It was nearing nighttime when her taxi pulled up in front of the hospital. She stepped into the brightly lit lobby, with its two-story wall of exterior windows and the curving wall of interior windows. Palm trees stood tall and vibrant, in contrast to the white walls and silver metal window frames.
The lobby held a collection of modern, comfortable-looking rust-colored chairs, most of which were empty on this Tuesday evening in May. A television in the corner stuttered out a canned laugh track on an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Frankie walked up to the front desk, behind which sat a tall, bony-faced woman wearing round glasses and bright red lipstick. A name tag identified her as Karla.
“Hi, Karla,” Frankie said. “I’m here to see Bette McGrath.”
Karla consulted a set of papers. “Family only.”
“I’m her daughter.”
“Okay. She’s in the ICU. Second floor. The nurses’ station is to the left of the elevator.”
“Thank you.” Frankie headed to the bank of elevators and went up to the second floor.
The ICU was newer, brighter, than the SICU in the Virginia hospital where Frankie worked, but it was the same series of glassed rooms, with nurses moving from room to room, family members crowded at doorways, looking worried, offering each other brittle smiles.
At the nurses’ station, she stopped, asked about her mother, and was directed to Room 245, where she found her mom lying in a bed in a glass-walled room, connected to a ventilator, which breathed for her. A crisscross of white straps kept the breathing and feeding tubes in place. The bed’s metal railings were up on either side, and the head of the bed was angled up slightly. A stark white pillow framed Mom’s head.
Machines stood around her, whooshing, beeping, showing graphs of color.
Frankie drew in a sharp breath; Mom was fifty-two years old but looked ancient, gaunt, and drawn.
“Hey, Mom.” She approached the bed slowly, pulled her mother’s chart out of its sleeve, read it. Intercranial hemorrhage. Respiratory failure.
She put it back in the sleeve. “We don’t care about statistics, do we, Mom? You’re tough. I know you are.”
She stared down at her mother’s pale, bluish skin, her sunken cheeks and closed eyes.
Frankie wanted to shut out the sound of the ventilator and imagine the natural rise and fall of her mother’s chest, but she had too much training to fool herself. She knew that stroke patients on ventilators often died within the first few weeks.
She brushed the back of her knuckles across Mom’s soft, warm forehead.
She heard footsteps and knew without looking who was here.
Her dad. The man who’d once called her Peanut and carried her on his shoulders and tossed her playfully into the air until his arms must have ached from the effort. The man she’d gone to war to make proud.
He paused at the door.
Frankie looked up.
He stared at her for a long moment, as if deliberating what he should do, and then he walked slowly forward, took his place on the other side of the bed. His fingers curled tightly around the bed rail. She saw how tanned he was, even in May, from walking job sites, overseeing construction beneath the hot Southern California sun. He wore a bright blue polyester shirt, buttoned incorrectly, and beige polyester pants. A wide, tightened belt hinted at weight loss.
“You didn’t call me,” she said.
“I couldn’t.”
She heard the way his voice cracked and knew it had been fear that stopped him from calling, not anger. “When did it happen?”
“A few days ago. She had a headache,” he said softly, in a voice she barely recognized. “I told her to quit complaining.”
Pain filled his eyes when he looked at Frankie.
“She’ll come out of this, Dad.”
“You think? I mean, you’re a nurse. You should know.”
“She’s tough,” Frankie said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s just the three of us now, Dad,” she said.
He looked up, tears in his eyes at the reminder that they’d lost Finley, that any one of them could be lost in a moment, while you looked away, took a breath, stayed angry.
“Will you stay?” he asked.
So, he felt it, too. They were family. As tattered and beaten-up as the connection might feel, it had a strong core, something you could hang on to. “Of course,” Frankie said.
* * *
For the next two days, Frankie rarely left her mother’s side. She made friends with the ICU nurses on all of the shifts and brought them donuts when she arrived in the morning. She sat at her mother’s bedside hour after hour, reading books aloud, talking about anything she could think of, rubbing lotion onto her hands and feet. Dad stayed as much as he could, but she saw how difficult it was for him to be here. For a few hours every day, he went to work, just—Frankie thought—to escape the pain of waiting and watching, but then he came back, sat in the room with Frankie and Mom. He told Mom stories of their youth, retraced the steps of their love, laughed about the way her family had reacted. Frankie learned more about her dad, and the depth of his love for his family, than she’d learned in all the years before, but neither of them spoke to the other about it.