After surviving an interminable lunch with Bridget hovering like a mother hen and practically force-feeding her a sandwich and an apple, Toni went back to the hospital. She managed a cheery enough “hello” for the on-duty nurse, one Elizabeth Effertz, R.N., according to the badge on her scrubs, before she made a beeline for Evie’s tiny room and pulled the chair up to the bed.
“So you want to hear what I did this afternoon?” Toni leaned over the metal rail, setting her chin on her forearm. “Bridget gave me a lecture about what a bad daughter I am,” she said, figuring she might as well say exactly what was on her mind. Maybe if it pissed off Evie enough, she’d open her eyes despite the medication. That would surely be worth an argument, wouldn’t it?
“You know, Ma,” she went on, keeping her voice low, “if you were angry at me for leaving, you should have spoken up. I can’t read your mind, much as I wish I could. And if I was too busy to come home and you missed me, you should’ve come up. The highway doesn’t just go in one direction.”
How strange it was to say exactly what she was feeling, right to her mother’s face, and not have to worry about repercussions. And still her pulse thudded frantically in her veins. She cleared her throat.
“In spite of what Bridget seems to think, you don’t have the market cornered on lonely,” she murmured. “I miss Daddy, too, only I didn’t give up when he left us. I kept going, because it’s what he would’ve wanted me to do.”
For a moment, Toni held her breath, staring at the squiggles on the monitor measuring her mother’s every heartbeat. Slow and steady, not a blip out of place.
What had she expected? That the blips would suddenly spike, and Evie would sit upright, glare at her only daughter, tug the tube from her throat, and reply, “How dare you speak to me like that!”
Well, hey, one never knew.
“What I really want to know is why you went to Hunter Cummings instead of coming to me when you realized the winery was in trouble. Did you think I wouldn’t care? That I wouldn’t want to help? Okay, don’t answer that,” Toni said and stopped herself, because, honestly, she wasn’t sure how she would’ve responded either.
What if Bridget was right, and she hadn’t made the wisest choices in the past? What if she wasn’t as good a daughter as she could have been?
Ix-nay on the self-flagellation, Toni thought and took a deep breath before she refocused on Evie.
“Are you okay?” She gazed at the bruised spot where the IV needle went into the back of her mother’s hand, stuck smack into a fat blue vein. Hesitantly, she reached over and touched the white taped “X” with a fingertip. “Does it hurt?” she asked. “Can you feel anything?”
In lieu of an answer, she heard the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator that caused Evie’s chest to rise and fall. Her mother’s hair puffed about her thin face like a cotton ball, and her skin appeared nearly as pale. Her lips, too, seemed absent of color.
She looked lifeless; lifeless and old.
In all her years growing up, Toni had never thought of her mother as any particular age. She was simply Evelyn Evans Ashton, wife and mother, the bedrock of the family, the lighthouse that guided boats safely into the harbor, as solid as a granite pillar, and too resilient to be entirely human.
Toni shifted in her seat, placing her forearms on the bed rail, watching her mother’s expressionless features. “So what made you go up to the attic yesterday morning in your nightgown?” she whispered. “Why did you put on the black dress? Did something about it remind you of Daddy? Or maybe of Anna?”
The shift was subtle, but something changed in Evie’s face. Toni detected the flicker of motion beneath Evie’s eyelids, as if she were dreaming, frantically dreaming.
Could coma patients do that? And had the heart monitor begun to blip the slightest bit faster?
Her own pulse careening, Toni leaped up from the chair and raced out of the room, straight to the nurses’ station. Breathlessly, she blurted out, “Something happened with my mother, something changed”—she gestured at Elizabeth Effertz, who quickly got up—“please, come see.”
Toni followed the woman’s quick footsteps back to Evie’s bedside, standing back a bit as the nurse checked her mother’s monitors that showed her vital signs and the leads measuring her EEG.
“I was talking to her about going up to the attic, and I asked if it had something to do with my dad,” Toni babbled. “Bridget found her surrounded by photographs and wearing an old dress, and I wondered if it was important to her, if maybe it was connected to my father somehow. It seemed like she heard me, like she reacted—”
“I’m sorry, Miss Ashton, but that’s not possible,” Nurse Effertz told her very matter-of-factly. “Your mother’s unresponsive.”
“I saw her eyes move—”
“She opened them?”
“Not exactly,” Toni tried to explain, suddenly feeling stupid. “It looked like she was dreaming. You know, the whole REM thing, and I don’t mean the band.”
“I know about rapid eye movement, yes,” the nurse dryly noted.
Toni saw Evie’s hand hanging over the edge of the bed, and she stepped past the other woman to gently tuck it back against her mother’s side.
When she was done, she straightened up to find Nurse Effertz watching her with a sympathetic expression. “Here’s the thing, Miss Ashton. People want to believe their loved ones dream when they’re in comas, but it’s really not possible. Dreams occur during the deepest sleep, and we’d see that in her EEG. Everything we know about coma patients tells us they don’t dream at all. It’s likely they don’t think of anything. Maybe it was an involuntary movement”—her smocked shoulders shrugged—“or it’s just that you want to see something so badly that you imagined it.”
“I didn’t imagine it,” Toni insisted, curling fingernails into her palm.
“It’s okay.”
No, it wasn’t okay. None of this felt okay in the slightest. Toni glanced past the nurse and looked at her mother, lying so still on the bed, no different from when Toni had come in. Had her mind played a trick on her? Had she truly not seen what she thought she’d seen?
“Look, if it’s any consolation, your mother is holding her own. All her vital signs and her cranial pressure are stable. There’s been no further bleeding. Hopefully, her brain is working hard to heal itself. I’m sure having you here is a comfort.” The woman smiled indulgently and started toward the door.
“Wait!” Toni blurted out before she could forget. “Do you still have it?”
The nurse paused and glanced over her shoulder. “Have what?”
“The dress my mother was wearing when she was brought in.” Toni needed to retrieve it. What if, when Evie did wake up, she asked about it? If she’d wandered up to the attic at the crack of dawn to put it on, it clearly meant something to her. “I’d like to take it home.”
Once again, Nurse Effertz smiled that indulgent I’m-sure-you’re-acting-cuckoo-because-you’re-under-stress smile. “It’s in a bag at the station. I apologize for the shape it’s in though. They had to cut it off her in the ER.”
Toni didn’t care what condition it was in. “I’ll pick it up on my way out.”
“Okay.”
“Sorry to have bothered you,” Toni apologized, even if she wasn’t sorry at all.
“That’s what we’re here for,” the nurse replied before she disappeared through the door in a muted squeak of her rubber-soled shoes.
Toni settled back into the chair beside her mother’s bed and reached through the side rails to hold Evie’s hand. “I know what I saw,” she said quietly and squinted at her mom’s impassive face.
Evie was in there, lurking somewhere within her frail human shell, perhaps even hearing; Toni wasn’t taking any chances.
“You are in there, aren’t you? Maybe you’re not listening to every word I say”—she let out a dry laugh—“but then neither of us was very good at listening to the other, eh? Nurse Liz might think I’m hallucinating, but I know the difference between real and imagined, and something’s going on inside your head. Whatever you’re doing, be quick about it, would you? You know I totally suck at being patient.”