Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed

Shelby

My sister Shelby is six years younger than me and she has been the center of every room she has ever walked into.

I do not blame her for that. She did not ask to be the pretty one, the easy one, the one whose life ran along the tracks my parents had laid down for a daughter: married at twenty-three to a man named Craig who sold crop insurance, three children, a series of houses each a little bigger than the last, each one furnished and photographed and posted. Shelby was the daughter who made sense to them. I was the one they had to explain.

The week I was in the hospital, Shelby and Craig were moving into a brand new house in a subdivision on the edge of the county seat, one of those developments they had bulldozed out of a soybean field by the bypass, all vinyl siding and bonus rooms and a kitchen the color of an eggshell. Shelby had wanted it for two years. She had shown my mother the floor plans on her phone at Easter, scrolling and scrolling, and my mother had made the sounds she has never once made about anything I built.

The move was scheduled for the day after my accident. That is not an exaggeration for effect. My surgery ended a little after two in the morning. The move started at eight.

My parents drove the ninety minutes to Shelby’s new house that morning. They did not drive the twenty minutes to me. I know now, because Shelby posted it, that they were there by nine. My father, seventy-nine years old with a bad hip, carried in a floor lamp. My mother arranged throw pillows on a couch that still had the plastic on the legs. They took a photo on the new front porch, the four of them, Shelby and Craig and Roy and Diane, squinting into the flat morning light, and my mother captioned it with a heart.

I was two towns away with a tube in my chest, calling them.

The calls

I want to walk you through the calls, because the order of them is the whole story.

The first one I made at 9:14 in the morning, once the anesthesia had let go of me enough that I understood where I was and what had happened. I called my mother. It rang four times and went to the voicemail that says, in her flat careful voice, that you have reached Diane, leave a message. I left one. I said, Mom, it’s Carol, I’m at Mercy Regional in Hays, I’ve been in a wreck, it’s bad, please call me back.

The second call was to my father, twenty minutes later, when she had not called back. His phone he keeps in his shirt pocket and never hears. Voicemail.

The third was to the group text. I typed it out slowly. “In a bad car accident yesterday. Emergency surgery overnight. In the ICU at Mercy in Hays. Please someone call me.” I watched the little bubbles for a long time. Nobody typed.

The fourth call, around noon, my mother answered. My heart came up into my throat. I said Mom. And she said, in a rushed distracted voice with a lot of noise behind her, “Carol, honey, we’re right in the middle of Shelby’s move, can I call you back in a bit?” And before I could get more than three words out, before I could make the words land, she was gone. She hung up. I told myself she had not understood. I told myself that for hours.

The fifth call went to voicemail. The sixth. The seventh, I called my father again and it rang and rang and I imagined it buzzing against his chest while he set down a box and did not check it.

The eighth call, I got the text back. My mother wrote: “We’re at Shelby’s helping with the move. Is it an emergency?”

I read that text maybe forty times. A nurse came in to change the bag on my IV, a young woman with kind eyes named Teresa, and she must have seen something in my face because she stopped what she was doing and put her hand on my shoulder and asked if I was all right. I could not answer her. I just turned the phone around so she could read it. She read it twice. Then she looked at me, and she did not say anything, and the not saying anything was the kindest thing anyone did for me that whole terrible day.

The ninth call I made at 6:40 in the evening, and I made it because my phone had buzzed with a notification, and the notification was that Shelby had posted a video.