Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  She shrugged. “I’m not in the mood for a fight.”

  I snorted. “Since when? I have never seen The Bulldog in the mood for anything other than a fight.”

  “You knew about that nickname?”

  “Ma, you were on the cover of American Lawyer. I may have skipped Algebra, but I did go to English class and learn how to read.”

  “You read the article?”

  “Yeah.” I studied the white sea of sheets around her. Smoothed out a wrinkle. Ran a finger over the hospital’s name, imprinted in faded cranberry letters, then finally rested my hand again on hers. “I was…well…proud of you, too.”

  I didn’t look up. But I felt her hand tighten under mine. And that was enough.

  A nurse came in and provided enough chatter and distance so that both of us could pretend that moment hadn’t happened, and by the time my mother was in a regular room and eating a crappy, cardboard-looking lunch, we’d gone back to our usual bickering, with her complaining about my disheveled state and lack of appropriate footwear.

  All was normal in my world. Exactly how I liked it.

  Except…

  That empty feeling I’d woken with had yet to disappear. My cell phone bulged against my jeans pockets—turned on despite the hospital’s poster in big bold block letters banning all cellular usage. I’d talked to a couple of my friends, to Karen three times, to Ernie twice, but not to Nick.

  I refused to call him. No matter how many times my fingers traced over his phone number, the pad of my thumb hesitated a breath above dialing. I did not want to be WAITING ON A MAN. But waiting I was.

  Never before had I been like this with Nick. Ever since we’d met, he’d been the one doing the pursuing, playing the traditional guy role.

  Even the way he’d asked me out had been traditional…in an untraditional, totally Nick way. He’d left a note inside the double doors, so that the first time I went to watch TV—and he’d installed it on a Thursday, knowing full well I was impatient for an ER fix—I’d find an invitation to meet him for dinner. At his place, where he’d had wine and burgers on the grill, about the only meal Nick ever mastered.

  That night, he’d been waiting on me. And now, the tables had been turned.

  I paced, the phone cold and heavy in my hand.

  A doctor who barely looked old enough to have passed his boards poked his head into my mother’s room. “Miss Delaney?”

  I left the uncomfortable vinyl armchair and crossed to the door. Ma had fallen asleep a few minutes earlier, so I shut the door most of the way and stepped into the hallway to meet the doctor. Paul Barton, M.D. scrolled across his breast pocket in dark maroon script. It seemed a trustworthy name. Had he graduated at the top of his class? Or at least somewhere in the upper ten percent? Did he have a degree from a medical college not located in a third world country?

  Too bad there was no non-rude way to ask for a peek at his MCAT scores.

  “I get the impression your mother is a bit…” His voice trailed off and his cheeks brightened.

  “You don’t have to be polite. She’s as stubborn as crabgrass. She knows it, and so do I.”

  He chuckled. “Then it’s a good thing she signed a HIPAA form allowing you to be included in her current medical decisions.”

  “She did?”

  Paul Barton, M.D., nodded. “We advise our patients to do that, in case they’re incapacitated. It’s good to have a family member on board, just in case.”

  “She’s not incapacitated now.”

  He gave me a lopsided grin. He was cute, in that young, fresh-out-of-med-school way, complete with a dark lock of hair across his forehead and a gee-whiz boyish smile. I refrained again from asking where he’d completed his residency—and whether he’d killed anyone in the process.

  “Well…she’s asleep. Close enough for me. I simply want to make sure she doesn’t end up back in a hospital again. I’ve talked with her and she’s bound and determined to make this road trip, even though I advised against it. Vehemently, I might add.”

  I bit back a laugh. My mother had undoubtedly had the poor young M.D. quaking in his lab coat. “And you want me to enforce your directions?”

  He sobered, and again Mr. Dread knocked on my heart. “You have to.”

  “But I thought it was just a bad cut, and she was bleeding heavy from the Coumadin and…” My voice trailed off. I took in the seriousness in his eyes, the way he pinched his lips together, gathering his words, reinforcements for his argument.

  Preparing to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

  “Your mother is very sick. Right now, the most pressing concern,” he said, leaving me to wonder for a flicker, if there was something else, because he looked away, then back, but went on and I forgot about it because my attention became riveted on the next few words, “is what we call deep vein thrombosis. Blood clots develop in her legs and if they break free and travel through the body, they can cause a pulmonary embolism.”

  The words slammed into me one right after another.

  I may not have gone to medical school, but I knew enough to put those pieces together. Blood clots did awful things.

  They were body bombs. Exploding in the lungs. The brain.

  I glanced at my mother’s door, realizing that any instant, one of those bombs could go off and I could lose her.

  “Blood clots?” I repeated, my throat so tight, the words nearly did make it out of my mouth. “Those are fatal, right?”

  Damned ER and Grey’s Anatomy. Why did they put those stupid shows on TV? And why did I watch them? Now here I was, standing in the middle of the real-life version of an episode, filled with way too much medical knowledge, thanks to Drs. Carter and Kovac.

  “They can be, but your mother is in no danger right now.”

  I took a breath. No danger. Okay. I was going to hold this doctor to that. All of a sudden, he’d become the person I trusted most in the world. Because I needed to trust him.

  “She’s on blood thinners, which is what caused her to bleed so heavily this morning when she got that cut. A simple thing like that can turn into something really big, really easily. But the anticoagulants—” at this he drew in a breath, and Mr. Dread tightened his grip again, refusing to let me turn away, to stop listening “—aren’t working as well as we’d hoped, because she didn’t keep up with monitoring her dosage. She should have been having labs drawn every four weeks, but skipped her last appointment.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  He shrugged. “I think some patients assume if they’re feeling fine, they must be fine. Non-compliance happens more often than we’d like to see, and it can lead to all kinds of trouble down the road.”

  “Once she’s on track with that, she’ll be okay, though, right?”

  His gaze flickered away one more time, which made me nervous, as if there was a box that hadn’t been checked on the HIPAA form, but then he nodded, all reassurance one more time. “That’s the plan. We’ll get her blood thickened up again, then let her go home in a couple days, make sure her levels stay consistent. But…” He drew in a breath, and here, I knew, came the left hook, the punch I didn’t want to take. “Eventually, she’s probably going to need a vena cava filter. It prevents the clots from getting to the heart, but it’s a procedure that comes with its own risks.”

  “What kind of risks?”

  “It can lead to the very kind of thing we’re trying to prevent. Strokes, pulmonary embolisms.” He put up a calming hand, waving those horrors off. “By and large, these go smoothly, but with any surgery of this kind, there’s always a chance of complications. And your mother…well, she’s not interested in taking that chance, not now.”

  I sagged against the wall, seeking strength from the gray zigzagged wallpaper. “She never told me any of this.”

  He nodded, non-plussed. Apparently, keeping relatives in the dark was par for the course. “She shouldn’t be in a car. And she especially shouldn’t be making a cross-country road trip. She n
eeds to be close to a hospital. Please talk some sense into her, because she’s not listening to me. Believe me, I’ve tried several times. Perhaps there’s someone else at home?”

  I shook my head. “No, there’s just me.”

  “I wish you well then.” He laid a hand on my arm, offered me a look of sympathy, before walking away.

  Chicken. I had to face my mother alone, without even medical back-up. Apparently, Paul Barton, M.D., had already fought that battle and wasn’t going in there again.

  The fluorescent light above Ma’s bed cast a grayish tint over her face, deepening the valleys beneath her cheeks, the shadows under her eyes. Every one of her sixty-seven years showed, a harsh reminder of time’s onward, brutal march.

  “Hilary,” she said, rousing, her voice still thick with sleep. She turned, a slight smile on her face, then reached for the button on her bed. With a reluctant groan, the electric motor inched her torso upward. In the darkened bed to the right, an elderly woman snored, while a machine hissed, dispensing something in a steady drip.

  “Hi, Ma.” I pulled the pink vinyl chair closer to her bed, bent one of my legs beneath me and sat.

  “You used to do that all the time when you were little. Never knew how you could stand to sit like that.”

  I looked down. “Oh, this. I don’t know. I guess it’s comfortable. Or I’m a glutton for punishment.” I drummed my fingers on the armrests. “Are you sleeping okay?”

  Her gaze narrowed. “What did the doctor say to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You don’t lie any better at thirty-six than you did at sixteen.”

  Putting off the conversation would only delay the battle. I’d read my history. Stalling didn’t tend to work out too well, not for Napoleon, and not for me. “He doesn’t want you traveling. I think he’s right. Why don’t we just turn around and go back home? You’ve waited this long to divvy up grandma’s stuff, what’s a few more—”

  “No.”

  “Ma—”

  “I said no. We’re going and that’s the end of it.”

  “This isn’t a trip to church for Easter service, Ma. And you aren’t Captain Picard. Just because you say it, doesn’t make it so.”

  “Captain who?”

  “Jesus. Don’t you watch any TV?” My feet plopped to the floor and I spun out of the chair. “I refuse to drive you one more mile when you could have a clot explode in your lungs at any second. I know how to mix a mai tai, find a cab for a guy who’s had a few too many, balance the books for Ernie, but I can’t perform goddamn emergency surgery on the turnpike in the back of a minivan.”

  “We’re going.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Fine. I’ll drive myself.”

  I wheeled around. “Are you suicidal? Didn’t you hear what he said?”

  “I heard every word that Dr. Barton and my doctor said and all the others have said and I am still going.”

  I let out a gust, heaved in another breath, prayed for patience that didn’t come. “Why the hell would you do that?”

  “Because—”

  “Will you two just please shut up? Some people come to a hospital to get rest, ya know,” the old lady in the next bed grumbled. “I can hear you jibber-jabbering away. You should stay, no, no, I wanna go. I say you should both go. I need my damned sleep and all you’re doing is keeping me awake.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lott,” Ma said, “but—”

  “No buts. No ifs, ands or otherwise out of either one of you.” She propped herself up one elbow, her hair a cumulous cloud of curls on the left side, a flat pancake of white on the right. “I’m not getting one day younger here and I refuse to go to my grave with two strangers yammering in my damned ear.” Then she flopped over, grabbed her pillow and jammed it over her head.

  “I’ll see if I can get you a private room,” I whispered.

  “Mrs. Lott’s okay. And she has every right to expect us to be quiet.”

  “I can still hear you,” Mrs. Lott sing-songed. “My God, you East Coast people must come born with megaphones in your mouths.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Lott,” Ma repeated, as calm as a lake, “my daughter is just being stubborn. We’ll try not to bother your sleep anymore.”

  “You young people should know better than to disagree with your elders anyway. What’s this world coming to?”

  “Forget it, Ma.” I threw up my hands and walked out of the room. I knew my mother when she got like this. The Great Wall of China had better odds of moving.

  I leaned against the hard hallway and closed my eyes. Grief settled its weight on me, along with the realization of my mother’s mortality. Rosemary Delaney, the immovable force in the Delaney family, the one who kept the engine rolling, had been running around with a ticking time bomb in her leg, and hadn’t even told me.

  But then again, my father had had one in his head—a time bomb of a very different kind—and he hadn’t told a single soul, either. This time, though, I knew and I could stop her. I held the keys—literally.

  And yet, she insisted on arguing with me, pushing that envelope. I sighed, and wished for one day of peace, one moment without an argument.

  “This is a long way for a man to come just for a Jimi Hendrix keychain.”

  I popped forward, opened my eyes and gaped at the last person I expected to see in Indiana. Joy burst in my heart, an explosion so strong, it nearly toppled me. “Nick. What are you doing here?”

  He grinned. “Embarking on my new career as a stowaway.”

  “Oh, God, I’m so glad.” I stepped forward and into his arms, inhaling the scent of cotton and wood that was uniquely Nick. His arms wrapped around me, with no room to spare, his grasp tight and firm, forming our own little world. The hospital went on around us, nurses bustling down the hall, patients calling for food and bedpans, the murmur of TVs whispering a talk show undertow behind us.

  But for me, there was only Nick. The feel of him, the solidity of him. The realness of him. For a long, long time, I simply leaned into his body, inhaled his scent, felt his body beneath mine, the scratch of his stubble against my cheek, the sturdiness of his shoulder under my jaw. When the reality of him became as sure as the tiled floor, I drew back. “Why are you here? How did you find us?”

  “Second question first. I talked to Karen, and she told me your mom was in the hospital, and which one she was at. I took the first plane out to Indiana and paid an obscene amount of money to a taxi driver to bring me here.”

  “But why?” He’d flown all this way, without saying a word, doing something no man had ever done for me, ever before. I stared at him, dumbfounded.

  He smiled the smile that I knew as well as my ABCs, the sum of two and two. “Because I knew you’d need me.”

  I buried my face in his shirt again, the worn cotton as soft as down. “Even if I didn’t get you a keychain?”

  He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, then let his lips linger there, warm breath in the top of my hair. “Even if.”

  eleven

  I’d always thought hospitals would serve healthy food in their cafeterias. That they’d ban French fries and grease, nix anything with trans fats and high cholesterol. Apparently, even the people who knew better couldn’t resist a culinary waltz with the dark side.

  “She’s still determined to go to your uncle’s house?” Nick asked, as he stabbed a pile of lettuce coated with tuna and ranch dressing, then popped it in his mouth. Nick had willpower.

  I’d given up on my waistline three states ago. I reached for a French fry, dipped it in a tiny paper cup of ketchup, then realized how much the ketchup resembled blood, which led me to a frightening thought about what I was doing to my arteries, and how it could easily be me in that hospital bed in just a few years. I pushed my tray—which had seemed so appetizing five minutes ago—to the side.

  Without a word, Nick halved his salad, dumped the second portion into the clear plastic lid and slid it over to me.

  I smiled my grati
tude. “I don’t deserve you.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, then grinned. “But I’m no angel, either.”

  I waved a spork in his direction, keeping it light, always light. That was me. “You do have your bad habits.”

  “And not to mention I come with my own baggage, and an ex-wife in Tulsa. No kids, unless I can convince you to—”

  “Can we stick to the subject of my mother? One nightmare at a time, please.”

  His lips thinned into a straight line, but he didn’t say anything. He went back to his lettuce and ranch dressing, the air between us a few degrees cooler, the distance a few inches farther. “Are you going to take her to California?”

  “Of course not. She could die.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Are you crazy? Just because she wants to do this doesn’t mean we should.”

  “You need to work things out with your mother, Hilary. I learned that with my parents after college.” He shrugged. “I think you should go.”

  He made it sound so easy. “What if something happens, Nick?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Knowing he would do that—drop everything to ride along from here to the other side of the country—filled me with an overwhelming relief. This man had come halfway across the country and was willing to traverse the rest, just because I needed him.

  Why wouldn’t I go the distance with him emotionally? I looked down at his hands, work-toughened, dependable, strong, which lay just inches from mine, and knew why. Because somewhere down the road, those hands would inch away from mine.

  I’d become someone else. Someone domesticated, like a lion kept too long in a cage, and so would Nick. We’d end up unhappy, and chained together, all because we’d made things legal.

  No, I decided. I liked his hands as they were, and where they lay.

  “So, what do you say? You and me, taking your mother to California?” he asked.

  “That’s like having Tweedledee and Tweedledum along for medical backup. Neither one of us knows what to do in an emergency.”

  “Your mother is not stupid, Hil. I’m sure she’ll take her medicine and listen to her doctors. I found this vein thing on Google and if she does what the doctors say, she’ll be okay.”