In This Small Spot

by Caren Werlinger

  “Whispers?”

  Mother Theodora smiled. “Sometimes God knocks us off our feet with something dramatic, but, in my experience, more often, he simply whispers and waits for us to be quiet enough to hear.”

  Chapter 39

  “How are her vitals?”

  “We need to change the dressing.”

  “Mother, may I have permission to stay?”

  Snatches of conversation filtered through the haze. Accompanying them were other sounds: beeps, rhythmic wheezing, bed rails being raised and lowered. Vaguely, Mickey felt like she could come up out of the haze if she wanted to, like choosing to wake up from a dream, but it was comfortable in the haze, and so she chose to sink back in whenever she got too near the surface.

  Some of the voices were familiar – Jamie, Mother Theodora. She thought she heard Alice’s voice sometimes. “Take me with you, I’m ready,” she tried to say to her.

  Then, in her ear, was Sister Anselma’s voice. “Michele, please don’t leave me.” She didn’t respond at first… not until that plea was repeated, and then reluctantly, she broke through the surface into harsh light.

  Blinking, her eyes had difficulty focusing. Sister Anselma’s face was the first thing she recognized. She tried to speak but couldn’t. Sister Anselma saw the fear in her eyes and said in a calming voice, “Don’t try to talk. You’re hooked up to a ventilator.” Slowly, Mickey realized the ventilator tube was inserted into her trachea with a feeding tube running through her nose as she lay on her side.

  Sister Anselma smoothed Mickey’s hair. “I can’t believe you’re awake,” she murmured, her eyes filling with tears. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t wake up.”

  Mickey tried to lift her hand, but couldn’t. Again, her eyes widened in fear. Sister Anselma held her hand, saying, “They have you restrained. They were afraid you might panic when you woke and start pulling at tubes.”

  Mickey saw then that her hands were tied to the bedrail by soft, padded straps. She mouthed words, hoping Sister Anselma would be able to read her lips.

  “How long?” Sister Anselma interpreted. “Six days. Do you remember what happened?”

  Mickey frowned. “Some,” she mouthed.

  “You came to rescue me from the fire. When you got me near the door, a roof timber fell on you. Some of the sisters carried me out while others got the timber off you and pulled you free.” Her voice cracked as she tried to continue. “Your spine was… your spine was broken in several places and you have serious burns on your back.” She was crying so hard she had to stop. Frustrated by her own inability to communicate, all Mickey could do was squeeze her hand. When Sister Anselma could speak again, she said, “You’ve had two surgeries to fuse your spine, although the doctors argued over whether to do it now because of your burns and the risk of infection.”

  Mickey pointed to the ventilator tube.

  “Your lungs and airways were damaged by the heat and smoke.”

  For a moment, the only sound was the asthmatic pumping of the ventilator. Mickey mouthed more words.

  “How am I?” Sister Anselma’s eyes filled with tears again as she laid a gentle hand on Mickey’s cheek. “I’m all right. I was in the hospital for a couple of days for smoke inhalation and a few small burns, but I’m fine. You saved my life,” she finished in a whisper in between ventilator gasps.

  Just then a nurse saw that Mickey was awake and called for a doctor.

  “Would you wait outside?” said a sixtyish man in a white coat as he entered the room accompanied by three younger men, also in white coats, in addition to the nurse. Pushing their way to the bed, the oldest man said in an overloud voice, “I’m Dr. Atwood. You’ve been injured in a fire and we have you on a breathing machine.”

  “She’s a physician,” Sister Anselma said from behind him.

  “What?” he asked, irritated that she was still there.

  “She’s a physician,” she repeated. “You don’t have to speak to her as if she were an imbecile. And you don’t have to shout at her,” she added with clear disdain.

  The medical students smirked at each other as Dr. Atwood responded with a lame, “Oh.” Raising his bushy eyebrows, he said, “Well then, Doctor, you suffered severe respiratory damage from the fire as well as comminuted fractures of T10 to L5. We’ve done two procedures to internally fixate the fractures and stabilize your spine. We don’t yet know the extent of the neurological damage.”

  He moved to the foot of the bed where Mickey could no longer see him. “Can you move your toes?” She wiggled them. “Did you hear me? Move your toes,” he repeated. Angrily, she wiggled them again.

  “Well,” he said, more to the students than to her, “it’s very early. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  The rhythmic wheeze of the ventilator was the only sound in the room as they left. Sister Anselma came back to the bed and gently wiped away the tear rolling from the corner of Mickey’s eye.

  ╬ ╬ ╬

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but we need to do a dressing change,” said a pleasant-looking nurse as she brought a tray of supplies into Mickey’s hospital room.

  Jamie and Jennifer had come for a visit, along with Mother Theodora, Sister Mary David and Sister Anselma who had been making the trip to Syracuse from the abbey two or three times a week for the past month.

  “May I assist?” Sister Mary David offered. “I’m the abbey’s infirmarian, and I may be doing these dressing changes when Sister Michele returns to St. Bridget’s.”

  “We’ll wait outside,” Mother Theodora said.

  “When did they start the grafts?” Jamie asked as they walked down the hall to the solarium.

  “Just last week,” Mother replied. “They wanted to start them earlier, but the doctors had to be sure she wasn’t going to need any further surgeries on her spine first. It’s a slow process. Apparently, they can only do small areas at a time, as new skin grows back to take for the grafts. Harvesting, they call it.”

  Jennifer shuddered. “That sounds painful.”

  Jamie paced in the solarium. “Why is the ventilator back in her room?” he asked, pausing to look worriedly back down the corridor toward Mickey’s room. “She was being taken off it the last time we were here.”

  “They did take her off,” Sister Anselma said, “but then she got pneumonia and had to be put back on for several days. She just got off it two days ago.”

  A half-hour later, Sister Mary David found them in the solarium.

  “Are you all right?” Jennifer asked when she saw Sister Mary David’s ashen face.

  Sister Mary David sat, raising a trembling hand to her mouth.

  “Sister?” Mother Theodora put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Forgive me, Mother,” Sister Mary David said in a hushed voice. “I wasn’t prepared… I’ve never seen anything like that.” She looked up at Mother Theodora, a horrified expression on her face. “Her entire back, her buttocks, her thighs… what isn’t burned is raw and bloody from taking skin for the grafts. The pain of removing the gauze to clean the wounds…” She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, as if shutting out the image. “I don’t think I can do that to her two or three times a day…”

  “Does she feel it?” Jamie asked, his face pale also. “Aren’t they giving her pain medication?”

  “Yes, but… I don’t think any pain medication is strong enough to… The only sound she made was one whimper…” Sister Mary David reached for a tissue to dry her eyes.

  “She hasn’t said a thing,” Jennifer whispered.

  Sister Anselma stood abruptly and left the solarium. Jennifer followed.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Jennifer suggested when she caught up. Sister Anselma didn’t say anything as Jennifer slipped an arm through hers and steered her out to the landscaped grounds.

  Outside, they found an empty bench in the shade of a large oak tree. They sat in silence for a while. Jennifer watched a bumblebee lazily drifting from flower to flower in a nearby flower bed before final
ly asking, “How are you doing?”

  “What possible difference could that make after what we just heard?” Sister Anselma sat stiffly, staring at her hands which were clenched in her lap.

  “It matters a great deal.” Jennifer watched Sister Anselma’s face carefully as she continued. “Sister Anselma, I don’t know if Mickey told you, but I confronted her a while ago about her feelings for you. She admitted that she’s in love with you, and… she said you love her, too.”

  Sister Anselma’s only reaction was to clench her hands more tightly.

  “I think I have a better understanding now of how careful and guarded you’ve both been,” Jennifer continued, choosing her words with care, “so I would imagine you have had no one you can talk to. We’ve all been worried to death about Mickey, but what about you?”

  Sister Anselma’s stiff, upright posture crumpled and her head bowed.

  “I feel so incredibly guilty,” she admitted in a voice that was barely a whisper.

  “Don’t you think that’s a natural reaction?” Jennifer asked. “But this is Mickey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jennifer turned to look at her. “I’ve known Mickey most of my life, and I know how devoted she was to my sister,” she said. “If she loves you as much as she loved Alice, she would rather have died trying to get you out than to have left you in that fire alone.” Jennifer paused for a moment, then said, “Forgive my prying, but I can’t help but feel a little protective of her. Do you love her that much in return?”

  For the first time, Sister Anselma looked Jennifer in the eye. “Yes.”

  “Enough to leave St. Bridget’s to be with her?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Sister Anselma struggled to explain. “Both of us felt called to monastic life for reasons that we would each need to address first. That is bigger than this – for both of us. I won’t be responsible for pulling her away from her vocation, and I know she feels the same. And then there is the issue of my vows – vows I intended to abide by for the rest of my life. If I can be swayed to ask for dispensation from those now, after all these years, how can I trust myself to make a lifetime commitment to Michele?”

  Jennifer digested these words. “Is there no one in the abbey who can help you work through this? Mother Theodora seems like a very open-minded woman.”

  Sister Anselma closed her eyes and sighed. “Perhaps it is time to be honest with Mother. If she hadn’t guessed about us before, she certainly has by now.”

  Chapter 40

  “Dr. Stewart, we’re going to offer a settlement.”

  Mickey stared at the insurance representative, not sure she had heard correctly. “You can’t be serious,” she said in disbelief.

  “This is not an admission of guilt,” he protested.

  “The hell it isn’t!” she retorted angrily. She leaned forward and stared at him. “I stayed by that kid’s bed for five days, operated three times. What did they want – a miracle?”

  For the first time, this balding fortyish-looking man looked directly at her through his thick glasses, an empathetic expression on his face. “Probably.”

  This had been a horrible trauma case. An eleven-year-old hit by a car while riding his bicycle. The internal damage had been extensive: heart, lungs, viscera.

  “You’ve got to see how this would look to a jury. You’ve got a dead child, grieving parents. It’s not likely they would see you as a bad doctor, but they won’t want to send these parents away with nothing. It’s just the way these cases work. They don’t see the money as coming from you, and they sure don’t care about making an insurance company pay. It’s a matter of minimizing costs.”

  An hour later, Mickey was walking aimlessly. In nearly a decade of medical practice, this was her first malpractice case. Rationally, she knew it was just the way the system worked, but she had poured her heart and soul into that child’s care. “I don’t care what the damned lawyers say, this is personal,” she fumed.

  Suddenly she stopped. This was it. She had been going through the necessary steps to apply for entrance into St. Bridget’s: a detailed physical, copies of her certificates of birth and baptism, letters from Christopher corroborating Mickey’s status as a member of his church – he’d been very happy for her when she finally told him about St. Bridget’s. But still she had been holding back on making the actual decision, waiting for… what? God’s whisper? The one Mother had talked about? “Please give me some kind of sign,” Mickey had prayed so many times over recent months, “something to let me know where you want me to be.” This lawsuit definitely felt like the thing she had been waiting for – a shout more than a whisper. It was time to go.

  Chapter 41

  After nearly ten weeks in the hospital, Mickey was considered stable enough to be transferred to a rehab center to continue her wound care and begin the process of trying to walk again. Her spinal cord had been compressed by the timber that fell on her, but it hadn’t been severed. As a result, the damage to the nerves was intermittent – “Medically, it’s considered an incomplete spinal cord injury,” she had explained to Jamie. “Some of the nerves are normal, some are partially firing and some aren’t working at all. The trick will be to strengthen the muscles that still receive innervation and see if enough of them are working to hold me up.”

  For Mickey, the process was complicated by her lungs and her burns. She required daily sessions with a nebulizer for her respiratory system, but still her ability to breathe deeply was impaired, which left her gasping during her strenuous exercise sessions. Her burns and grafts required ongoing care for application of dressings and creams, and inspections of any areas that might begin breaking down or become infected. To control scarring, she had to be helped into a skin-tight garment that fit like a corset to maintain constant pressure over the grafts.

  The day after Mickey was transferred to the rehab center, Jennifer brought a collection of sweatpants, t-shirts and underwear plus a pair of tennis shoes.

  “Keep going,” Jennifer smiled as Mickey pulled the clothes out of the bag in her lap.

  In the bottom of the bag was a portable CD player with earphones and a small collection of CDs. “Gregorian chants?” Mickey grinned as she leafed through the discs.

  “I thought you might be feeling homesick for St. Bridget’s,” Jennifer said. “And for Sister Anselma?”

  “Oh, Jen,” Mickey sighed, slumping back against her wheelchair, “I miss… everything so much. That’s the hardest part, harder than any of the physical things.”

  Jennifer’s expression became serious. “Mickey, I’ve always admired you, and even,” her face turned a deep red, “had a bit of a crush on you, but… everything before pales in comparison to the awe I feel at how brave you’ve been through all of this.”

  Mickey grimaced and shook her head. “Not so brave. I have never felt so close to panic in my life as I did in that fire and again when I first woke up – with the ventilator and the restraints, unable to move or breathe on my own. It was terrifying to be so completely helpless when the ventilator would clog up and the alarm would go off – it was like everyone was moving in slow motion before I could breathe again. And when the grafts started,” she shuddered, closing her eyes, “the only thing that kept me from screaming was reminding myself over and over why I did it.”

  “I told her that,” Jennifer said softly. “She feels so guilty, Mickey. I told her you would rather have died with her than to have left her in there.” Jennifer bit her lip. “To tell you the truth, I feel kind of guilty myself.”

  “You? Why?” Mickey asked in surprise.

  “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t interfered. The whole idea of the abbey doing the restorations was my idea. That prompted the re-wiring, and all my big talk about how valuable the tapestries were…”

  “Jen, that’s crazy. You opened a whole new world for the community. Nothing that happened is your fault.” A thought occurred to her. “How are the tapestries anyway?”

&n
bsp; “Believe it or not, they didn’t burn,” Jennifer said in bewilderment. “They’re almost the only things in there that didn’t. Mostly smoke and water damage. We’re having them cleaned, and they should be fine.”

  “Hey, while you’re here, would you help me with one more thing?” Mickey reached over to a table and held up a set of electric clippers. “Shave my head?”

  Jennifer looked shocked. “What? No, Mickey.”

  “Look, I haven’t had to worry about anything as meaningless as my hair for a long time. It’s amazing how functional a habit is in freeing you from having to even think about what to wear or what to do with your hair, but I can’t wear a veil here, and I can’t pay for haircuts. I don’t want to have to worry about this. Shaving my head is the simplest solution.” Mickey held out the clippers. “I will if you don’t, but it’ll look a lot better if you do it.”

  A few days later, when Mother Theodora and Sister Anselma arrived for a visit, neither of them hid her surprise very well.

  “Well, it’s simple, it’s cool and it solves a problem,” Mickey defended herself with a grin, running her hand over the soft, red bristles.

  “How are you adapting to being here?” Mother Theodora asked. “It seems a fine facility.”

  “It is. The therapy is strenuous and tiring,” Mickey admitted. “I can’t believe how weak I’ve become. But the noise: telephones, televisions, visitors – I miss the quiet of the abbey. Jennifer brought me these,” she said, showing them the CDs.

  “I need to speak with the billing department about the abbey’s insurance,” Mother Theodora said. “May I suggest some outdoor air might be good for you? It’s a beautiful day.”

  Mickey transferred herself to the wheelchair next to her bed, and insisted on wheeling herself as she and Sister Anselma went outside. The rehab center had beautifully landscaped grounds and gardens with wheelchair paths criss-crossing the property. They made their way to a remote corner where they could talk without being overheard. Mickey angled her wheelchair so that she could face Sister Anselma as she took a seat on a bench.