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The registration nurse peers from her little cubbyhole, her eyes moving between the two of us, the man and me. Time passes, crawling, the second hand clicks from one second to the next, but the minutes never march forward. Twice the man rises and paces the floor, his hands rumpling through his hair, making it stand in spikes and cowlicks. He stares at the doors without blinking, and after several minutes he jerks to his feet and goes out into the night, like a person who just remembered they had an appointment elsewhere. Time passes, and I am alone in the waiting area, listening to the silence of the walls. When the bay doors open again, Dylan blows through, his eyes scanning, adjusting to the brightness. He catches sight of me on a third blink and rushes my way. Through the doors I can see the man, pacing in the cold night in front of the entrance.
“What happened?” He kneels in front of me.
“Not sure, nobody has talked to me. She’s in surgery.” He settles next to me, drawing me close to him, and we wait. Time passes, click click click go the seconds. The woman at the desk continues to pass her eyes from us to the young man who has come in again. After noticing her glance several times, it suddenly dawns on me that after she looks at us, Dylan and me, her head turns away and moves slowly from side to side. That pity movement. The word dirty hums on my left foot. After seeing her do this three times over the next two hours, I push free of Dylan and walk to her. She looks up at me, standing on the other side of her counter, her painted-on eyebrows raised in question, as if she doesn’t know what I might want to say to her. Before I manage to summon a single word, the door leading to the emergency room springs open, and a white-collared pastor steps out into the waiting area, going directly to the young man, who peels himself from his seat and stands.
The words are spoken quietly, almost whispered, “Please come with me, Mr. Dollman.” His words are normal, but the impact is extraordinary. The man crumples, as if the bones of his back and legs have turned to liquid. The preacher collects the man, who looks small and broken, his body shaking, as if wracked by tears, but his eyes and face are dry. He is cried out. The pastor does not look away from the man, and what seems like a lifetime later, he helps him to his feet and they move past me into the recesses of the hospital. Dylan has come to my side, and I feel his arms around my shoulders. I turn back to him, leaving the counter without ever asking my questions. The slow sinking that had quickened in my stomach when the preacher came out has moved to my knees, and I make it about halfway across the room before I realize I am crying. The crumpling of the man has somehow hit me, and in his crumpling, I know the truth. She has not killed herself; she has killed somebody else. A preacher wouldn’t come instead of a doctor if there was anything left to be done for the body. She’s killed somebody. She’s killed somebody’s somebody. There is no other reason for a man of God to come instead of a doctor.
“Miss Hayes?” comes a voice from behind me, and we turn together, Dylan and I, his hand on my elbow as we meet Dr. Connard, who looks like he’s been awake for days, looks like he hasn’t slept much in all of his fifty-odd years. His hair is thinning, and there are dark circles and bags under his eyes. He is dressed in blue scrubs. I feel so guilty for thinking that it would be better if the preacher came for me and the doctor for the other man. Wouldn’t the world be just a little better? I close my eyes and squeeze them tight. What is wrong with me? Who thinks something like that?
“Yes?” I sniff and wipe tears from my cheeks and onto my hands.
“I’m Dr. Connard. Your mother is in recovery. You’ll be able to go in to see her once she is moved to her room.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
He begins listing details about her physical condition—she has a steel pin in her right leg, a concussion—and then he explains about the rehabilitation, and, yes, she will be able to walk again. But what I want to know about is the accident and how it came to be. Nothing seems to matter until that information can be filled, and he is not the man to provide that detail.
She is sleeping when I enter the room, so I stand there, beside her bed, watching her. Her chest rises and falls slowly. Her thin arms are covered by bruises and sores, and an IV drips into her hand. I’d known she was doing drugs, but until now I had not known that she was doing intravenous drugs. That’s a whole new story. How am I supposed to think of her now? This is so totally not what MOTHER is supposed to be. In her neck I can see her pulse beating, fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird. The tendons in her neck and the bones of her skull are covered by flesh that looks like rice paper. What would happen if I unplugged all the beeping machines? Are they keeping her alive or only monitoring her as she lives?
The blue-tinged lids of her eyes flutter open, and her unfocused gaze looks through me, somewhere past me. “Mom.” I take her hand, although I don’t want to touch her. I don’t want to look at her. I want her to be dead. Her eyes widen, and the air catches in her throat, and she begins to cough. Spittle sprays from her mouth, speckling my arm where I am reaching toward her. I force myself not to recoil. The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor speeds up, and a nurse comes in, pushing me away from the bed. I stand in the corner, wiping spit from my forearm discreetly on my jeans and shirt, watching as the nurse tries to calm her.
She begins to yell, my mother does, in a small, frightened voice. She begins to yell that the devil is here trying to take her soul. I am rushed out into the hall, where Dylan is waiting for me, and I would laugh except for the tragedy of that young man’s somebody being gone. I would laugh because that heinous bitch, that Satan, that evil, selfish, insane woman lying in that bed thinks I am the devil. That thing that stole my mother from me thinks I am the devil. The cold stone in the pit of my stomach shifts, and I swear by the life taken today that that woman will never forget what she has done. “That’s right, Bitch. I am your Devil.”
“What?” Dylan asks, but I just shake my head and tell him nothing, and he puts his arm over my shoulder and draws me to him.