“You can wait forever if you don’t nudge them along,” the older woman said.
“They don’t like being pushed,” the younger one said, “but you do what you have to do when it’s family.”
She wondered what they would do if she ran screaming for the window and jumped.
She didn’t do hospitals well at all. She never had. She liked to say it was that tonsillectomy when she was three years old—the one where they told her The Big Lie about all the ice cream she could eat—but it was more than that. Everything about them made her skin crawl. The smells. The sounds, The naked emotions flying around everywhere you looked. People came undone in hospitals. They went a little crazy. You never got good news in hospitals, not unless you were on the maternity ward, and even there things didn’t always go the way you hoped they would.
Ellen thought Deirdre was worried about Billy, but that was so far from the truth that it was laughable. This didn’t have anything at all to do with Billy. This had to do with the fact that if she didn’t get out of there in the next thirty seconds, they would have to hose her down or put her in a straitjacket to keep her from doing something crazy.
Antonio had been claustrophobic and he said some of her symptoms sounded exactly like what he felt when he found himself trapped in a small room. Of course, that had made her wonder how often a grown man found himself trapped in small rooms unless he was in the habit of being interrogated by the police on a regular basis. Which, unfortunately, turned out to be closer to the truth than she had realized at the time.
See how good she was at spinning her mind away from her circumstances. Who said daydreaming didn’t come in handy? She closed her eyes and tried to settle deep into that zone where she could tap into peace and harmony and block out the fact that she was trapped on the sixth floor of some crummy hospital in the middle of—
Oops. Now, that wasn’t the right way to go about it, was it? She had to transcend her situation. What was it they used to say when she lived in Los Angeles and started hanging with the yoga-and-Zen crowd? Sublimate? Breathe deeply? Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes?
She started to laugh, quietly at first, then a full-out bark of laughter popped out. She opened her eyes in time to see her two companions scuttling away like a pair of L. L. Bean land tortoises. When was the last time she had thought about land tortoises anyway? Grade school maybe. Maybe never. Land tortoises were a good thing to contemplate if you didn’t want to contemplate the fact that you were trapped in a hospital waiting room while your sister the doctor had an audience with the great Billy O’Brien.
Notice how Mary Pat didn’t press her to see him first? So much for all of that “he’s been asking for you” bullshit she had used to bludgeon her into driving down with Ellen. Nothing had changed. She was every bit as invisible to Billy today as she had been since the day she was born. She’d bet her repaired-at-great-expense Hyundai that he had never once asked her whereabouts or expressed even a fleeting desire to see her. Deirdre who?
She should have asked Mary Pat for her cell phone. She needed to talk to somebody, connect with the real world beyond this stinking hellhole of a hospital. She could always call Scott the Mechanic or maybe Annie. Or how about her agent? She could pretend that she had forgotten the details of the cruise ship job. Once you got him on the phone, he was good for at least an hour of telling her everything that was going wrong in his life, from his hernia to his wife’s snoring. Or better yet she could phone Hall Talbot and check up on how Stanley was faring, but she supposed it really wasn’t good form to call an OB during office hours to ask about your dog, even if he was the only child you’d probably ever have.
Maybe she would walk down the hall and see what was happening in ICU.
* * *
Ellen didn’t recognize him. If Mary Pat hadn’t told her that this was their father, she would have walked back over to the nurses’ station and asked where they’d transferred him. The big handsome man known as Billy O’Brien had disappeared, and in his place was this frail old man looking up at her with her eyes.
“Ellen!” His voice had the raspy quality consistent with the n-g tube that they had inserted down his throat.
“I see Dr. Loewe is taking good care of you.” She bent down and kissed his left cheek.
He reached out and clasped her hands. His grip was surprisingly strong. He had always believed you could take the measure of a man by the strength of his handshake.
“Thank you for coming.” The lilting rhythms of Ireland still lent music to his words. “I know you’re a busy doctor.”
“Babies follow their own timetable,” she said, calling on every ounce of professionalism at her command to help her maintain her composure. “Especially around the full moon.”
His richly vibrant laughter was a thing of the past. His eyes lit up, but his laughter was a rasping half-cough, half-sigh that she had heard before.
He was dying. She didn’t need to hear test results to know that his time was near. The knowledge was there in his eyes, in the sound of his voice. She had seen it often enough to recognize the signs, and it filled her with regret for the things that would never be.
“I never stopped loving your mother.” His voice was so low she had to lean closer to hear him. “She told me she was expecting you.... I was planning to leave Jeanne and Mary Pat so I could be with her.”
Oh, God. Mary Pat was on the other side of the curtain. “Maybe we should talk about this some other time.”
“It was the happiest time of my life.... We couldn’t wait for you to be born....”
“Mary Pat and Deirdre are here, too. Maybe I should—”
“Then Jeanne told me she was pregnant, too, and I had to choose.”
“I know all about that,” she said, unable to control the note of bitterness in her voice. “You chose your wife and family.”
“She had nobody else.” It hurt to listen to him. The raw sound of his voice matched the raw pain his words conveyed. “Only me. Nobody to turn to if I left. Her people were all gone.” Ellen’s mother had her parents and her friends, a network of support. She would never have to be alone.
And her mother had Cy Markowitz. Cy, a good friend who had loved her for a very long time and was eager for the chance to take care of her and her unborn baby.
“I wasn’t a good husband to Jeanne,” he said, “before your mother and after. So many mistakes....”
His eyes glittered with unshed tears over choices made a long time ago. She saw him as he must have been then. Tall. Strong. Heartbreakingly handsome. The wild and poetic Irishman who could charm the birds from the trees.
Two choices and either way he lost.
They had all lost.
She wanted to love him, but she didn’t. Too much time had passed, too little of it spent together without shadows of pain between them. His wife’s humiliation. Her stepfather’s jealousy. The fourteen years she had lived without the knowledge that she was his daughter. It had all been too much to overcome.
She pitied him. She wished him well. She would do anything she could to make him better, to see to it that he could live a long and healthy life, but when all was said and done, she didn’t love him. But he was her father and she had one small gift for him.
“She always loved you,” she said to him as he held on to her hand. “Right up until the end.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.” She squeezed his hand. “She saved all your letters.”
He closed his eyes. Moments passed. Minutes. She watched his shallow respiration and noted the signs of life displayed on the machine in the corner. Pulse. Respiration. Blood pressure. Sinus rhythm. Her hand in his felt oddly comforting to her. She would be happy to stand there forever if it would do any good, but she knew it was too late for that.
His eyes fluttered open and there was that smile again.
“You’re really here,” he said. “I thought I was dreaming.”
“I’m really
here. We were talking about the letters.”
“Letters? I don’t remember—” His smile made the years vanish as his dark blue eyes filled with tears. “I sent one every year... on her birthday... Yeats... I introduced her to Yeats....”
“I know. She saved them all.”
“Go raibh maith agat.” No human being should look at another with such pure aching gratitude. All she had done was give him back a memory. It seemed the least she could do for the man her mother had loved.
“You’re welcome, Da.” The unfamiliar word was on her tongue before she realized it. There was a first time for everything.
He smiled and closed his eyes again, and she settled down to watch him sleep.
* * *
Deirdre told her sisters she would meet them in the hospital cafeteria, but they dragged her down the hall to the consultation room as if she were five years old. She didn’t want to hear anything this Dr. Loewe had to say. It wasn’t going to be good news. Even she knew that, although she wasn’t sure any of it was sinking into Mary Pat’s head. Mary Pat was too busy racing around with her Day Runner clutched in her hands, trying to schedule Billy back to health.
What room would they take him to when he left ICU? How about a private nurse. TiVo. A CD player. A companion. A private chef.
Ellen had been very quiet since her visit with Billy. Deirdre had been expecting it to be a hello-how-are-you-doing kind of thing, the daughterly equivalent of visiting an ailing patient. Some good advice, a few upbeat words, a graceful goodbye. It hadn’t quite gone that way. Instead Ellen had stayed with their father for almost an hour, leaving only when a pair of nurses told her she had to go so they could tend to Billy’s needs. Now she seemed distant, as if she had somehow detached herself from her surroundings.
Deirdre glanced around. Who could blame her? The consulting room was painted the color of a baked potato. A nothing beige that was supposed to lull you into a false sense of security and hide the fact that nothing good ever happened here. Nobody walked out that door with a check from Publishers Clearing House or a gig on the Tonight show as the oldest living undiscovered talent in the universe. The room didn’t even have a window, just a framed print of a Tuscan meadow.
They sat down at the long table. Mary Pat opened her Day Runner and uncapped her fountain pen. Ellen slipped her typed notes from her briefcase and fanned them out in front of her while Deirdre wished she had bought one of those PDAs, the kind that make you look all busy and efficient when you’re really playing Free Cell.
Dr. Loewe blew into the room in a cloud of Phisohex and authority. He shook hands warmly with Mary Pat, who looked much older and much more terrified than she had just moments ago. He introduced himself to Ellen and made pleasant noises about her stepfather Cy and his family while Ellen made equally pleasant noises back to him. She supposed it was a doctor thing, an audible secret handshake.
“I’m Deirdre,” she said finally, extending her hand.
“The harpist,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“My father’s a musician, too,” she said. “It’s a crazy life.”
Mary Pat neatly stepped in before she could start up an actual conversation. “I told Dr. Loewe you’re leaving to work a cruise ship at the end of the month.”
She laughed, which was probably inappropriate given the circumstances. “You make it sound like I’ll be leaning against a smokestack in my miniskirt, trying to entice the wait staff.”
Loewe, bless his chart-reading heart, got the joke. He allowed himself a quick eye twinkle before he got down to the business at hand. The good ones always knew how to pretend they were human. He started talking and before long Mary Pat was keening softly, so softly only a sister could hear her. Ellen took over, asking questions nobody really wanted the answers to. Loewe looked relieved to be talking to another doctor, someone who understood the jargon without requiring a translator. Someone who understood that emotion had no place in the business of dying.
The words volleyed across the table. A few of the serves went long. Some replies never made it to the net. She tried to listen without hearing, pulling only the necessary information out of the air and keeping the rest an arm’s length away. Once again she summoned up every yoga class, every Zen lecture she had ever attended to help her quell the monkey mind inside that was always five years old and waving goodbye to Da as he set out on another adventure that didn’t include them.
“We’ll be moving him into a regular room tomorrow morning,” Loewe was saying, “and I hope to discharge him Monday if he remains stabilized over the weekend.”
“What about Hospice care?” Ellen asked.
He nodded. “It’s time.”
Mary Pat flinched and pretended to jot down a note in her Day Runner. Mary Pat was the good daughter, the one who had given him grandchildren, the one who always had a spare room ready for him. She would be lost without Billy and his problems.
Loewe looked over at Mary Pat. “I assume he’ll be discharged to Mrs. Galvin’s home.”
Mary Pat nodded. “I’ll talk to patient services before we leave tonight and get things moving.”
Billy would need a hospital bed, a visiting nurse, access to sufficient painkiller to numb the discomfort but not so much that he lost touch with the world. Help to sleep. Help to move his bowels. Help to remember why waking up each morning was supposed to be a good thing.
They were all dancing around the one question that had to be asked.
“How much longer does he have?” Deirdre asked.
Mary Pat gasped. Ellen revealed nothing. Dr. Loewe took it in stride.
“With luck, six months.”
“Without luck?” she asked.
“Three, maybe four.”
“I disagree.” Ellen’s voice broke the silence that had fallen over the room.
“I understand how you’re feeling, Dr. Markowitz,” he said gently, “but the reality—”
“I don’t think he has that long.”
“You read the report. I showed you the scan results. He has a strong constitution. I think once we get him stabilized, he’ll do surprisingly well for a fair bit of time.”
“Medically I agree with your prognosis,” Ellen said. “But I saw his eyes this afternoon. I think he’s ready.”
“Ellen, for God’s sake!” Mary Pat’s voice shook with anger. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m not speaking as a doctor this time,” Ellen said, still maintaining her even tone. “I’m speaking as Billy’s daughter. He’s saying his goodbyes. He’s ready to leave.”
“And since when does goodbye mean you’re leaving?” Mary Pat tossed back at her. “Grandma Kathleen said goodbye fourteen times before she died. It became a family joke.”
“I wouldn’t know about Grandma Kathleen,” Ellen said, “and I can’t offer you any scientific proof to back up my words. I can only tell you what I’m feeling.”
“Wow,” said Deirdre minutes later as Dr. Loewe sprinted down the corridor toward the elevator. “I didn’t think he could run that fast in those fancy Italian shoes.”
“What the hell were you thinking?” Mary Pat demanded of Ellen. “How dare you jump in with all of your fancy medical training and embarrass me that way! You’ll be going home to Maine, but I have to see Dr. Loewe every single day.”
Ellen’s cheeks reddened slightly, whether from anger or embarrassment, Deirdre couldn’t say. “As I said to Dr. Loewe, I wasn’t speaking as a physician. I was speaking as a daughter.”
“A little late for that,” Mary Pat said.
“Get off your high horse, Mary Pat,” Deirdre said. “Let’s quit pretending we’re anything but the dysfunctional family that we are. It will make this discussion a whole lot easier on all of us. Maybe Ellen is right. Nobody can predict exactly when a person is going to die... not even the great Dr. Loewe. Ellen’s worked with dying patients before. Maybe she sees something we don’t.”
“I don’t know how you could see anything,�
� Mary Pat said. “You haven’t even stopped in to say hello to him.”
She had easily a half dozen excuses she could offer up to appease her sister’s self-righteous anger, but lying seemed an utter waste of time and energy. She was getting too old to play this game. They all were.
“Did he ask to see me, Mary Pat?”
“Didn’t I tell you—”
“The truth,” she said. “Did he ask for me?”
Mary Pat fell silent.
Deirdre turned to Ellen and asked the same question.
“No,” Ellen said. “I’m sorry, Dee.”
“Why should he ask to see his own daughter?” Mary Pat found her tongue again. “What’s stopping you from just walking in there and saying hello?”
“I don’t know,” she said, starting to cry. “Isn’t that a kick in the head?”
* * *
Mary Pat whipped out her cell phone and told her husband James to forget about meeting them at the hospital. They would grab something at the local Olive Garden, then return to the hospital.
Ellen excused herself to phone her service for messages and to touch base with Hall. He was in the delivery room with Jill Franzese, whose easy labors and deliveries were the stuff of legend around the hospital. She left a long, rambling message that probably made no sense at all, but it was good to hear his voice, even if it was just his outgoing message.
She found her sisters in the gift shop. Mary Pat was thumbing through Martha Stewart Living while Deirdre flipped through People.
“If you need to make any calls, you’re welcome to use my cell,” Ellen said to her younger sister.
“I was thinking of calling Stanley.”
“Don’t bother,” she said, draping an arm around Deirdre’s shoulder. “You know Stanley. He probably has the phone off the hook.”
The restaurant was crowded, but they lucked out and were settled into a booth near the window in record time.
“A glass of the house red and a bushel of breadsticks,” Deirdre said to the painfully young waitress.
Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2) Page 33