t called yet.”
“Megan, I’m here in the ICU and it doesn’t look good. She looks bad. I think people should come.”
“What people?”
“Everybody,” Alison said. “Jeff and Andrew and, everybody. This is serious.”
Megan wa
s an innate skeptic. Plus, she was exhausted.
“But you haven’t talked to the doctor yet.”
“I can’t find the doctor!”
“Just sit tight. Don’t go to the bathroom. If you miss them, it’s hours before they show up again.”
“YOU CAN’T USE YOUR CELL PHONE IN THE ICU!” Nurse Patricia suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the door behind her, and she was finally worked up.
“I got to go,” Alison muttered, and tapped the phone off.
“You cannot make phone calls in here.” Nurse Patricia was staring at her as if she expected Alison to leave. Alison stared back.
“Yeah, okay, I won’t make any phone calls in here,” she said. She held the phone up and then dropped it into her purse. Pissed, Nurse Patricia went back and checked her mother’s vitals. Alison stepped forward, tentative. “How’s she doing?” she asked. “Is the doctor coming?” Now proving a point, Nurse Patricia silently continued her procedures, checked her watch, and left the room.
I wonder why it’s so easy for me to piss people off, Alison thought. She sat in the chair next to her mom, and reached up and held her hand. Her skin was so fragile, her hand clawed, the knuckles prominent. It was the hand of an old woman.
She had missed seeing her mother growing old. When she started insisting that she couldn’t come to Cincinnati anymore—I don’t have the money, Mom, I have an audition this weekend, I have to be in LA—Rose had done her best to fill in the blanks. She called every week, whether or not Alison called her back. She sent birthday presents, packages full of cookies Alison couldn’t eat and old-fashioned photos of all her kids and grandkids, the ones who actually did make it back to Ohio for Christmas. And Alison had just blocked it all out, let the rift establish itself. Movie stars don’t have families from the Midwest. For a moment Alison had the urge to climb up in that bed and wrap her arms around her mother’s tortured body, give her a hug, hold her, tell her stories, apologize. But she knew that she’d just wreck everything. Nurse Patricia would come in and yell at her. Megan would hear about it and roll her eyes. Besides which, she probably would just yank out Rose’s IVs and kill her. So that was a bad idea. Better just wait for the doctor.
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