Things Remembered

by Georgia Bockoven

  “Wait until you get a good look at that twinkle in her eyes and then tell me that,” Karla said. She understood Susan’s surge of maternal feelings. For the first time in her life, Karla had felt them, too, and it had left her reeling. She thought she’d accepted the running down of her biological clock when it became clear she and Jim were never going to get back together. And now this.

  As much as Karla loved Jamie and Jason, she hadn’t experienced this lioness emotion when they were born. But then they’d been big, ready-to-take-on-the-world, full-term babies. This bundle of perfection in miniature struck a protective chord in Karla, one she had believed so deeply buried it would never surface again. This was exactly the way she’d felt about Heather and Grace when their parents died.

  “I’m going in,” Bill said. “Would either of you care to join me?”

  Karla and Susan looked at each other in silent agreement to give Bill this time alone with his daughter. “I’m in desperate need of a cup of coffee,” Karla said. “We’ll be in the cafeteria if you need us.”

  They stood at the window until he was inside. A nurse brought a chair and opened the round window for Bill to reach through and touch Anna Marie. The moment was so intimate, so personal, so wrenching, Karla could hardly stand to watch.

  Susan nudged her. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The cafeteria was nearly deserted, the coffee hot, the doughnuts surprisingly fresh. A live tree sat in the corner wrapped in silver garland and twinkling Christmas lights. Paper elves and reindeer cavorted on the walls and small potted poinsettias sat in the middle of the round tables.

  Karla led the way to a table by a window. “If you tell me you’re ready for Christmas I’ll gleefully wring your neck.”

  “I’ve got everything for school taken care of, but I’m not even close to being finished with my shopping for the family. But what’s the hurry? What do we have . . . about two weeks left? Plenty of time.”

  “Even taking unexpected trips into consideration?”

  She shrugged. “In the end, it all seems to get done one way or another.”

  Karla looked at her maple bar. “I really shouldn’t.”

  Susan grinned and took a bite of her jelly doughnut. “But you’re going to anyway.”

  “Damn straight.” Luckily, it didn’t taste as good as it looked and the second bite was easier to resist. “I haven’t thanked you for bringing Anna.”

  “I know why you didn’t want her to come, but once she found out Heather was in the hospital, there was no way she was going to stay home.”

  “Heather needed her here. I had no idea how much until I saw the two of them together.”

  “I loved having my mother with me when Bobby was born. We understand what the other one is thinking without having to say a word. And we laugh at the same things. There was this woman in the room next to mine when I was in labor. We couldn’t figure out why she’d be screaming her head off one minute and quiet the next. Turns out she stopped when her husband went outside for a cigarette. After that Mom and I just roared every time the room got quiet. The doctor and nurses thought we were nuts.”

  Karla managed a smile. “My mother and I were like that, too. We’d go to a movie and be the only ones laughing and then not get the joke when everyone else was rolling on the floor.”

  “If she was anything like Anna, she must have been a wonderful woman.”

  “Heather is more like our mother than I am.” There it was, admitted aloud for the first time, and it hadn’t hurt at all.

  Susan took a sip of coffee. “I’ve been instructed to ask if you’re coming home for Christmas.”

  “By whom?”

  “Mark.”

  “Mark . . . or Cindy?” She refused to let herself get excited over a casual question.

  “You’re kidding, right? You have to know how Mark feels about you.”

  “I know he likes me—as a friend,” she quickly added.

  Susan stared at her for a long time without saying anything.

  “What?” Karla prompted.

  “I’m trying to figure out which one of you is putting me on. I can’t believe you don’t know how much Mark likes you. He hasn’t had any problem telling me.”

  “Thanks. I needed that. My ego has been scraping bottom lately.”

  “You can’t think I would make up something like this. To what point?”

  “Not make up—just exaggerate a little. Maybe a different time and place and we could have worked things out. Right now his life is in Rocklin and mine is in Solvang.”

  She shook her head and crumpled her napkin. “That’s too bad. In my humble opinion, I think the two of you were made for each other.”

  “Humble opinion? I think that’s an oxymoron where you’re concerned.”

  Susan laughed. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

  Karla finished her coffee and took another bite of the maple bar. She’d finally figured out that she ate when she felt stressed. And bored. And happy. Hell, she ate because she liked to eat. But she was not going to eat the rest of the maple bar.

  Before she could change her mind, she got up and tossed everything in the garbage. “When are you heading back?”

  “I told Anna I’d stay the night and we could leave after lunch tomorrow.”

  “If you have to get back, I can take her home.”

  “There’s more than a good-neighbor policy working here. When I told Allen I was going to be gone a couple of days with Anna, he volunteered to put up the tree by himself. If I get back early, I’ll have to help.”

  It was a typical Susan story. True, but embellished to make Karla feel she was doing a favor rather than imposing. “To answer your question, I wasn’t going to come up for Christmas, but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to be alone any more than I want Anna to be alone.”

  “Since it will just be the two of you, why don’t you have dinner with us. We eat around six, but you can come anytime.” She warmed to the idea. “This is perfect. My folks can’t come this year, so we won’t even have to borrow extra chairs. And did I mention Mark and Cindy are coming?”

  “And Linda?”

  “Good God, no. She hasn’t made it home for Christmas since she and Mark divorced. Besides, if she did, she’d spend it with her mother.”

  A minute ago Karla had had no plans for Christmas, and now everything was in place, tucked in a gold box and tied up with a bright shiny red ribbon. “I’ll talk to Anna.”

  “Oh, she’ll come. She’s never turned me down about anything. You’re the only one I have to convince.”

  Karla laughed. “Oh, you’ve convinced me.” She’d been on board with the mention of Mark’s name. “I’ll be there.” For once Christmas was turning into something other than a good retail month. “I’ll even make the pies.”

  Chapter

  26

  Another storm moved in, this one from the Gulf of Alaska, colder than the last and packing a bigger punch. Karla was exhausted from fighting the wind and rain on Highway 101 as she drove home and felt a little like the horse with the barn in sight when she hit Santa Maria.

  She would have liked to stay another day with Heather. Not because she was needed, but to stagger the leave-taking with Grace and Anna and Susan. As it was, there had seemed enough good-byes that afternoon to see a ship set sail. While the quiet was undoubtedly welcome, all of them taking off at once must have created a small vacuum for Heather.

  She’d started getting better from the minute Anna arrived. The progress wasn’t slow and steady but in great leaps.

  The highlight for all of them came as they stood with their noses pressed to the neonatal intensive care window and watched Heather hold Anna Marie for the first time. Even Grace was swept away, her control so far gone she ended up with swollen eyes and a face wiped clean of makeup.

  The night before they’d gathered around Heather’s bedside and toasted Anna Marie’s birth and Grace’s new job with sparkling cider.

 
Finally the world held such promise for them all.

  And then, just as Karla was leaving Santa Maria, a scant twenty-five miles from home, her cell phone rang.

  She put her ear piece in and said, “Hello?” There was no way this was good news. She was tempted to end the call and blame it on the weather and give herself a few more minutes to prepare.

  “Karla, it’s Susan. I’m sorry about chasing you down like this, but I’ve tried you at home several times and at the shop and—”

  “What’s wrong?” Karla’s stomach convulsed in fear. Her skin turned cold and sweaty at the same time.

  “It’s Anna. She’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “She had a heart attack.”

  “When?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it started a couple of days ago. At least that’s when she started swelling. By the time we got home, she could hardly breathe. I took her to Sutter Roseville to have her checked out and they admitted her right away.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “That the attack itself was minor. But she has acute pulmonary edema—at least I think that’s what they called it. It’s part of the congestive heart failure. They’re giving her digitalis and a ton of Lasix. I’m not sure I’m getting all of this right, but what’s important for you to know right now is that everything that needs to be done for her is being done.”

  “Did they have to put her on a respirator?” On her second visit to Dr. Michael’s office Karla had quizzed him on what to expect if Anna had to be hospitalized. But hearing the clinical details in his office was a long way from hearing them from Susan.

  “Yes,” Susan reluctantly admitted.

  Karla recoiled at the thought of Anna lying in a bed without the ability to breathe for herself, her ability to communicate gone. “Is she awake?”

  “She fights the respirator, so they’re keeping her sedated.”

  “I’m coming up.” Karla glanced at the dashboard clock. “Look for me around midnight. Can you stay at the hospital with her until then?” She couldn’t bear the thought of Anna being alone.

  “Where are you now?”

  “About a half hour from home.”

  “It’s crazy for you to turn around now, Karla. Go home and get some sleep. Allen and I will stay with Anna until you get here tomorrow.”

  “What about Bobby?” She felt guilty for asking, but needed to know that Susan was free to fulfill her promise.

  “Mark said he could spend the night with him and Cindy.”

  She was relieved Susan hadn’t taken offense. “Did you call Heather?”

  “No. I wanted to talk to you first. She’ll be furious if we don’t tell her, but I just couldn’t do that to her and Bill. Not after everything they’ve been through. Unless you think I’m wrong?”

  “This is the last thing they need to hear right now.” The sky opened and it no longer rained, but poured. She slowed the car and turned the wipers on high and still had trouble seeing the reflectors on the road. “What about Grace?”

  “I tried, but I couldn’t reach her. I didn’t want to leave a message, so I thought I’d just keep trying until I found her home.”

  Grace had taken off a couple of hours before Karla. With a straight shot down 1–5 and the speed Grace drove, it was possible she’d been home and had left again already. Karla wished she’d paid more attention to Grace’s chattering about where and when and how long she was going to be gone on location in Florida. If she’d already gone, Karla had no idea how to find her without launching a minor investigation.

  “I have to stop by the shop before I do anything,” she told Susan. She’d talked to Tonya the night before and everything but the number of customers coming into the shop was in chaos. None of the orders had come in correctly. They were ass-deep in cups and out of their two best selling coffees. “I’ll call you from there as soon as I decide what I’m going to do.”

  A dozen parting thoughts crowded her mind. She wanted to tell Susan to hold Anna’s hand, to tell Anna to stop fighting the respirator and let it do its work, to say that Karla was coming and that she loved her . . . and most important, that she wasn’t to die. Not now. Not yet. Not for a long, long time.

  After she hung up, she became passive to familiar landmarks that only minutes before had brought comfort that she was nearly home. Finally, without conscious thought, she did what her heart demanded and ignored her mind, giving into emotion rather than logic. At the next off-ramp she turned the car around and headed north.

  As soon as she was sure she could talk without breaking down, she called Tonya to tell her to fill all the promised special orders that she could and then close down the shop for the holidays.

  The rain slowed after Karla left Paso Robles and took the cutoff to I-5. With little traffic to occupy her mind, she began counting the swipes of the windshield wipers to keep from thinking about the miles that separated her from Anna and what could happen in the time it took to travel those miles. When counting didn’t work, she went through the alphabet, listing all the states in order. Next came the names of every teacher she’d had since kindergarten.

  The teachers provided more of a challenge. She had to remember the year, where she had lived, and which school she’d attended. Between third and fifth grades, three moves had equaled five schools and as many teachers.

  She stopped for fast food in Kettleman City and bought a book on tape at the service station. Her mind was back on Anna before the deep-voiced narrator had made it through the introduction.

  Somehow, even after everything that had happened, the doctor’s appointments, the estate planning, the signs that indicated Anna wasn’t moving as quickly or breathing as deeply or staying up as long as she had the week before, Karla had still managed to convince herself they had time.

  A part of her mind had refused to believe Anna was really dying. She’d compartmentalized the information for later. Even with intimate knowledge of how abruptly life could end, she’d allowed herself to become one of the people she’d always wondered about—the ones who attend funerals and grieve for words left unsaid, for love unexpressed, for questions unasked when the person who died did so slowly and painfully and alone.

  Finally Karla stopped trying to distract herself and made a mental list of the things she would say to Anna if they were granted the time. She hadn’t fulfilled her end of their bargain. There was so much more she could say about her mother—how she’d helped Heather catch fireflies on summer nights, how she’d taught Grace to swim before she was two, how she and Karla had wandered through the woods to pick blueberries and come home with poison ivy all over their arms.

  And then there were the questions she wanted to ask. How did her mother come to love the mountains and Anna the ocean? She’d never asked Anna about her wedding day. Or if she’d gone on a honeymoon. The Depression was something Karla had read about in books, never thinking to ask Anna how she had made it through those years. Had she lost friends in World War II?

  In the end, it was the memories, not the wealth or belongings, that marked the sum of a person. If Karla allowed those memories to die for lack of the right questions, she would be witness to two deaths.

  When she saw the exit for Santa Nella she reached for the phone to call the hospital but flipped it closed before she had completed the call. No matter what anyone told her, the only thing she could do was what she was doing right then.

  Anna had waited for nineteen years; Karla refused to believe she wouldn’t wait just a little longer.

  At two o’clock in the morning even businesses had turned out their Christmas lights. Karla spotted an occasional house still lit up from the freeway and assumed the owner had gone to bed and forgot to turn them off, but for the most part, the holiday was on hold for another six hours.

  Not at the hospital, however. Here the trees and decorations were lit, the employees in the wide-awake time warp dictated by shift work. Exhausted to the point of numbness when she�
��d arrived, her pulse quickened and her mind focused sharply as she crossed the entrance to the reception desk. By the time she had received directions and was halfway down the long hallway to the Grove Region wing of the hospital, her hands were shaking.

  She experienced a chill of apprehension when she saw a sign that instructed her to turn off her cell phone. Reality became a battering ram against the wall she’d built to protect herself. Anna wasn’t just in the hospital, she was in the part of the hospital where death, not life, was the accepted outcome.

  She picked up the receiver to the visitor’s phone outside the locked door to the cardiac intensive care unit, identified herself, and waited for the buzzer. The nurses’ station was to her right; to her left was an arc of private rooms with glass walls between the patients and their caregivers. The lights had been dimmed in the rooms but were bright in the hallway and at the station.

  A woman in a multicolored nurse’s uniform saw Karla peering into a room and asked, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Anna Olsen.”

  “She’s in number five.”

  “Thank you,” Karla said automatically.

  When she found the room, she stood at the door, her gaze intently focused on the waiflike figure under the unnaturally smooth bedspread. An obscene tube protruded from Anna’s mouth, connected to a machine that quietly hissed and thumped in rhythm to the movements of her chest. A bag of clear liquid hung suspended from a pole attached to the bed, its fluid dripping into a tube connected to the back of Anna’s frail-looking hand.

  Monitors filled the small space. Some she recognized from Heather’s hospital room; others she’d seen on television. One flashed numbers, another heartbeats. Even those that were familiar scared the hell out of her because she didn’t know if their readings were good or bad.

  Karla slowly moved closer, a terrified gazelle ready to bolt. Anna looked insignificant and utterly defenseless in the generic mechanical bed. With her skin a translucent blue-white, her eyes closed, her face swollen and unanimated, it was almost as if her life weren’t hers anymore but had been given over to the machines.