Eating With the Angels

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Signora Marinello hove into view, her body straining to get out of its uniform, her face beaming with its usual mixture of joy and concern.

  ‘Good morning, my love,’ she said, and replaced my pillow. I felt her lift my head, then lay it gently back down again. I heard the crunch of the crisp hospital pillowcase. It all seemed very life-like. Very recognisable.

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked her.

  ‘Constanzia, you are in hospital. You have hurt your —’

  ‘Yes,’ I interrupted even though it took longer to say than it should have. ‘I’ve hurt my head. I’ve been in a coma. I know that. But am I —’ I lost the thread but picked it up again, ‘am I in Venice?’ My tongue felt stiff and unfamiliar, my voice was a dull flat monotone.

  Signora Marinello stroked my arm, her face full of concern. ‘You in St Vincent’s Hospital in New York, Constanzia. You been here nearly three weeks. You fall and hit your head, my love, hurt your brain, but she is getting better now.’ Her hand moved up to my forehead, which I hadn’t realised was burning until the dry coolness of her palm soothed it.

  Three weeks? I should have been surprised, horrified, scared witless, but then again I had known that time had not been passing in the usual fashion. Still, three weeks. I would be in deep shit at work. Had I had any reviews up my sleeve before my vacation? I couldn’t quite remember.

  ‘I fell?’ I asked Signora Marinello. There were so many questions to ask and I couldn’t quite sort out the right order. ‘After I saw you at Do’ Mori? It must have happened on the Giudecca. At the boatyard. I’m not sure. I don’t remember.’

  My words weren’t coming out as crisply as I intended. They were mashed together: bland, with no inflection nor change of tone.

  She shushed me and smoothed the sheets over my chest. ‘Not to worry, Constanzia. Is normal. Not to worry about nothing. You been full of drugs to help your brain, stop her from swelling. She coming down in size now. Not pressing on your skull no more. Time to wake up but slowly.’

  ‘I’ve been asleep for three weeks?’ I was still trying to grasp the concept but it kept slipping away. I knew things had been weird for a while, but how long was a while? That long?

  ‘Oh, no, you been awake for long time,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You just don’t know it. You in a coma five, six days, then we start to wake you up, every day a little bit more but not every day you remember. Same with everybody. Your brain, she is just working a little bit at a time. Not to worry, Constanzia. Is normal.’

  ‘What day is it today?’ I asked her.

  ‘Is Wednesday,’ she replied.

  ‘Wednesday,’ I repeated, ‘Wednesday.’ I looked at the clock on the wall opposite my bed. It was 10 minutes past two. It was 10 minutes past two on Wednesday. Signora Marinello took a chart from the end of the bed and started marking things down on it. I looked around me. It was just like ER only I had my own room. A machine that gave the impression it’d flat-line as soon as look at me hummed to my left, wires sprouting out of it and going somewhere behind me. I was aware suddenly of a scratchiness between my thighs and up deep inside me, a catheter I supposed. I didn’t even want to think about the other business.

  I had a horrible tube going up inside my nose and down my throat, a drip attached to my arm and something clipped to one finger. My body felt foreign. I licked my lips, they were dry and chapped. Swallowing felt alien.

  ‘Is it still Wednesday?’ I asked. Signora Marinello laughed and I looked at the clock. It was 13 minutes past two.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is still Wednesday. You looking very good today, Constanzia. You got some colour back. I think is all downhill from here.’ She followed my gaze to the clock. ‘Your best friend come soon, I think. She always come about now.’

  ‘Fleur?’ My heart thumped with happiness, but Signora shook her head.

  ‘No, not Fleur,’ she said. ‘I don’t know Fleur. No, this best friend is Paris. You know, fancy manager lady.’

  My brain resisted this piece of information, or jumbled it somehow. Mention of Paris threw me off track but before I could ask for clarification, the blonde bobbed woman who’d woken me up with her freaked-out voice strode in the door, her witchy-poo features splitting into a grin as we made eye contact.

  ‘Darling!’ she cried and sashayed her way to the bed, leaning in to nearly kiss me on each cheek with perfectly glossed lips. ‘Emsie, you look fabulous. Doesn’t she look fabulous, Mrs um, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Marinello,’ I said but I couldn’t tell if the bob had heard me.

  ‘And it’s about time, too,’ she prattled on. ‘You’ve had us worried half to death, Emsie, with this whole brain-swelling thing. Why, we thought we’d have to turn the machines off for a while there, didn’t we, erm, Mrs … Anyway not good, darling. Must do better!’

  Why was this strange woman here but my husband nowhere to be seen? I was lost. I looked helplessly at Signora Marinello but she was busying herself with the contents of a huge garbage bag, her generous mouth, I couldn’t help but notice, considerably more pinched than usual.

  ‘Are you allowed to eat yet?’ The bob asked me. ‘Is she allowed to eat yet?’ She turned to Signora Marinello. ‘Don’t want that magical palate of yours to waste away to nothing now, do we?’

  Food! I just about slipped back into a coma at the thought. Was it possible that eating had not crossed my mind in three whole weeks? Surely not. I usually had trouble going three minutes without planning a meal. But I supposed being unconscious must have knocked the edge off my appetite. ‘Am I allowed to eat?’ I asked Signora Marinello.

  ‘Soon, Constanzia,’ she said. ‘Time we got some meat on those bones. Meanwhile we feed you through naso-gastric tube.’

  ‘Please.’ The bob held a perfectly manicured hand up in front of her face to ward off this disgusting detail.

  I lifted one hand to my nose and started to pull on the tube, but Signora Marinello hissed at me to stop.

  The bob looked fit to puke. ‘Don’t,’ she chastised me. ‘It’s revolting.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked her. I really wanted to know and I had been polite long enough but she simply laughed just the sort of tinkly rich woman’s laugh that I would have expected her to have and said: ‘It’s me, Paris!’

  I opened my mouth to tell her to get her skinny little butt off my bed and out of my room but Signora Marinello beat me to it.

  ‘I tell you before, the best thing for Connie’s brain now is rest, Ms Tait. Perhaps you come back tomorrow, hm?’

  Paris, since that’s whom she claimed to be, stood up and straightened her skirt, which could well have been Chanel. I had never seen someone so impeccably groomed. It was vaguely terrifying. She picked up a pale pink pocketbook that matched exactly the pale pink of her suit, her shoes, her nail polish, and her lips.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she breathed as she leaned in to nearly kiss me again. ‘We’ll get you out of here soon enough. Ciao!’

  And with that, she was gone.

  I opened my mouth to have a big long enthusiastic bitch about her, whoever she was, but something in the way Signora Marinello looked at me made me shut it again. She glanced furtively over her shoulder and moved in close to the bed.

  ‘You a nice girl,’ Signora Marinello said quickly. ‘I can tell from when you first come in, you a nice girl.’

  I nodded. I thought I even remembered her saying that.

  ‘And you going to survive, you know, Constanzia? You going to live to be 90. That’s one good brain you got there.’ She took my hand. ‘That brain get plenty more life in her yet. But is no going to be easy. You have to be strong. You have to be strong from now on. For yourself. You understand me?’

  I wasn’t sure that I did, but I squeezed her hand back nonetheless.

  ‘I see a lot of families and friends, Constanzia, standing next to beds just like this one.’ She paused and looked dolefully around the room. ‘But I have to tell you, I seen none so cuckoo as y
ours.’

  At first I thought I must have misheard her but at that moment my mother arrived struggling under the weight of a six-feet wide flower arrangement that spelled out GRANDAD.

  ‘Twelve dollars from the undertaker down the road,’ she told Signora Marinello without so much as looking at me. ‘Apparently, he wasn’t dead after all. And these colours! Who could resist?’

  The point my nurse had just made thus perfectly illustrated, we acknowledged it with a silent glance.

  And then I turned to my mother. ‘Mom,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Well, of course it is,’ my mother answered, irritably. ‘Who else would it be?’

  Seven

  Other people might have suspected they were still in cloud cuckooland — a dark-eyed midget bearing someone else’s funeral wreath coming in and showering their broken mind and body with pinched-lip disapproval — but for me, it was confirmation that I was in fact alive and things were returning to normal.

  ‘I take my break now,’ Signora Marinello said. ‘You tell Lois next door if you need anything.’ She gave me a look that I assumed referred to her ‘be strong’ lecture and her white shoes squeaked their way across the linoleum, out the door and into the hallway.

  ‘So, you’ve decided to join us for real,’ my mother said, pulling a chair closer and dragging a lurid collection of knitting yarn out of her bag. ‘It’s about time.’

  ‘I’m still not 100 per cent sure what is for real,’ I said, although I was definitely starting to get the picture. ‘If you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’ve never known what you mean,’ she said, her needles clacking. ‘Your father’s in a terrible state. He couldn’t even come back to the hospital after the first time when your face was all puffed up and those staples were sticking out of your head. He couldn’t eat for a week. I made him my special coq au vin and everything. Not one single bite.’

  I thanked God, just briefly, for only being able to ingest nutrition through a pipe in my nose. Mom’s coq au vin was made with turkey instead of coq and grapefruit juice instead of vin. It was truly, truly vile. Still, for Pop to have been rendered unable to stomach it? Well, I had seen him dive into the hideous mess on at least half-a-dozen prior occasions so he must have been seriously out of whack to risk offending her by refusing it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ I said and I was too. Winding up in a coma was hardly likely to prove a step forward in our troubled mother-daughter relationship.

  ‘Oh, you’re always sorry, Mary-Constance,’ she replied.

  She was right, I was always sorry — she demanded it of me. And half the time I didn’t even know what I was sorry for. Now these may seem kind of depressing thoughts to be having, but the good news was I felt very clear about them. There was no pea-souper clouding my head as far as Mom was concerned and for that, if nothing else, I was thankful.

  ‘As for Emmet,’ she said, caressing the name of her son with a special velvety tone, ‘well, if there was anything your brother could have done for you, he would have. In an instant, Mary-Constance. Without a moment’s hesitation. Not a one.’

  I closed my eyes. I knew what this was about too. I did know what I was supposed to be sorry for. I had been supposed to be sorry for it for quite some time — approximately a third of my life, in fact. Clearly, there was nothing wrong with my memory and I felt happy at least in that knowledge. I just couldn’t believe that our first real conversation after my being in a coma was going to refer to this piece of ancient history that my mother wore around her neck like a barbed-wire garrotte.

  Some years before, when I was about 21, my idiot brother Emmet, who really can be a class-A peckerhead, got it into his noodle that he was dying of kidney disease and in need of an organ transplant. Why my mother got sucked into this drama without, oh, I don’t know, talking to a doctor, for example, I’ll never understand but she took it hard. Like most only sons, he was the apple of her eye. She’d waited less than three months after giving birth to me to fall pregnant again, this time bearing a boy, a real boy, a real spoiled boy. She didn’t spot his rotten core at all even though the rest of the human race could smell it a mile off.

  ‘I’m too old,’ she told me, her voice all gluey with crying, when she broke the news about his kidney over the phone. ‘And your father vomits at the sight of blood. We’ve talked it over and decided it has to be you, Mary-Constance,’ she said. ‘It just has to be you.’

  ‘It has to be me what?’ I asked, not following her. Emmet had created enough storms in enough teacups throughout our childhood and early adulthood for me to know that this too would blow over and most likely be drug-related like all his other dramas. My role had always been to placate the parents and take the heat while Emmet got his shit together. It was not a role I had chosen, but it was the sisterly thing to do. It kept the peace and in our family peace was a precious commodity: you paid whatever the price.

  ‘It has to be you that gives him a kidney of course,’ my mother said impatiently. ‘Your best one, too. Don’t you go fobbing him off with anything shrunken or lop-sided.’

  I had been stunned. She could stun me like nobody else on the planet, that woman. Did I even have a spare kidney to give, I wondered? I did a quick check of things I had learned in biology class. One heart, one liver, two lungs, one large-capacity stomach, yup, two kidneys. But did I really want to give a body part, even if it was a spare, to a lame brain who lived on cheap pharmaceuticals and McDonald’s?

  I had only just ever-so-fleetingly touched on this thought when I heard a sharp intake of breath from my mother on the other end of the telephone line. She is the only person I know who can inhale with venom.

  ‘Mary-Constance,’ she said, her tears dried and her voice shrivelled with whatever it was I always brought out in her, ‘to think that I raised you to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Where did I go so wrong? What did I do to deserve it? Why, Mary-Constance, just tell me, why?’

  I was used to these theatrics. She had employed them my whole life and I had learned to simply sidestep her and let it play out the way she wanted it to. ‘What exactly have I done, Mom?’

  ‘You know exactly what you’ve done and you will have to live with it for the rest of your life, Mary-Constance. May God — and I mean this, I really do even though many others would not show such charity — may God have mercy on your soul.’

  At times like that I seriously wondered if my mother’s mental health was as it should be. I had tried to talk to my father about it once, about that kind of low-level hysteria she practised around the clock, but he had waved me off, telling me she was grand, that she just liked to jazz things up a bit.

  ‘Mom,’ I sighed. ‘I didn’t do anything. I was just thinking about Emmet’s kidneys.’

  ‘That wasn’t thinking,’ she said. And I could tell the clincher was waiting around the corner, idling, about to throttle off and run me down, then back up over me again, finish the job. ‘That was hesitating,’ she hissed. ‘You hesitated. Over a life-and-death matter, you hesitated. My only son. Your own flesh and blood. Well, may God forgive you, Mary-Constance. May He in His infinite wisdom forgive you.’ And then, dial tone.

  Extraordinary. But that was not the end of it. Oh no, not by a long stretch. Even though later that same day it became clear that Emmet’s life-threatening condition was no more than severe constipation brought on by Percodan abuse, my mother never forgave me. That alleged hesitation had haunted me for well over a decade and haunted me still, lying there in that hospital bed, my brain recently all swelled up and my head apparently held together by unsightly staples.

  ‘If Emmet offers to donate me his brain,’ I told my mother, ‘please tell him I said thank you but no.’

  Traditionally, flippancy had been an ill-considered weapon in the tango we tripped but the quip was out of my mouth before I had even thought to wrangle it.

  Mom stopped her knitting and shot me her level-one disappointment look. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you came ba
ck mean. They told me some came back mean and I have to tell you Mary-Constance it made my blood run cold because I knew that if mean was an option, you would take it.’ She rustled in her knitting bag and pulled out a little medal on a blue ribbon, the sort of thing the nuns give you on their namesakes’ feast days. ‘By the way, you should be wearing this,’ she said, pinning it on my gown.

  I took a look. It was St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

  I sank back on my pillows, closed my eyes and let sleep lure me out of her clutches. It was blissful.

  I drifted in and out of this delightful state until the next morning, when I woke up properly and thought it might be Thursday — and I was right. Signora Marinello seemed just as pleased as I was at this minor triumph, beaming at me as though I had just solved the world’s most complicated mathematical equation.

  ‘I tell you,’ she said, ‘is all downhill from now. Trust me.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘By the way, I take the nasty saint man off your chest and put him in the bathroom. He no good. Me, I like Honorius, patron saint of pastry-makers. You heard of him? You like pie, Constanzia? Anyway, because you do so well, I wash your hair.’

  Until she said that it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder what a fright I must look. My hands moved slowly up to my head. I don’t know what shocked me most, the collection of bumps and ridges on either side of a fat slice above my right temple, or my hair.

  ‘How did this happen?’ I asked Signora Marinello, dazed.

  ‘You fall and hit your head,’ she said. ‘Your brain is damaged but your surgeon cut open that part of your head and remove a blood clot. Is called a craniotomy. You very lucky, Constanzia, to have a good surgeon. The best.’