“Heart attack, then stroke,” I said plainly. “Was really sick at first, getting better now.”
Kweku nodded solemnly. I wondered what his story was. How he fell for my mother. What he knew about me, her prodigal daughter.
He told me none of this. Instead, he said something even more mystifying.
“Thank you,” he said. “She didn’t think you would come, but she prayed that you might. Every day, she prayed. Until she...” He cleared his throat, choking on his new reality.
“Until she couldn’t,” I finished, and Kweku gave me a bleary look.
“She was proud of you,” he said.
I winced. “Well, she had a strange way of showing it,” I said.
Kweku didn’t respond to that. Instead, abruptly, he turned to Ezra.
“I was going to the vending machine. Come. Let me get you a drink,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder. When Ezra didn’t budge, he added, gently, “Give them a little time alone.”
Ezra’s eyes flickered to me in a question that I couldn’t answer. Then he sagged, nodded, and they walked away, leaving me alone at the door.
Now or never.I pushed down on the handle with the heel ofmy hand, sure that beyond the door I would find a vortex, a black hole, a glitch in space.
The first thing I noticed about my mother’s hospital room was that it was nice. She’d scored a corner bed, which bought her not only solitude but also tall windows that probably let in a lot of light in the daytime. The couch against the back wall was covered in plush, colorful blankets: Kweku’s station, I assumed. The IV pumps next to her bed whirred, and I scanned over them. She was still on a few drips, but judging by the low doses, they were close to weaning her off them. I looked up at her monitor, took note of her heart rate (ninety-three, normal sinus rhythm), blood pressure (low, but serviceable), the waveform of her pulse oximeter (shockingly good).
Don’t just look at the data, I could hear my old senior resident saying in my head.Look at the patient.
I looked down at the bed to find my reflection staring back. When I was young, I’d dreamed of someday looking like my mother, of inheriting her long, curling eyelashes and round, high cheeks. Even ill, she looked well cared for, her skin greased and smelling of cocoa butter, her lips smooth and uncracked. I could see myself in the reflection of her large, wet eyes: her mirror image.
She lifted a hand, reaching for me.
I felt the gesture like a bludgeon to my chest, memories pummeling at the levy of my hardened heart. How many times had I reached out to her just like this? How often had I begged for her affection, or at least her recognition, only to be met with disdain, to be told that I wasn’t wanted? That by existing, I’d ruined her? I tore my gaze away to face her monitors, heading back to safe shores of data. Data didn’t lie. The data said that she was on the mend. That she’d had a brush with death, but that it hadn’tcaught her, and wouldn’t, at least not today. By hanging up on her and changing my number, I hadn’t left her to die.
A soft coo interrupted my thoughts, and it took me a moment to realize that it had come from my mother. The hand she’d extended still hovered, shaking, in the air, and when I looked at her face, she stared back with resolve.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” I said to her, my nails digging into the side of her bed. “All this time, I’ve wanted to actually speak to you. Every time you called, I thought, maybe this is it. We’ll finally have a real conversation, and I can gain some understanding. And now you can’t even give me that.”
Broca’s aphasia, I knew, affected the left frontal cortex. Patients with it have no problem understanding language but struggle to produce it. I could see the effect my words had on her, but when Prudence opened her mouth to respond, the words were lost to her. She searched for them, grunting and groaning, her tongue twisting uselessly in her mouth, before, finally, she gave up. A tear leaked out from the corner of her eye, and she kicked the foot of her bed, frustrated.
I watched her.
“You may never get an apology from your mother,” my therapist, Rochelle, had said during one of our first sessions. “And that’s okay. You can’t control who she is, or what she does. But you can control yourself. So I want you to use your imagination. I want you to not think of her as your mother, but as your contemporary. Who was she? What ailed her? What and how did she survive? Find closure within yourself.”
Prudence Boateng was a single mother in a foreign land, with no papers, keeping a household afloat by scrubbing other people’s toilets, caring for other people’s children. The man who’d left mewith her was nowhere to be found, his existence a blight, the child he created only a reminder of the damage he’d wrought. And now she was in a hospital bed, her heart weakened, her brain damaged, her voice stolen. She should have been easy for me to empathize with. I’d lectured many an intern on showing grace to patients just like her.
And yet.
“I’m loved, you know,” I told her. “I found a family. One of them is out there right now, waiting on me. And a partner too. A man who tells me he loves me and shows it too.” Her monitor began to beep, and my gaze reflexively jumped to it: her heart rate, easing into the low one hundreds. Fast, but a normal rhythm.Physiologic.“Do you get it? I didn’t need you in the end.I did just fine on my own.”
Prudence’s eyes turned glassy. I could tell I’d hurt her, and I was glad for it.
“G-guh,” she tried. Then she cleared her throat, the corners of her mouth turning up into a small smile. “Good.”
The levy broke.
My hand moved on its own to clasp hers, tears streaming down her face, even more coming down mine. She said it again and again and again, her small body wracked with sobs, her grip on me so tight that she kinked her IV tubing and her pump began to beep. “Good,” she said, and then later, with much effort: “Sorry.” Once, when I released her hand to find tissues, she reached out for me in alarm and added, “Please.”
I sat with her, sobbing, for hours. Karen came in, quietly checked her vitals and found me a chair. Dr. Hosseini dropped by to give me an update, and we talked softly at my mother’s bedside about her impending transfer out of the intensive care unit andthe input from the neurology team. Outside, the sky lightened from pitch black to a soft, periwinkle blue, and I held her hand all the while, marveling at how, despite our similarities, it was so much smaller than mine.
Eventually, Prudence drifted off to sleep. I let her go, knowing that she would be woken soon for a full day of tests.
