Around the Bend (8 page)

True to his word, Nick went out again. Or, pretended to and didn’t answer his phone. I went to bed in a cheesy motel room—the only place I could find off the highway that didn’t blink an eye at a potbellied pig—with my cell in my hands and an empty spot in my stomach that had nothing to do with the lukewarm spaghetti we’d eaten at a nearby diner.

Bright Indiana sunshine streamed through the window, straight into my eyes. No room-darkening shades here, nothing between me and the farmer’s daily crop joy but a flimsy wheat-patterned curtain that stopped halfway to shut. I groaned, rolled over, pressed my forearm to my head, and then revisited the gnawing vacancy beside me and inside me.

Nick.

Blindly, I patted the bed until I hit the small, hard security of my cell phone. I peeked open one eye, pressed the speed dial for his apartment, then waited through the rings. One. Two. Three. Four.

And was sent to his voice mail, his chipper short greeting,
set to the strains of his band practicing in the background. “Not here, dude. Leave a message. I’ll catch you later.”

“Hey, Nick,” I said, forcing brightness into my voice. I was cool with this. I’d done it a hundred times before, and this time was no different. Then why did my heart lurch, and feel like someone had taken a twisty tie to my aorta? “Just calling to say hi. We’re off to, oh…I don’t know, wherever the hell somewhere across the country is. The pig isn’t bacon yet, so I take that as a good sign. I’ll, ah—” and I paused. What was I going to do? Call him later? Wait for his call?

I’d been thrust into that awkward position of WAITING ON A MAN. I’d taken a Bikram Yoga class once, part of some Bohemian phase I’d gone through, where class members were essentially tortured for ninety minutes in a room kept at a hundred and four degrees and performed things like the “warrior” pose and the “corpse” pose.

WAITING ON A MAN—that capital-letter, awful thing I’d vowed never to do again—made Bikram Yoga look like Richard Simmons’ Sweating to the Oldies with a dash of Emeril’s trademark “Bam!”

I clicked my phone shut without finishing the sentence. If I’d known Nick’s voice mail password, I would have called back and deleted the message entirely.

Idiot
.

I smacked myself in the head with the Motorola. But it didn’t feel any better.

I didn’t know what I wanted out of our relationship but it definitely wasn’t this limbo, this uncertainty. This pain.

I didn’t do pain well at all. I was my father’s daughter, after all, which meant I liked things fun and light, not deep and
meaningful. None of the straitjackets that came with commitment.

My mother had married my father hoping he’d loosen her up. If anything, marriage had made her tighter than a ball of twine. If I married Nick, would I end up the same way? Would he?

If Nick would just leave well enough alone…then we could stay the same. I didn’t want to mess with our recipe and sour the batter.

But that didn’t stop me from missing him like crazy and wishing he’d just answer the damned phone. I cursed again. I hated that I needed the reassurance of his voice. It meant I cared. That I was vulnerable.

That I could be hurt. And that was the one road I tried never to travel.

After a shower and a change of clothes, I realized I hadn’t heard from my mother, either. It was nearly nine and this was the second day in a row when she hadn’t been at my door, bright and early, ready to go. I packed up, loaded my bag in the van, then headed over to her door. “Ma? You ready?”

No response.

“Ma?”

Nothing more than some grunting and shuffling from Reginald. I knocked harder, calling her name louder. I paused, pressed my ear to her door. Reginald, making every noise a pig was capable of—and a few I didn’t know he could make—was scraping at the door now. Damn thing probably desperately seeking a shrub.

“Ma! Answer me.”

“Hilary?” She called my name so faintly, I almost didn’t hear it.

“Let me in.”

No response. Just Reginald and his oink-bark-scrape noises. Dread returned with his haunting grip, curling around me with familiarity, rooting me to the concrete stoop for one long, terrifying second. I thought of my father, of how I’d called to him and how he hadn’t answered with his voice, only with that terrible click, and then the explosion—

My mouth went dry, my hand still fisted against the door. Time ground to a halt, and it seemed even Reginald stopped moving.

“Help me, Hilary.” The words, faint, almost childlike, caught in a sob.

I threw myself against the door, but the cheap motel had scrimped on everything but the damned locks. Reginald let out a yelp, and I could hear his hooves as he scrambled backwards. Again, I slammed into the wood, but the door held, a steadfast pine soldier between me and my mother. My vision clouded, obscured by the memory of my father behind another door that wouldn’t open and me, too late, too slow.

“I’ll be back! I have to get a key! Don’t move. Don’t
do
anything!”

I hoped she knew what I meant. I could only pray she listened.

I spun so fast, my flip-flops flew off my feet, scattering onto the concrete like sparrows. I shot toward the motel office, blasting through the glass door, screaming on my way in for help, for somebody with a key and an ambulance, knowing without being told that whatever was behind that door—

Wasn’t good.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

We’d been sitting in a semi-private curtained area in the
emergency room of what I was relieved to see was a large and bustling Indiana hospital for two hours, while the hospital staff tended to people who had more pressing needs.

As much as I wanted to grab the nursing staff and force them to help my mother, even I had to admit that a woman who had impaled herself on a kitchen knife—I didn’t ask how—was more of an emergency than my mother’s cut leg, which had been bleeding like a sieve until now. She’d cut herself getting out of the shower, nicked it badly on the sharp edge of the cheap shower doors, and nearly passed out, a combination, the doctors told her, from her Coumadin dose being too high, her blood being too thin, and her doing too much when she should have been taking it easy.

Classic Rosemary Delaney, I could have told them, although I was still reeling from the blood I’d seen, the way it had coated the bathroom floor, my mother, her leg, her hands, and how it had nearly made
me
pass out, too. For a long, awful second, I’d stood there in her room, with a very nervous, green-faced motel manager beside me, sure she was dead, sure I was looking at a horror film remake of my worst memory, before I’d spun back into action and called 9–1–1.

But now, in the pristine, white, antiseptic hospital, it seemed as if all of that hadn’t happened. My mother’s medication would be adjusted, she’d take care of herself—or I’d yell at her—and we’d go home tomorrow.

Uncle Morty, and the division of my late grandmother’s possessions, would just have to wait.

While I’d been waiting in the emergency room, I’d left another message on Nick’s machine, then called Karen, and talked to her, telling her about my mother. A half hour of
spilling my guts to my best friend had left me feeling much better, and shored up for the battle ahead with my mother.

Who was being stubborn. Big surprise there.

“I didn’t want—” my mother waved a hand at me, then at the IVs, the bandage wrapped around her leg “—this.”

“The hospital? The huge Band-Aid?”

“You. Worrying. Hovering.”

I sank onto her bed, covered her hand with mine. Regardless of the words we’d flung at each other over the years, the wall that remained between us, she was my mother and I loved her. “Ma, that comes with the DNA.”

A smile crossed her lips. “Yeah, it does. I had a lot of those nights myself.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t exactly an easy kid.”

“Yeah, well, that was a million years ago.”

I leaned closer, staring at her. Wishing I could read her mind as easily as she seemed to read mine. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You just had an opportunity to run down the list of my bad choices, to pick apart all the mistakes I have made, and I know I have quite the list. You have me, right here, apology in hand, and you wipe the slate clean, just like that?”

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.