the potential for true love (even if it was all in my head)
the little sister I never had
my wallet
my car
my sanity
Chapter Twenty-Two
I sit by the hospital window in a padded faux-leather chair. I still have one IV and various monitors attached, but they’ve removed a few of the more serious tubes: breathing tube, feeding tube, and catheter. My throat feels as though I’ve swallowed nails, and the two times I’ve tried to pee, it burned like a hot glue gun between my legs. A nurse with wrinkles and a thick accent told me not to worry. My insides need to remember how to work. And once they do, I’ll be able to go home.
Home.
It won’t feel like home. Mom’s not there. She’s here, in this hospital, three floors down. The auburn-haired doctor whose name I can’t remember promised that she’d have Mom’s doctor stop by to update me. In the meantime, I am to concentrate on getting better. My mother won’t want to see me weak. The doctor actually wagged her finger at me as she said that, as if I were an errant toddler.
Outside, the palm trees sway in a light breeze. Cars wait at a red light to enter the hospital parking lot. My car isn’t in that parking lot. It’s either outside an impossible town or it’s totaled in a junkyard somewhere. Or maybe it’s totaled and in Lost because I’ve lost it. Except that Lost doesn’t exist.
The auburn-haired doctor showed me photos of when I’d arrived, the X-rays from my initial examination, and the daily nurse reports. Ihadbeen here three months, which meant I couldn’t have been in Lost. I’d imagined it, like Dorothy and Oz. How cute. How quaint. I want to put my face in my hands and cry, but I don’t want another conversation with the nurses or the extra cheerful doctor.
At their insistence, I have eaten a little, liquids only. I didn’t have much appetite. A few spoonfuls of soup before I felt as if I was going to vomit. I pushed it away before I did. I’ve also walked around the room. Felt as weak as a baby and had to rest. They wanted me back in bed; I pleaded for the chair.
A man knocks on the open door. “Hello, Ms. Chase? I’m Dr. Barrett.” He carries a clipboard, and he has a koala bear clipped to his stethoscope. He’s young, early thirties I’d guess, and handsome, like a doctor in a soap opera. He has killer blue eyes and a lopsided smile to accompany his calm, baritone voice. In short, he’s exactly the kind of doctor that a coma patient is supposed to open her eyes and see and fall madly in love with.
Unfortunately, I’m already awake and don’t feel at all like Sleeping Beauty with my hair matted and my limbs shaking and bruises up and down my arms from all the needles that have been jabbed into me over the past few hours. Or three months.
“Are you the psychiatrist?” I ask. They promised one will come talk with me about my feelings regarding my lost three months. They said this completely oblivious to the appropriateness of the phrasing. My “lost” three months.
“I’m your mother’s primary oncologist,” he says.
“Oh.” I sit up straighter.
He lays out the diagnosis in plain terms in his soft, calming voice. Stage four ovarian cancer. It’s spread to the lymph nodes in the abdomen and to the liver. They suspect it may also be in her lungs and bladder. Her body is essentially riddled with cancer. As he tells me this, his blue eyes are full of compassion. I nod in all the appropriate places. And then I ask as calmly as I can, “Can I see her?”
He nods. “Of course. I’ll ask one of the nurses for a wheelchair...”
“I can walk.”
He looks at me dubiously but he doesn’t contradict me, which I appreciate. Pushing on the arms of the chair, I grit my teeth as I stand. My legs feel shaky, and my head spins. I wait for it to pass. Maybe my mom shouldn’t see me like this. I need real clothes. And a brush through my hair. Makeup wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. But handsome-doctor-guy whose name I have already forgotten has one hand under my elbow. “One step at a time,” he says. “You can change your mind whenever you want. It’s not as if it’s hard to find a wheelchair around here, being a hospital.”
I crack a smile since that’s obviously what he wants.
“Your mother is a very brave woman, you know. She’s a fighter. That’s why she’s held on as long as she has. She’s talking about what plants she’s going to put in her garden and how no one has weeded.”
“She’s beaten this before,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Yes, she has,” he agrees. But he doesn’t say she will again. He also doesn’t say she won’t, and human bodies are so complex with all sorts of factors. He can’t know for certain that she...
Stop it,I tell myself. Stop denying. Stop making excuses. Stop running away. My entire coma-induced hallucination had an obvious point. It was clearly my subconscious helping my conscious come to grips with my mom’s death.
I won’t let leaving Peter and Claire be pointless.
Even if they weren’t real.
Hobbling, I follow Dr. Handsome into the elevator. I sag against the wall. He watches me. “She’s rallied quite a bit since she heard you woke,” he says. “But I need to caution you...sometimes it’s a shock to see someone you love here.”
“I’ve seen her in the hospital before.”
