Jane's Harmony (Jane's Melody #2) (21 page)

Chapter 18

J
ane was in the middle of writing a ticket when her phone rang. She slipped the ticket machine into her belt and answered.

“Did he do it? Wait. Don’t tell me yet.”

A full moon was rising between two buildings, and Jane looked up at it and made a silent wish.

“Okay, I’m ready now . . . Oh, Marj, I knew it. How did he look? Tell me everything.”

By the time she ended the call, she was so overjoyed you’d have thought it was her smile the moon was reflecting. She sent Caleb a text, congratulating him. When she looked up again, the car she had been ticketing was gone. But she didn’t care. She canceled the ticket and walked on, her feet almost skipping up the sidewalk as she went. She passed by expired meters without even noticing, too busy wishing everyone she came across a good evening, smiling at them with such genuine kindness that none could do anything except smile back.

A half an hour later, her phone rang again. It was a 206 area code from Seattle, and she assumed it must be one of her island friends calling to congratulate her after watching the show and recognizing Caleb. But as soon as she answered, she knew something was terribly wrong.

“This is Harborview Medical Center calling. Am I speaking with Jane McKinney?”

Hearing the words
medical center
erased the smile from Jane’s face, and she stopped in her tracks and tightened her grip on the phone. Before responding, she looked up at the moon to make another wish, but the moon was gone.

Marj buckled herself in and started the car. Then she sat with her hands on the wheel and looked at the dash as if she were confused about what to do next.

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive, Marj?” Jane asked. “I’ve got time yet to catch a cab.”

“I’m fine,” Marj said. “It’s just been a while.”

She put Jane’s car in drive, turned the blinker on, looked over her shoulder three or four times, and then finally pulled away from the curb. But by the time they reached the main road, she seemed to be getting the hang of it.

“So did they say it was a stroke?” she asked.

“They didn’t know yet,” Jane replied. “They were doing tests. They said it could be something called a TIA.”

Marj nodded. “A ministroke.”

“You’re familiar with them?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’ve had one myself.”

“You have? Oh, God, that makes me feel better. Not that I’m glad you’ve had one or anything. But you seem okay. What happened with you?”

“They gave me blood thinners and I quit smoking.”

Jane eyed her suspiciously, knowing full well that she still smoked like a chimney.

Marj caught her look and shrugged. “Okay, I cut back my smoking. I do take the blood thinners, though.”

“I just hope she’s okay,” Jane said, sighing. “I’m not ready for this. Not now.”

They drove in silence for a while. It was still dark, and when a passing car flashed them, Marj searched for the lights.

“Right there on the blinker,” Jane said.

Marj found them and turned them on. “How long will you be gone?”

“I’m not sure. But if you could water the plants on our balcony for me, that would be great.”

“And your work? They approved you leaving?”

“I don’t know. I left a message for my boss. I guess they’ll have to be okay with it or else I won’t have a job.”

When they arrived at the airport departure entrance, Jane leaned over and hugged Marj, and they shared a silent look of understanding. Then Jane got out and retrieved her bag from the backseat, shut the door, and stood and waved good-bye, watching the taillights fade into the early morning gray.

No sooner had the flight taken off than Jane felt sick.

She ignored the seat belt sign and went to the bathroom and retched into the toilet, then flushed it away. She wasn’t sure if it was flying on no sleep and an empty stomach, or nerves. When she finished, she rinsed her mouth and splashed cool water on her face. The flight was nearly empty, and rather than return to her aisle seat, she took a window in an empty row, leaned against the wall, and tried to sleep. She kept rerunning her last conversation with her mother in her head.

She remembered driving away from the house and seeing her standing in the doorway obscured by the screen, and she remembered wondering if she’d ever see her again. Now she was wishing she’d stayed in touch. As miserable as she could be, the woman was still her mother.

Jane found herself wishing that Caleb were with her. He somehow always knew just the right way to comfort her. He would wrap her in his arms and make her feel safe. Last night
when she had told him, he had offered to leave the show and come with her to Seattle. And she knew he had meant it. Thinking of him made her feel calmer, and she actually smiled as she finally slipped off to sleep, listening to the soft hum of the jet’s engines just outside her window.

They were descending into Seattle when she woke. She lifted the window cover and looked out for familiar landmarks. All she saw was a wall of gray. Then they dropped beneath the clouds and into the rain and the wet runway came up slowly to meet them—touchdown, gray pavement rushing by in a blur, slowing, taxiing to the ramp, stopping. Back in Seattle again.

She hadn’t bothered to check a bag, so she retrieved her carry-on and deplaned, then headed straight for the taxi line outside. It was odd watching through the water-specked windshield as the city of Seattle materialized slowly out of the gray, steadily clearer with each sweep of the wipers on the glass. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted him to drive faster or slower, but it didn’t matter because soon the hospital appeared out her window. The building was grayer than even the sky, except where it was punctuated with yellow-glowing windows. The rain clouds had dropped and the hospital rose up and disappeared into them as if the upper-floor residents already had some hold on heaven. She paid the fare with her credit card and thanked the driver. Then she stepped out into the rain with her bag.

It was surprisingly quiet inside, and her wet shoes squeaked loudly on the vinyl flooring as she walked to the help desk, then waited for the man there to look up from his computer screen. He directed her to the fifth floor, and two minutes later she was standing in front of a nurses’ station.

“McKinney?” the nurse repeated. “Here she is. Room sixteen B. Could you sign in here, please? It’s just down the hall there on your left, and there are gowns outside the door.”

Jane took the pen and filled in her mother’s name and her own, then wrote “daughter” under patient relationship. Some daughter, she thought. She located the room and put on a gown, and when she entered, she found her mother sleeping in the hospital bed. Her gray hair that was usually so perfectly done up was spread out on the pillow, and her skin seemed to hang from her thin face. She looked much older than Jane had thought she would, lying there with wires connected to her fingers and somewhere beneath her gown, so quiet and so still that the rise and fall of her heartbeat on the graph and the soft beeping of the oxygen machine were the only signs that she was in fact alive.

She was standing beside the bed gazing down on her mother when a nurse came in. He smiled at Jane and washed his hands in the room sink. Then he joined Jane beside the bed.

“She looks very peaceful now that she’s sleeping.”

“Is she going to be okay?” Jane asked.

“Yes, I think so,” he said, pulling the chart up from where it was hanging at the foot of the bed. “The doctor should be around in an hour or so. She can tell you more.”

“But she is okay, isn’t she? You said that. I mean, she’s going to wake up, right?”

“They gave her something to calm her down for the MRI. That’s why she’s sleeping now.”

“So she was awake and talking earlier? Please tell me she was talking.”

“She was talking well enough to tell me that she wanted a different nurse.”

“That’s odd,” Jane said. “Did she say why?”

“She didn’t say directly, but I got the impression that she wanted someone lighter skinned.”

Jane felt a mixture of humiliation and relief. She looked down at her mother and shook her head and sighed. “Well, she
must be all right then. I’m really sorry if she offended you. She can be that way.”

“I’ve heard much worse,” the nurse said with just the hint of a smile. Then he added, “She’s actually my favorite patient now that she’s sleeping. Why don’t you relax and if I see the doctor, I’ll let her know that you’re here.”

Jane’s nap on the plane had not done much to make up for her mostly sleepless night, and she had just nodded off in the chair when the doctor came in and woke her.

“You must be the daughter,” the doctor said, drying her hands and picking up the chart. “I can see the resemblance.”

Jane sat up, then she stood. Then she wondered if maybe she should wash her hands too; she wasn’t sure what to do. The doctor looked far too young to be a doctor to Jane. But she knew that Harborview had some of the best in Seattle. It was chilly in the room, and she crossed her arms for warmth and waited for the doctor to finish updating the chart.

“I spoke with the neurologist a little while ago, and it looks like your mother had a transient ischemic attack.”

“Is that a stroke?” Jane asked.

“It can be a warning sign for one,” the doctor said. “Do you know if there’s a history of heart disease in her family?”

Jane shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

“It looks like she scored well on the cognitive and motor tests. She doesn’t have diabetes, so that’s good. We’ll get her on an aspirin regime and talk with her about diet and exercise, but I have every reason to believe she’ll make a full recovery.”

“When can I take her home?”

“We’ll keep her one more night for observation, but she should be good to go as early as tomorrow morning.”

Jane thanked the doctor and followed her to the front desk to claim her mother’s purse. She opened it, got out her mother’s health insurance card, and gave it to the nurse along with her
mother’s address and other information. She was putting the card back when she found a pack of Virginia Slims, the same brand Jane occasionally smoked, having picked up the habit when she was young by stealing them from her mother’s purse. She tossed the cigarettes into the waiting room’s trash can. Then she bought a cup of coffee from the machine.

Her mother was awake when she returned to the room. She took one look at Jane and her face fell into a frown. “What are you doing here?”

“Not exactly the welcome I was expecting, Mother.”

“Let me have my purse,” she said, struggling to sit up in her bed. “What are you doing with my purse?”

“You need to relax, Mom. I didn’t steal anything out of your billfold. Although I did throw away your cigarettes.”

“You did not.”

“I sure as hell did. You had a stroke, Mom.”

“I had a fainting spell.”

“No, you didn’t. You had a ministroke, probably brought on by heart disease, and you probably have heart disease because you smoke and you hardly eat and you never exercise.”

Her mother opened her purse and looked inside as if to verify that everything was there. “I didn’t realize you’d gone off to Texas to attend medical school,” she said. “I don’t need advice from my own daughter.”

“I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t fly all the way back up here to be beaten down again by you.”

Jane could hear the resentment in her own voice, so she looked out the window at the rain and told herself to relax, to remember why she was here. Then she looked back at her mother, determined to use a calmer tone.

“I’m scared for you, Mom. Really scared. And you should be scared too. This is a wake-up call.”

Her mother looked up at her with her mouth pinched tight
and her eyes glassed over, as if she were doing her best not to cry. When she finally spoke, she said, “You need to go and see your brother. You need to tell him I’m okay.”

“He’s in jail, Mom. How would he even know that you’re in the hospital?”

“Because I was visiting him when it happened.”

“Oh, great. Can’t we call him or something?”

“You know damn well we can’t call him in the jail.”