Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed

The last thing I changed was the smallest and it was the one that made me cry, the only time I cried that whole day, and I did not cry when the truck hit me and I did not cry in surgery. I changed who could make medical decisions for me if I could not make them myself. It had been my mother, for thirty years, a piece of paper in a drawer naming Diane Denning as the person who would speak for me if I could not speak for myself.

I took her name off it. I put Warren’s name on it, and told him to find someone kinder for the long term, and he said he would, and he did, but that is another story.

When it was done, Warren gathered the pages and squared them against his knee and put them back in the folder, and he looked at me, and he said, “It’s done, Carol. It’s real. It’ll hold.” And I lay back against the pillow and for the first time in a very long time I felt like the size I actually was, and not the size my family had folded me down to.

It was 9:50 in the evening.

They finally came

My mother walked into the ICU at 10:03 that night, holding a paper cup of gas station coffee.

I know it was 10:03 because I was still watching the clock. She came in the way she comes into any room, already talking, already a little put out, already narrating. “Carol, honey, my word, you gave us such a scare. Shelby’s move ran so long, you would not believe, and then the traffic on 183. Your father’s out in the truck, his hip’s bothering him. How are you feeling?”

She said it all in a rush, setting her purse down, and then she looked around the room, really looked, and she saw the machine and the tube and the lines, and I watched the day catch up to her at last. Her face changed. Some real fear came into it, late, too late, but real.

And then she saw Warren Oakes standing by the window in his gray suit with the leather folder under his arm, and she did not know who he was, but she knew what a man in a suit with a folder means when he is standing in an ICU at ten o’clock at night, and something in her went very still.

“Who’s this?” she said.

“This is Warren Oakes,” I said. “He’s my lawyer. He drove out from Hays tonight.”

“Tonight? Whatever for?” And then, before I could answer, the fear tipped over into something more like defense, the way it does with her. “Carol, honey, what have you gone and done? You can’t be making big decisions in a state like this. You’re not yourself. You’re on drugs, look at you, you’re not thinking straight.”

My father came in behind her then, moving slow on the bad hip, his cap still on his head. He took the room in the way he takes everything in, quietly, missing nothing, saying little. He looked at me and he looked at Warren and he did not ask a single question, and I understood that he already knew. My father is not a stupid man. He is a hard one, but he is not stupid.

“Diane,” he said to my mother. “Hush a minute.”