Part Five: The Waiting
The family waiting room at Saint Catherine’s was a room I had been in before — once when Leo was five and had needed stitches after a fall from a playground structure, once when my husband Mark had an appendectomy three years ago. It was the usual kind of room: chairs with upholstery that was trying to be comfortable, a television mounted at a height that was useful for no one, a vending machine that made more noise than necessary.
I sat.
I did not look at the television.
I did not get anything from the vending machine.
I borrowed the phone of a nurse named Theresa to call Mark, who was in Denver at a conference, who answered on the second ring, who listened to the first forty seconds of what I told him and then said: “I’m booking a flight. I’ll call you from the gate. Are you all right?”
“He was conscious in the car. They took him back immediately.”
“You did the right thing. Are you all right?”
I thought about this.
“Ask me when they tell me how he is.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there. Which hospital.”
I told him. He said he would be on the next flight. He said he loved me. He said you did the right thing again, which I needed to hear more than I had expected to.
I sat and I waited.
I thought about Leo on the floor with his face the color it was. I thought about Ryan standing four feet away looking satisfied. I thought about my mother’s hands on my phone. I thought about Dana’s faint smile.
I thought about the Thanksgivings. All of them, stretching back. The choreography of them, reliable and repeated, the sage and the butter smell and the lattice pie and the football sleeping. The assumption, built into all of it, that we were a family that worked, that this was what working looked like, that the frictions and the difficulties and the things that didn’t quite bear examination were simply the texture of ordinary family life, the kind of thing everyone had, the kind of thing you didn’t make scenes about.
I thought about my mother’s phrase: Don’t make a scene.
As if the scene were the problem.
As if a child on the floor unable to breathe were less important than the appearance of a holiday proceeding normally.
A doctor came through the doors. She looked at me — I must have been visible as the mother, something in how I was sitting, the particular alertness of waiting — and she came directly toward me.
