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“About the same,” she says, and I find comfort in that.
Kathy gives her change of shift report. After she leaves, I do my initial assessment, going through the motions. I take her vitals, administer medication, force her eyes open to check for a pupillary response, and then I check the urine output, which is how we watch for things like dehydration and kidney function. There is a urinary catheter in place, to collect urine directly from her bladder and bring it to a drainage bag beside the bed, which has to be routinely emptied. Caitlin wears an adult brief too that has to be regularly changed. She requires more care than a baby, and I wonder if she’ll always be this way or if she’ll ever go back to being the person she was before.
The Becketts look exhausted by the time they come to the room. Mrs. Beckett holds a paper cup filled with coffee in her hand. Her clothes—the same ones she’s worn for days—hang limply on her; her jeans bunch in the knees.
“How did you sleep?”
“Not well,” Mrs. Beckett says. “I can’t sleep, not here, not with Caitlin like this,” she says, letting her eyes go to the bed.
Mr. Beckett spent the night with her in the waiting room, but now he plans to leave, to go home, to shower, walk the dog and catch up on work. “Come with me for just an hour or two and take a nap in our bed,” he suggests before he goes, but Mrs. Beckett shakes her head with a childlike mulishness to it. She won’t go. She won’t leave Caitlin alone. She lowers her tired body into a chair, bent on staying, and then later, after Mr. Beckett has left and she and I are alone, she turns to me and asks, “Have you ever known someone to do what Caitlin did?”
The question—the frankness of it or perhaps the fact that it hits a raw nerve—takes me by surprise. A knot forms in my throat. I try swallowing it away, but it’s like a boulder: large, heavy and unable to be knocked loose. It chokes me, stealing my air, and I have to clear my throat to dislodge it. “You have, haven’t you?” she asks because of my delay and my reaction. She softens, easing off. Her head slants and her eyes turn warm.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Not far from us, there was a highway overpass that crossed over the expressway. The year after I left high school for college, my little sister drove her car out close to that overpass. She parked on the shoulder of the road just before it, walked a hundred feet to the dead center of the bridge, climbed to the top of the concrete parapet and jumped.
When I tell her, Mrs. Beckett stares open-mouthed at me, as if this revelation binds us, as if it makes us kindred spirits. She looks to me in mild astonishment and says, “Then you, more than anyone, know what Tom and I are going through. You know what it’s like. You can understand.”
I nod, trying to stay unaffected but it’s impossible. The truth is that everything about this stirs up memories of Bethany and brings back all the emotion I felt after she died. Lately, I’ve found myself thinking of her all the time, and about what it would have been like for her to stand at the top of that highway overpass and jump. After her suicide, I did research, looking into things I didn’t need to see but I couldn’t stop myself; it became an obsession, a form of self-sabotage, self-flagellation. Nothing I read did me any good, but I wanted answers. I wanted someone to tell me how my happy little sister could do that to herself. What I found out was that jumping from a building or a bridge is one of the more lethal forms of suicide. Unlike with an overdose for example, where there is a chance someone might find you and that you can be saved, jumping isn’t something that can be stopped or undone. It’s a manner of suicide exclusive to those who are most bent on dying. That fact, when I read it, broke me. Bethany didn’t have any doubt. She wanted to die.
I swallow hard, asking, “You have other children besides Caitlin?” because I have to change the subject before I start to cry.
“Yes, two. Caitlin is our baby,” she says, letting her gaze go down to Caitlin’s face before reaching into her purse to pull out a small photo album. She flips through the pages and, when she finds the one she’s looking for, she stretches the album across the bed to me.
“That’s her,” she says, pointing at the photo. “That’s Caitlin. I wanted you to know what she looks like,” she says. I know, of course, what she looks like. I can see that for myself, but what she means is that she wants me to see what she looks like without all the gauze and tubes, which mask half her face while the rest is swollen and bruised.
I look down. The image I see throws me off-balance. I find myself staring at her face and her eyes, which are very much vibrant and alive. In the photograph, Caitlin Beckett is a confident woman, composed and practically bold. She strikes that pervasive hand-on-the-hip pose, her chin jutting out, her smile teasing and playful, and it’s hard to reconcile the woman she was with the woman she is now. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think they weren’t the same. I swallow hard, my saliva thickening.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Mrs. Beckett asks, but she doesn’t wait for me to respond. She goes on, harrumphing and saying, “Clearly, she didn’t get it from me.”
It takes a second to collect myself. I say, “She’s lovely,” and then I hand the album back. “Will you tell me about her?”
“About Caitlin?” I nod. Mrs. Beckett chuckles to herself. “Typical youngest child,” she says, but the laugh is melancholic. “Outgoing, attention seeking. Charming and creative. If you were to ask the others, they’d say that Caitlin was Tom’s and my favorite, or mine anyway. She always got her way, or at least that’s what the others would say.”
“Did she always get her way?”
“I may have spoiled her, yes. Some. Not intentionally. But she was my last. My last to carry, to give birth to, to nurse. I coddled her more than the others, because after Caitlin, I would never do it again. There was a finality to it, which was hard for me, because I dreamt my whole life about being a mother. Each of Caitlin’s firsts—first steps, first day of kindergarten—was also my last.”
I grow solemn, thinking of Sienna. I can relate. These last few years, now that Sienna is a teenager, I feel her pulling away from me, her life going in a different direction than mine. It used to be that I knew everything about her, her friends and what she was thinking, but now I don’t.
“Are your kids close?”
“No,” she says. “They live on opposite sides of the country—one in New York and one in Seattle—but despite the physical distance, they’ve never been close. Caitlin is our only daughter. My relationship with her was different than the one I have with my boys, and I’m not sure but that they didn’t resent her for it. You have a daughter too?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Just the one?” I nod. “Do you have a picture? I’d love to see what she looks like,” she says. I carry my phone with me, in one of the many pockets of my scrubs. The phone is always on silent, though I check it throughout the day with some frequency, in case Sienna texts or calls.
“She doesn’t like to have her picture taken,” I say. “She’s at that age where she scrutinizes every photo of her I take. None is ever good enough. She zooms in on the image until every pixel is magnified and then she comes up with some reason not to like it—her hair, her smile, the particular angle of her head.”
I slip my hand into my pocket to retrieve the phone. I swipe through the pictures of Sienna on my photos app for one to share, finding one I love. When I do, I hand Mrs. Beckett my phone and then I watch her eyes, the way they study Sienna’s face.
“I have no idea why she wouldn’t like having her picture taken. She’s stunning.”
“Thank you,” I say, slipping my phone back into a pocket.
“The blond hair must come from your husband,” she wrongfully assumes. She wouldn’t be the first to notice that Sienna looks nothing like either Ben or me, who are both brunette, while Sienna is a light blond.
“No,” I say, and then I tell her the same thing I tell everyone, holding Ben’s mom accountable, though she is more of a strawberry blonde. “My mother-in-law, we think.”
