“It’s a good day. Tell me about your plans for Thanksgiving.”
Anna told him about her plans to cook for Thanksgiving, making lists, having the kids all at home and feeling so comfortable in her surroundings finally. Her panic of another stroke diminished by the day.
The doctor touched his own face under his nose and she looked at the screen. She jumped in surprise and grabbed a tissue from the box on the table.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She dabbed at the blood running from her nose. “This is new. I had a bloody nose this morning and this is the second one today. I might have to put you on hold awhile. Unless you want to just watch me bleed.”
“Have you told the doctor?”
“The occasional bloody nose is not unusual. The bruises...”
“Was that an answer?” he asked.
“Of course I mentioned it to Jessie.”
“And you mentioned your two bloody noses in one day? And quite a few bruises?”
“She’s gone into the city today.”
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“There’s a clerk here,” she said. “Oh, hold on. This is getting ugly.” She put aside her laptop and grabbed more tissues and was mopping up her face, getting blood on her hands. Finally she headed for the bathroom and got a hand towel, pressing that over her face. With a bloodstained towel pressing over her nose, she headed for the kitchen. She found an ice pack and pressed it over the bridge of her nose.
Forgetting about the videoconference call on her computer, she went to the sofa and reclined. Her face was frozen before long, the ice was so cold. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, trying to stop the bleeding, when young Cameron came into the living room, took one look at her and screamed, “Holy shit, your honor!”
“It’s a bloody nose,” she said.
“It looks more like a bus accident!” He ran to the kitchen and loaded up on paper towels, wetting some of them. “Try pinching the bridge of your nose.”
“I have. It’ll stop soon.”
Together they concentrated on getting the bloody nose to stop but for the next fifteen minutes all they did was collect bloody towels, tossing them on the coffee table. Anna began to choke and cough, gagging on the blood that was running down the back of her throat.
The door from the garage opened and slammed shut and Jessie walked into the family room to find a young male clerk bent over Anna, a large pile of bloody paper towels on the coffee table beside them. She calmly walked over to them and said, “Oh, dear. Stay right here.”
Jessie opened her doctor’s bag on the kitchen counter. She pulled something out, cut it with her scissors and came back to the sofa. She stuffed some thick cotton up Anna’s nose.
“Lay back on these pillows and breathe through your mouth.”
“Did you just stuff tampons up my nose?” Anna asked.
“Sort of,” Jessie said. “I think your blood thinner needs to be adjusted.”
“We used tampons in wrestling,” Cameron said. “It works.”
Anna laid there for a while, the strings of two tampons trailing across her cheeks. “This is becoming concerning,” was all she could think of to say.
Though it took quite some time, with Jessie’s help, they finally managed to stop the nosebleed. Jessie cleaned up her mother’s face, discarded the wet towels and put in a call to Anna’s doctor. A changed prescription was called into the pharmacy.
“This is getting to be a lot of trouble,” Anna said.
“Patience,” Jessie advised. “We’re getting there.”
SIXTEEN
It was the night before Thanksgiving and Michael sat in his apartment alone, slowly nursing a beer. He had thought about going out with some of his buddies, but before he had even completed the thought, he lost interest. He could have gone to his mother’s house, but Jessie and Bess were both there, staying the night, helping with the preparations for Thanksgiving dinner. He just didn’t feel like all that fake happy-family bullshit. They weren’t a happy family anymore. He felt they’d lost it all when his father died and then lost it all again when they found out their father had betrayed them. Betrayed them all, when you got down to it.
His thoughts were distracted by the ringing of the phone and he smiled to see it was Jenn calling. If there was an upside to all the crap he’d been dealing with it was Jenn. He had called her to tell her his mother had had a stroke and that was all it took to get them talking again. She couldn’t tell him to go jump off a bridge when his mother could be dying.