Elsey Come Home

by Susan Conley

  “Robert,” she said after she’d sat down. My father had been dead five years. “Robert, I forget where you said I put the salt.”

  I watched her stand and circle the kitchen not knowing where she was exactly. She found the salt and sat down again, and we prayed. I was again afraid that the girls would refuse to go through with it, but we held hands and bowed our heads.

  · 69 ·

  Later that week we drove to Pemaquid Beach and walked past the clearing with the charcoal grates and picnic tables I’d seen in my mind on the wall in China. We put our blankets on the sand. The urge I’d had to drink seemed further away here. The idea of drinking was still something chemical in me, but also the memory of an obligation. I’m not sure I can explain it. When you drink, you’re in a private conversation with the drinking, and it becomes something you do, and in this way it’s an obligation. A gift you give yourself, but also a weapon.

  I knew an American painter who came to Beijing for a show I’d helped organize before I had the girls, and I met her at the airport and drove her around the city. The woman was interested in the things involved with Tibetan altars—the brass bell and pestle and mortar. She asked me to drive her to the shops and markets that might have these altarpieces, and while I drove, she pulled a silver flask out of her shoulder bag and took sips. She did this regularly throughout the day so when it came time to give her talk at the gallery in Dashanzi, I thought she’d be quite drunk, but instead she’d just maintained her obligation to the drinking. She spoke well about her painting process and slurred her words only a little.

  In Maine my drinking was the memory of an obligation. I’ll say that it was also a lost friend. Maybe a friend who wanted to cause me great harm, but still a friend. When you’re lonely and unable to be alone with yourself, you’re glad for any friend. It took up a great deal of my thinking during the time I was in a relationship with it.

  * * *

  —

  There were kayaks for rent at the beach, and I asked Elisabeth if she wanted to go out in one with me, and she shook her head. “I’m not a kayak person. When will you ever understand that?” I tried not to laugh, and we walked back to our blankets, and the girls and my mother built a small fort out of driftwood, large enough for the girls to stand in.

  I clapped for them from where I stood in the water and went for a long swim back and forth along the beach, maybe twenty feet out, and it was cold and lovely.

  When I dried off, Myla said, “That made me uneasy, Mama. To see you swimming out there alone.”

  I nodded and took in her worry, and this time on the beach was the real beginning of my understanding how to be with her fully.

  · 70 ·

  That night Elisabeth began having stomach pains. Mild at first and then sharper. We were on the couch in the living room where my mother had installed a brown recliner to watch TV in. This chair, like the tarring of the driveway, was a surprise because my mother hated tarred driveways when we were growing up, and hated TV more.

  I sat with Elisabeth and Myla and didn’t talk to my mother about Margaret, even though this was the subject she most warmed to. Elisabeth’s head was in my lap, and I asked if she thought she might need to make a poop, and she moaned. I took her in my arms and rocked her and my mother got her a wet washcloth for her forehead, and at eight o’clock I walked both girls to bed.

  Elisabeth came to me at four in the morning and said her stomach hurt more, and I gave her Tylenol and put her back to bed. At six she crawled in with me and held her stomach, and I tried to touch where it hurt but she wouldn’t let me. Myla woke up and looked worried, and I wanted to spare her so I told her to go ask her grandmother for cereal. “Do you think you can do that? Go wake your grandmother up on your own?”

  She said yes she could, and she did as she was told.

  Then Elisabeth threw up in my bed. She’d been outside playing all week, and I thought she was dehydrated. I helped her walk to the bathroom and cleaned her face with a washcloth, and when I kissed her she was burning. We got back in bed, and she closed her eyes, and I used the phone next to the bed to leave a message at the doctor’s office in Augusta.

  Twenty minutes later my mother yelled up from the kitchen. “Doctor on the phone!”

  The nurse asked me Elisabeth’s symptoms.

  “She now has a very bad headache.”

  “What happens when you try to palpate her stomach where the pain is?”

  I put the receiver down and tried to press the area of Elisabeth’s stomach where the pain was worse, and she screamed.

  “I can’t do it,” I said into the phone. “It hurts her too much.”

  “Take her in. You can’t be sure. Sounds like appendix and I’d take her in.”

  · 71 ·

  The ambulance had to turn around at the end of our driveway, and the overgrown pine trees made it tight. I didn’t think they were going to make it, and I said this out loud. The driver was a volunteer firefighter named Spike I’d known all my life. He owned the one gas station in town and smiled at me through his open window and said, “Elsey. Turning this thing around is not our biggest problem here.”

  Then he parked and got out and opened the back doors so he and an EMT named Dane could put Elisabeth’s stretcher in. My mother stood on the front porch holding Myla’s shoulders, and I willed Myla not to have one of her fits over me leaving. I went to her and told her she would be okay with her grandma, and I kissed her face and she stared at Elisabeth on the stretcher, and my mother did the smart thing and took her inside.

  I climbed into the ambulance and sat on one side of Dane. A nurse named Noreen sat on Dane’s other side, and I followed Dane’s instructions to keep talking to Elisabeth while Noreen put the IV needle into the vein on top of my daughter’s hand. Then Elisabeth began screaming in a way I hadn’t heard before, and Spike put the sirens on, and we drove through road construction on the bridge into Augusta with more construction on Wayland Road.

  Elisabeth went through two bags of fluid and kept throwing up until there was black bile in the bin that Noreen asked me to hold under her mouth.

  “We’re all thinking appendix,” Dane said.

  “The fever is the clue,” Noreen said.

  They were good people, Dane and Noreen. They did not talk down to Elisabeth. They spoke to her like she was a person, and Noreen said that an appendix was a ticking clock and told Spike to drive faster.

  “I don’t know what hurts more, the IV or my stomach,” Elisabeth whispered to me and cried more, because something had gone wrong with the IV needle and it pressed into her wrong.

  “Take it out! Please take it out. Please, Mama, take it out.”

  I told her if she could just wait the doctor would fix it. I said, “I love you.”

  I kept repeating that. That I loved her and that we would get the IV out.

  * * *

  —

  The emergency room was brightly lit, with a semicircle of six examining rooms with glass doors. Dane wheeled Elisabeth into the second room on the right if you were looking from the nurses’ desk, and one of the nurses followed us into the room and asked me Elisabeth’s weight. I didn’t know it. I didn’t know her height, either. I could guess, and it turned out I was close, but I didn’t know exact measurements. Lukas would have known them.

  The nurse’s name was Angie, and she wore purple clogs and said she needed to give Elisabeth morphine for her pain and what was Elisabeth’s blood type? I didn’t know that, either. A woman from the hospital administration office came in and said she needed to know Elisabeth’s Social Security number. She was seven, I said, and I hadn’t memorized it yet. I wondered how many other things they would ask me about my daughter that I wouldn’t know the answer to.

  I left Lukas two messages on his phone, and each one said call me. Call me please as soon as you can. After the woman from
the administration office finished, I called him again and said, “Elisabeth is sick. Elisabeth is in the hospital. Oh, Lukas, I am so sorry. Oh, Lukas, call me.”

  There was a male patient two doors down from Elisabeth’s room who started screaming, and I think this acted on each of us in the ER differently. The man sounded horribly sad, as if he didn’t have any hope, and what a thing.

  Then a doctor came into Elisabeth’s room and said his name was Howard Swan and that the clock was ticking on Ms. Elisabeth. “Twelve hours after the pain starts,” Dr. Swan said. He wore small, round wire glasses. “Then the appendix has to come out.”

  An hour later they wheeled her into the OR and prepped her for surgery. She reminded me of a deer. Not a fawn. Or a grown deer. But maybe a teenage deer. Everything about her was brown—her wild hair, her darker eyebrows and skin from the beach. I thought all of these were Lukas.

  · 72 ·

  When it was almost time, Elisabeth looked up and asked me to come into the operating room with her. “Of course,” I said. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it earlier or why none of the nurses had offered.

  A nurse rushed me to a metal locker, and I put on a white bunny suit made of crepe paper, and a blue skullcap and facemask like the nurses and surgeon wore, and I went back to Elisabeth’s bed and took her hand and told her again that I loved her.

  “Did it hurt when you had your surgery?” she asked. I thought she was too young to have registered anything about my thyroid, and we’d never talked about it. “Did it hurt?”

  “No.” I was casual, because she was scared and this had to be casual. “No, it didn’t hurt. The surgery didn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying, Elisabeth.” I meant this. “I love you. Daddy loves you. Myla loves you.”

  Another nurse named Sue said we were on our way to the place where they made the incisions, and Elisabeth liked this word, incisions, and she repeated it.

  “Incisions,” she said again while they wheeled her in, and I kept holding her hand.

  The act of wheeling her into the OR caused the IV needle to move, and tears leaked down her face. “We are here with you. I am here with you. Daddy’s here with you. Myla’s here with you. I love you.” I said this. It was the only thing I could think of to say that mattered.

  Sue put a green facemask over my daughter’s face that looked like it had a snorkel attached, and she instructed Elisabeth to breathe in until her lungs were full. When Sue took the mask away, Elisabeth said, “I have a statement to make. Whispering is like black and white. Speaking is like color.”

  Her eyes crossed briefly and she was gone. Then one of the other nurses asked me to leave, and I couldn’t believe she was asking me to do this.

  “I have kids,” Dr. Swan said, because he was reading my mind. I bet none of the parents want to leave, because how could you want to? “We all have kids in this room.”

  But even before he said this, I felt their big-heartedness and was leaving the room.

  · 73 ·

  I walked to the waiting area with the blue poster of Cinque Terre on the Italian coast, and I called Lukas three more times and the third time he picked up and told me things that helped me understand that Elisabeth would live. He also said he loved me and was so sorry he’d been sleeping when I’d called before and could I tell him more about Elisabeth’s vital signs and how long the nurses thought the surgery would take?

  We talked many times during the surgery. I’ve lost count, and each time we talked, I had more things to tell him about Elisabeth and I tried to remember everything so he could feel like he was there with us.

  At the end of one of the calls Lukas said, “When are you coming back?”

  “As soon as Elisabeth is able to fly.”

  “I’ll be the man with a beard at the airport and a sign that reads ‘Elsey come home. Elsey, Elisabeth and Myla come home.’ ”

  He was trying to distract me, and it worked and I laughed and hung up. Then I was alone in the waiting room and went to the time of Margaret at the hospitals when she called on me and called on me for water and Coke and sourballs. Then the surgery was over, and they wheeled Elisabeth into the room with the pink curtain, and she didn’t wake up for a long time.

  Two hours went by while I sat next to her bed.

  “Elisabeth.” The nurse named Betty wiggled the toes on her right foot with her hand. “Elisabeth, are you in there?”

  She didn’t move. After each hour I called Lukas and called my mother and told them not to worry.

  “Elisabeth,” Betty said after four hours had gone by. “Come in, please, Elisabeth.”

  It was the most dreamlike part. She looked fine but she wasn’t with us.

  When she finally opened her eyes, Betty asked, “Where are you, Elisabeth?”

  “I’m in the place where they do incisions.”

  Then she went back to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  The next time she woke up, she was in her own bed in a pale green hospital room, and I was holding her hand. “Do I have to ever go to another circus?”

  “No you do not.” Had I been forcing her to circuses? We’d gone to two. I smiled and tried to remember to tell Lukas.

  “Good. That’s a relief. I don’t like the clowns.”

  · 74 ·

  We got to my mother’s house two days later, and Myla was solemn when we carried Elisabeth in. I’d never seen Myla able to hold herself together so completely, and I was grateful for that and for my mother. I put Elisabeth in my double bed so I could watch her, and I put Myla in Ginny’s bed.

  Once they were asleep, I went into Margaret’s room, which was the only room in the house with a slatted wooden ceiling like the floor of a ship. Her bed had three fish carved into the headboard, and I could hear trees and birds outside the window. I felt clear. When you’re in the hospital with a small girl, everything becomes clear. It really does.

  It was quiet in the house, and my mother had also gone to sleep early. I didn’t stay in my sister’s room long, but I felt like myself in there and not terribly lonely like I had after she was gone. I haven’t written that Elisabeth has Margaret’s long face, and Myla has Margaret’s long arms and legs. I sat on my sister’s bed and told her Elisabeth wasn’t going to die, and that I’d never believed she was going to die. I said I hadn’t believed that she, Margaret, was ever going to die, either, and I always thought I’d see her again and I missed her.

  Ginny was too young and had been sent to my mother’s parents in Augusta during the worst part, and I’d been less than vigilant until then. I had my pot and my running and my music, and it was the surprise of it that still got me. I’d come and gone to school and cross-country practice and studied my face in the mirror. I was already getting ready to leave Hallowell. I had great excitement inside me over this, and I thought my sister would live as long into the future as I could see. So the difference was everything. They put her on a stretcher and wheeled her to the top of the landing, and two men carried her down the eighteen stairs.

  She was my charge. I mean, there were nurses in the last months and there were my parents, but I thought of her as mine. I’d made her mine the way an older sister does, and she was so agreeable to it. I was also embarrassed for having not known. The joke was on me with my running practices and my thin, poorly rolled joints, and my misunderstanding. I never thought she would die, and it has taken me until now to stop trying to resolve the joke. There are people who aren’t trying to solve the joke. Mei was like this, and I learned from her. Things came up. She let them go.

  Myla and Elisabeth were sleeping in rooms down the hall, and I was their mother and I needed to go check on them. I said goodbye to my sister out loud. It wasn’t weighted with meaning, and I didn’t imply I’d be back, because I didn’t think I would be. Marg
aret listened in her even way and I left her.

  · 75 ·

  Two weeks later we made an unplanned landing near a small city west of Beijing and sat on the runway waiting out a lightning storm. There was no way of knowing how long we’d be there. The flight attendants weren’t interested in giving out information, and I began texting my husband: We are close but still so far away and do you love me?

  The girls lay on top of each other in their seats, and opened and closed their eyes. Their faces were sweaty and they didn’t speak. It was hot on the plane because they’d had to turn off the engines in the storm, and the toilets were also out of order. The flight attendants offered each passenger a small glass bottle of vodka for free while we waited. The bottles were clear with little metallic blue tops, and arranged on the drink cart like toys that people opened and drank with or without the melting ice in plastic cups.

  I didn’t reach for a bottle when the flight attendant came to my row with her cart and offered me one, but I did think about it. Then I texted my husband again from the field. I was so sorry for the things I’d put us through: I have no idea where we are or when we’ll get to you. Will you ever forgive me?

  I wrote that I still had pain in my arm, and promised myself I’d have it checked and later I did, and he was right. It was a nerve tear, and with physical therapy it got better.

  Lukas wrote back: At arrivals already.

  * * *

  —

  There was the long line at Immigration, and after thirty minutes or so we cleared and walked down the white hall to the luggage carousels. After customs, we passed through the automatic doors that opened to the international terminal, where there was always a throng. People pushed up against the metal gate and tried to see, and they called the names of their people, but the metal gate held us back, and Lukas couldn’t get to us.