Chapter Twenty-Six
For the first time since I could remember, I was happy about my life. All of it, up and down and sideways, even with my mom and all the hell she put us through, past and present. I felt too good to let anything bring me down. I had a boyfriend, a hot, sexy, Italian boyfriend, one of the Fierros whom I had it on good authority were hard to catch. He took me to nice restaurants and held doors for me and refused to let me pay for anything. He kissed me until I could barely breathe. He gave me blowjobs I hadn’t known to dream about. He didn’t pressure me for anal sex, or anything about sex, letting it all evolve as it would. Plus, he wanted me to fuck him. Big macho Vincent Fierro wanted me to fuck him, and pretty soon I was going to. I felt like the king of the world.
I should have known things were too good to be true, that happiness couldn’t last. Not when my mom was around.
It started innocent enough, one Thursday after a particularly erotic goodbye from Vinnie that morning before we’d gone off to our respective jobs. As I arrived at the restaurant, Gram called. That was my first warning. Gram only called when there was an emergency of some sort.
“Honey, I don’t want to scare you,” she said, “but I thought you should know, your mom’s in the hospital.”
Again. “What is it now?”
I knew I should have more sympathy. I should be concerned more than annoyed, but the number of trips to the hospital we’d lived through prevented me from becoming too alarmed.
“It’s kind of strange. We were having breakfast, and she kept saying the oddest things. Mixing up her words. I asked her if she was okay, but she was really slurring—”
“Had she been drinking?”
“That’s the thing. She seemed sober. Just confused. Anyway, I brought her to the hospital. They think her electrolytes are low.”
“That causes disorientation?”
“I guess. Anyway, they say they’ll give her fluids, and she’ll be fine.”
“Do I need to come down?”
“No, honey. Work your shift. They say we’ll probably be home by tonight.”
“Okay, Gram. I’ll bring dinner home so you don’t have to cook.”
I had a seven-hour shift that day, and I was busy the entire time. I barely had a moment to think about my mother, but when I did, it was mostly in passing. Gram had said she’d be fine. We’d been through enough of these incidents, they’d become routine.
I ordered some spaghetti and garlic bread to go. While I waited for it to be ready, I went to the employee break room to get my things from my locker. My phone was there, and it was ringing. A glance at it showed a number I didn’t recognize. It also showed five missed calls.
That couldn’t be good.
“Hello?”
“Trey, honey. You need to get to the hospital right away.” Gram wouldn’t use that tone unless it was warranted. When I asked what was going on, she said, “I don’t know, but it looks bad.”
I was lucky enough to catch a cab outside the restaurant, which got me to the hospital quicker than the EL would have. Gram had given me the room number, but all I could remember was that it was on the third floor. From there, I asked a woman in scrubs and eventually found my way to a room where my mom lay in a bed. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she was asleep. Gram sat in a chair at the back looking more tired than I’d seen her in a long time.
“What happened?”
“I tried to call, honey. Maybe I should have called the restaurant, but she seemed fine, and then everything happened so fast, and I tried to call, but you didn’t answer.”
“My phone was in my locker.” I went to the bed. My mother didn’t move. She had an IV in, and a Pulsox monitor on her finger.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“She started having seizures, one right after the other. Each one was worse than the one before. It was awful, Trey, the way she was thrashing around. They gave her some medicine to stop them.” She shook her head. “They don’t really know what’s causing it, but if you watch, you’ll see her feet shake every few minutes. They can’t get them to stop.”
“Did you tell them about the drinking? And the cough syrup?”
“I told them. One doctor said it could be related. Another said he didn’t think so.”
“How could it not be related?”
“I don’t know, Trey. They’ll be back in a few minutes, and you can ask them.”
“Okay.” I thought about my order back at the restaurant, likely in the trash by now. “Have you eaten?”
“There wasn’t time.”
I sat down. There was nothing to do but wait. Again.
I sent Gram to the cafeteria for dinner, and I called Vinnie.
“Do you need me?” he asked, then immediately swore. “Shit! Forget I even asked that. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Don’t, Vin. There’s nothing to do but sit here and watch her sleep.”
“Stop. I’m coming.”
“But—”
“Just because you’re used to doing this alone doesn’t mean it has to keep being that way. Now stop arguing and give me a room number.”
I gave in, secretly glad he was coming, even though I felt selfish for wanting him there. There was nothing he could do. It seemed unfair to make him deal with my dysfunctional family.
The doctors came in, but they didn’t tell me much more than Gram had already said. They didn’t know why she was having seizures. They’d been so prolonged and so severe, they worried about brain damage and cardiac arrest and so had chosen to sedate her. The problem was, the medications weren’t working. She wasn’t conscious, but the seizures hadn’t stopped.
“We have her in a medically induced coma,” one doctor told me. “The amount of antiseizure medication we’re giving her is off the charts. Any more could kill her. We have to weigh the risks of continued seizures against the risks of giving her a higher dose. It’s hard to say which approach is safest.”
Vinnie arrived half an hour later with a bag of sandwiches, several bottles of Sprite, water and a thermos of coffee. He also had a change of clothes for me, some of the things I’d taken to leaving at his house: an old pair of sweats, a T-shirt that bore faint traces of his aftershave, and a soft, worn hoodie to wear over it.
“Hospitals are always cold.” He handed me a sandwich. “I figured you hadn’t had time to eat between work and coming here. Brought enough for Sophia too, and some stuff for later in case you need it.”
He was right. Even though I’d sent Gram to the cafeteria, my own hunger hadn’t registered yet in my brain. “Thank you,” I said, hoping I sounded grateful and not wooden.
Vinnie rubbed my back and kissed my hair, and for the first time in about an hour, I felt slightly human again.
He led me to the comfier love seat, which he had somehow shanghaied, and told me to eat. I wasn’t hungry, but I choked down half of the sandwich simply because I knew it would make him stop worrying so much.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m here all night.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he didn’t have to do that, but his fierce look shut me up. Despite what I would have anticipated, it made me feel better too. I finished my food, sipped at my Sprite and settled in against Vinnie to wait.
By midnight she took another nasty turn, so bad that for a moment her heart stopped beating. By one a.m. they had her stable again, only to have her seize so badly at three it felt like half the hospital came into her room.
By the time the sun rose, she was in Intensive Care. A respirator kept air moving in and out of her lungs. I let Vinnie lead me to the new waiting room, let him take care of everything, trying to stay distant, trying not to get wrapped up in this new nightmare, telling myself it would be over soon.
By the time Vinnie came back with breakfast, the doctors had already come to us with long faces.
“It’s time to prepare for the worst,” they told me.
My mother was going to die. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know when.
I only knew I couldn’t quite believe it.