Chapter 4

I don't remember when I started pouring salt on my eggs, but I dropped the shaker when Aunt Julie shouted “Em!” so loudly that the entire restaurant looked over at us. I saw their eyes, judging us for being rude and interrupting their breakfast. I wonder how they would have reacted if I had jumped on the table and shouted “My mother is in the hospital!”

But I didn't jump up and shout. I dropped the salt shaker and stared at my sodium-laced eggs. I must have had only three bites before my mind wandered into a salty oblivion. Brad was talking to Aunt Charlotte about work. She was taking the role of mother for the moment. We told her our general worries, talked about work, and she told us to get some rest and that we were doing fine. It was as if mom's situation hadn't registered for Brad. Charlie, to my right, was sitting entirely still. He had sucked all his food up in seemingly one bite, but he hadn't uttered a word, or even opened his mouth other than to intake food. I thought Julie and Charlotte would try to push us to talk, but they didn't. When Brad and Charlotte weren't talking about work, the table sat in silence. There was nothing to say. Breakfast was a way to pass the time. And no one was eating.

“Aunt Julie, Aunt Charlotte...” I started saying, but paused to look at Brad and Charlie, “I want to go see mom.”

They both looked at me, then each other, then Brad and Charlie. Aunt Julie put her fork down. “What do you guys want to do?” she asked.

Brad looked around, his hazel eyes still red from the long drive downstate. “I want to go shower, really. I think I'll go home first.”

“Me, too,” said Charlie.

“Okay, how about Char takes Brad and Charlie home, and I'll take you back to the hospital?”

I nodded my head, and Aunt Julie reached for the check.

“Hey, Em, go on up, I'm going to grab a coke from the vending machine...wherever it is...” her voice trailed off as I headed up the main hospital stairs and toward the ICU. The stairwell was filled with abstract art. An odd choice, I thought, as I paused briefly to examine the bright pinks and blue splattered across the canvas. Perhaps that was the point. To make visitors stop thinking about their dying loved ones for a moment.

I quietly walked down the hallway, passed the nursing station and the other rooms of suffering patients. The door to my mom's room was mostly closed. At first I thought a nurse was there, but then I heard a soft, yet muffled sound that couldn't have come from the nurse. I peeked through the slit in the door and saw my father, knelt down beside my mother and holding her hand. His head was bent down, and his shirt and shorts looked wrinkled and worn. He sang.

Katie, Katie, give me your answer do.

I'm half crazy all for the love of you.

It won't be a stylish marriage,

I can't afford a carriage.

But you'll look sweet upon the sweet

Of a bicycle built for two.

I remembered this song. My mother, Katie, used to sing it to me. She said once that my dad sang it to her, but I never heard that happen. And here he was, a grown man on his knees, singing a child's song to his wife. I couldn't walk in the room. It was his room. And it was his wife, if only for this moment.

He finished singing, and after a few moments of silence, I started to walk in. A young nurse coming from the other direction in Winnie the Pooh scrubs saw me and smiled. She asked if that was my mother in the room, as if she was asking if I had just given birth to a beautiful baby. The Pooh nurse waited with a full and happy face, until I glanced back into the room, leading her eyes toward my father. The smile dropped instantly, and the happy crinkles in her eyes faded.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, quickly walking away, almost jogging. I felt as though I was just taken out of this world and placed in another. An older, worn out nurse in comfortingly plain scrubs grabbed my shoulders and said gently, “she doesn't normally work in the ICU. She probably forgot where she was.” That seemed a bit impossible to me as all the life was sucked out of this wing of the hospital, but perhaps the spirit lived on in her. I decided to get the hell out of that hallway.

My father didn't make any noise when I walked into the room, but I knew he knew I was there. I lightly closed the door and even closed the curtain all the way for good measure and knelt down beside him. Both of us held my mother's hand, which was falsely warm. Keeping her breathing and alive through the tubes made her body physically warm, but there was no spirit, no soul behind it. But I held it anyway. It was the last thing of her I had. And when I held it, along with my father's, I knew she would die. The truth was in his face, in his body, in his defeat. I looked around and suddenly the room felt hollow, as if it had been all along and I only just noticed it. And the hollowness took everything with it. There were no Illinois sunsets, no friendships, no futures, no families in this room. I looked back up and my father and I were still on our knees, miles away from my mother's hospital bed in an empty, infinite gray room. And we couldn't stand up. All we could do was watch as we were pulled farther from my mother, his wife, our love. She was sliding into the darkness of the shadowy room and we couldn't help her. I felt too heavy to move. I didn't lift my head.

My father and I were left in the gray room with nothing but overwhelming space. I closed my eyes, afraid that when I reopened them, my father would have slipped away too.