Nan was conscious when the ambulance arrived. The team examined her, and stepped a few feet away from us to confer out of our hearing. If I’d been frightened before, I now felt useless, too. The seconds of waiting for them to come back were agony. Morbidity had become my habit, and I couldn’t be like Robert, who continued to urge her on, but instead I prepared myself for the worst by rehearsing it. The joy I’d had for a couple of months had always felt borrowed. My real life was death-drenched.
“We’ll need your help,” said a voice above me. “Do as we tell you.”
We all painstakingly slipped a pallet beneath her, disturbing her as little as possible. She moaned. “She’s shocky,” I heard one of them say, and they repeatedly took her pulse. She turned gray. We were dull with fear by then. The ambulance drivers loaded her into the truck, and Hiram told them that Virgil was the father. I have to admit, I didn’t even think of doing so.
“We can’t take him with us, we’re going to have to be back there with her.”
“I’ll drive,” I said. I asked the Circumstances to man the fort, including Star, and I set off with Virgil Reed next to me, a theretofore unimaginable occurrence. He was silent during the drive. A palpable, suffering silence. I rode as if alone, in my own thoughts. It was a dreadful ride, endless, as we got behind a slow truck. The land’s beauty, as always, provided ballast for my wild emotions, but not much. The distant mountains’ rocks showed through the bare trees, like a bald scalp. The ocean appeared in flashy, frothy brilliance. Yet I was not at one with them, not under pressure. I was human, and I pressed my stomach to keep from wailing.
Leaving the close atmosphere of the car and striding into the hospital provided relief; it was so familiar to me from all the time I’d spent there with everyone in the family that I felt, for the first time, that everything would be all right. The layout was part of me, and I took myself down the corridor to the nurses’ station. Nan had been taken straight to the operating room.
Sandy, one of our father’s nurses, stopped to greet me. She led me to the waiting room and told me a doctor would come talk to me as soon as there was any news. The only two there were Virgil and I. We took turns in uncoordinated spasms of sitting and pacing. Occasionally I glanced at him—the father—but I couldn’t discern the difference on his face between numbness, boredom, anxiety, fear, or whatever else. In spite of literal movement, he was deadly still. Masked beyond recognition. As with most people in stillness, he became younger in appearance. I had never spent this much time with him, or so close to him. He was really only a youth. I had the thought that I should help him more than judge him, and realized that I was falling apart. Judgment is my home base.
Hours passed before anyone came but Sandy, who poked her head in every so often. When a doctor appeared, he asked for the relative, but Virgil looked as dumb as a fish. I stepped in to do the talking.
“I’m Agnes Lee. My father was a board member of this hospital.” Can you believe I said that? Putting myself forward!
“I’m Dr. Mercer. She’s alive. But her injuries were massive. Her pelvis is broken and her legs are like soup.”
“I see.” I behaved as though I were tough, and could handle anything, but I felt undone.
“The leg bone is in pieces. She had vast internal bleeding. We can’t work on her anymore for now, her body can’t take it. She’ll be moving to a room in the ICU soon.”
“When can I talk to her?” I asked, as if it were my right.
“We have an Engstrom respirator here and I think it best that she be on it for a while. We have to wait to see how things go forward. It may end up being best to move her down to Boston. The next day or two will make matters more clear.”
Days! I wanted her to be home in days. I wanted her in my house, to nurse her myself. I wasn’t going to leave that to him.
“I want to see her,” Virgil asked.
The doctor looked at me. The rule—only relatives. The reality—I was in charge.
“That’s her father.”
The doctor remained cool. He’d seen a lot. He turned to Virgil. “You can’t go in but may look through the window. A nurse will come get you when she has been moved.”
Another wait. It irritated me to have to sit in a room with such a morose and taciturn person. What did he even have to do with any of this? My interpretation of their situation was that Nan’s mother had died or had been somehow swept away, that Nan ended up with him out of custom and legality but that result had never made any sense. I berated myself for not stepping in more completely. My manners had made a muddle of things.
A different nurse appeared and led us down corridors and through doors to a glass window in a door. We couldn’t see much. Little Nan looked like the subject of an experiment, jammed with tubes and lines, the respirator mask obscuring her face. I watched her for some time, until we were told we may as well go home, there’d be nothing different to see or do that day. “I’ll stay,” Virgil said. He pointed to the ground, indicating where he might sleep. I asked the nurse to arrange beds for both of us, but then I glanced at Virgil. It is hard to describe what I saw. A mix of grief and some other emotion I couldn’t interpret. It seemed his inner being had come to a point, a place of determination. If I didn’t entirely understand, I was nevertheless set straight about his attachment.
“I’ve changed my mind. Just find a bed for this man. He is the child’s father. I must go home, but I’ll be back tomorrow.”
I made the long, quiet drive back to the house in the dark. Star was subdued, as if he knew. I had a bowl of soup and slept in spite of the fact that I was sure I wouldn’t be able to.
Nothing changed in the next several days. I went back and forth to the hospital and sat in Nan’s room with Virgil, both of them silent. He appeared to be asleep most of the time, but every so often he’d stand by her bed and hold her hand. I spoke to her, though it was a job to overcome self-consciousness in front of him. I encouraged her to come back to us. She showed no sign of hearing me.
One cold morning, when Star and I were out for a walk, I again practiced the mental discipline I’d learned through all my other nursings—the skill of keeping my mind in the cold, bright moment. This was tough, and especially hard with Nan, but it was best I preserve my strength and concentration for all the tasks ahead.
So I looked around me at the day. Winter had come in with great dignity and beauty. No heavy snow yet, but the light was of a different hue than I’d ever seen, gold-toned unless it was rainy, white gold, yellow gold, pink gold, tipping the bleached meadow with an auric veneer. The leaves had bowed out for the year, and the firs had filled with sap for their dominant moment, which they took on with military bearing and notably good posture. The cold road pushed my feet away, but when I walked across the earth, my footsteps melted the frost, and I left a trail of dark marks in my wake. Star too. The small animals he enjoyed chasing in the warmer gathering seasons had burrowed in, so he pushed his snout into their holes and sometimes gave a bark to remind them that he hadn’t gone anywhere. He turned around to see my reaction, and I offered him a believable amount of praise.