The Name I Crossed Off My Emergency Card
Then Dottie told her about Karen.
She told her about ten years of men. One who wrecked Karen’s car and walked away. One who ran up four thousand dollars on a credit card in her name.
“And every time,” Dottie said, “I paid. Every time, I wrote the check and kept my mouth shut, because I thought that’s what a mother does. I thought if I said what I really thought, I’d lose her.”
Dottie took a bite of the pie. Vicki said her hand was shaking a little.
“Do you know what I wish?” Dottie said. “I wish one time, just one time, somebody had sat my girl down and told her the truth. Not me. I was too scared. Somebody who loved her and wasn’t afraid of losing her. So I’m going to tell you, because nobody told her.”
Vicki said she nodded. She said she felt about nine years old.
“A man who will let you take your mother’s surgery money for his truck,” Dottie said, “is telling you exactly how he’ll treat you when your money runs out. He’s not hiding it, honey. He’s showing you. You just have to be willing to look.”
“He didn’t ask me to,” Vicki said. “He didn’t know where it came from.”
“Did he ask?” Dottie said.
Vicki said she sat there a long time. Then she said no. He hadn’t asked. He’d just said thanks, babe, and gone out to wash the truck.
Dottie put down her fork. Then she said the thing Vicki told me she has never forgotten.
“Your mother didn’t cross your name off because she stopped loving you,” Dottie said. “She crossed it off because if something went wrong on that table this morning, the person they called needed to be somebody who’d tell the doctors the truth. She just didn’t know if that was you right now. That’s all. It’s not forever. It’s a card.”
Vicki said she cried so hard that the lady at the register came over with a stack of napkins and set them down without a word and went back.
“Now,” Dottie said, when she’d quieted down some. “What are you going to do about it?”
Recovery
I woke up in the recovery room with a terrible thirst and a tight, heavy feeling in my right leg, like somebody had parked a car on it.
The lights were bright. A machine beeped beside my head, slow and steady.
There was a voice. It was a woman’s voice, and it was reading out loud.
I couldn’t open my eyes all the way yet, and for a minute I thought I was home in my own bed with the radio on.
“Seven letters,” the voice said. “Something you hold onto in a storm. Starts with an A.”
It was Dottie. They’d let one person back, and she’d come.
She had the newspaper crossword folded in half on her knee and a pencil behind her ear, and she was reading every clue out loud, nice and slow, the way you’d read to a child.
“Anchors,” she said, and wrote it in. “Well, that one was easy.”
The recovery nurse told me later that Dottie sat there for over an hour.
She said Dottie had asked whether patients can hear things when they’re coming out of anesthesia, and the nurse had said sometimes they can, and Dottie had said, well then, I’ll talk.
So Dottie talked. She read every clue in the Thursday crossword. When she couldn’t figure one out, she told me about it like I was helping.
She told me Tim was in the waiting room eating his second bag of chips.
I didn’t say anything for a long time. I just lay there with my eyes half closed and listened to her voice, and I felt safe.
I can’t tell you what it is to come up out of that black, cold place and hear somebody you love reading clues about rivers and old movie stars.
“Four letters,” Dottie said. “A daughter’s name in the Bible, the one who stayed with Naomi.”
“Ruth,” I said. My voice came out a croak.
Dottie put the paper down. She leaned in close and put her cool hand flat on my forehead, like I was running a fever.
“Well, there she is,” she said softly. “There’s my girl. You gave us a scare, Gail Moser.”
I started to cry. I don’t know why. The nurse said the medicine does that.
But I think it was just Dottie, and her pencil, and her hand, and the fact that I had written her name on a card at six in the morning and she’d shown up for every bit of it.