Walking down the hall to Dad’s room the next morning, I passed a sign that cautioned me to be quiet because rest was healing. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with Dad. I could hear voices coming from his room when I was still about three doors away. When I got there, the nurse was yell-talking to him the way people often do with the elderly. He was yelling back as well as he could, given the condition of his lungs. Apparently he was much more alert than the night before, and I had hope.
“Mr. Quinn, all you have to do is hold this in front of your face, put your mouth on the stem, and blow as hard as you can.”
“You blow it,” he said. “I want my breakfast.”
“Fergus, stop acting like a baby and do what the nurse tells you to do,” Mom said. She was standing next to the bed, leaning over him like she was about to take the blower from him and do it herself. I wondered what time she had arrived. Had she spent the night there?
Did I really grow up with this? “Hi, ya’ll,” I said.
The women turned to me without having time to drop the same glares they had used on Dad. He looked relieved to see me. And spent from the yelling. “Brigid. Tell these two I don’t need to blow in a goddamn tube.”
“You sound terrible. Blow in the goddamn tube, Dad.”
He wheezed. “Make me.”
What a child would say. There was something about this two-year-old in an eighty-three-year-old body that set me off, Quinn-style. I took the device from the nurse and shoved it at my father. He grabbed it out of my hand and swung it against the opposite wall, missing Mom’s face by about six inches. She reared back with the long practice of avoiding projectiles.
Things stopped. I had one of those flashbulb memories, other swings, other ducks, loud fights while Ariel and I played Drug Bust Barbie and Todd whimpered in his playpen.
Then another flash of my last routine mammogram and how the technicians had started asking routinely: Is anyone at home hurting you?
Did they ever ask Mom this? What did she say? Of course not, she would say, because he never actually connected, he only threw things. When I was growing up, this wasn’t considered abusive. Very little that went on with married people was considered abusive.
Time started up again, and I happened to connect with the nurse’s eyes. She frowned. Times had changed. I felt ashamed of my family.
As if she noticed my shame, which made it worse, the nurse said, “Sometimes this happens with what he’s on. How about you both go get a snack or something.” She lowered her voice as if Dad couldn’t hear. “It may be better if there’s no audience.”
Mom set her mouth in that way she could and followed me out into the hall. I leaned against the wall, but she stood rigidly at attention. She was one of those elderly women who never sagged in any way.
“Did you have a nice evening with your friends?” she asked. The woman could have written Passive Aggression for Dummies.
After translating her question, I ignored it, as I did most often. “How is he doing today?”
“The doctor said he’s got about a quarter use of his lungs,” she said. “Pneumonia on top of emphysema on top of all those years of smoking. It’s a wonder he still has that much fight left in him.”
I thought about him throwing the breathing thing across the room. All the throwing I had seen. I asked, “Does he still throw things?”
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she stood straighter. “Throw?”
“Like the time, I guess I was about eleven, the Thanksgiving turkey burned and he hurled that metal chair at the wall so hard the legs stuck in the wallboard.”
“I don’t remember that.”
I doubted that was true. “Honestly, sometimes he acts like a cartoon character.”
“Mmm.” The way her head was turned I could tell she was only half paying attention, one of her ears fixed on the open door behind us, waiting for the shriek of the nurse. I wanted to distract her.
Anybody else grow up comparing people to Warner Brothers cartoon characters?
“Yosemite Sam, or maybe the Tazmanian Devil. We used to be scared of him even though he never did anything to us, just blustered. You were never scared of him, though. Like in the room just now.”
“I learned how to stay out of his way,” she said, looking toward the room so it seemed she was partly talking to herself.
It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time I was alone with my mother, talking. There were always other people in the room. Dad was always there. That and the hospital setting made me say things I never had before. I had visited many women in a setting like this, trying to get them to speak to me through opiates and split lips. The way Mom put things made habit kick in.
I asked, “How long did it take you to learn?”
Mom looked down the hall again, and I couldn’t tell if she was thinking of my question or just ignoring me. So I didn’t ask the other questions, and maybe never would.
The nurse came out of Dad’s room. She looked fatigued. “You can go back in now. If you want.”