by Katherine Brown
I am choking on orange peanut butter crackers.
“Lissa?” I can barely manage to get any words out. The crackers that the medical student has fed me minutes before keep threatening to resurface. I gag for a moment, taking a faltering breath, and then try again: “Lissa?”
“Who is this? This isn’t Lissa. Can I ask who’s calling?”
My body keeps oscillating between hot and cold, hot and cold. I am so taken aback by the voice on the other end of the phone, and so desperate for Lissa, that for a moment I can’t come up with any words.
“This is Kat.” Again, my words are obstructed by the imminent threat of vomit. I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them up again, registering the bright television monitor at the corner of the room. It is so vibrant compared to the sable blackness of the rest of the room. “Kat.” Again, my voice cracks as the hot acidic threat rears up again.
“Oh, Kat? This is Scott.”
I think I interrupt him, my vision going watery as I try to dredge up the next words.
I tell him where I am: the OB-GYN office in Stafford. The words come out in a slurred rush, each syllable straining into the next. “Can you guys come?” I swallow. “Now?”
There’s movement on the other end of the line. Then, Lissa’s voice flows through my phone. The sound of her voice immediately calms me, reassures me.
“Kat? Sweetheart?”
I repeat what I just told Scott, her husband. Each word is threaded together by a white, hot needle of pain.
“Where is the doctor’s?”
I repeat: Stafford. I don’t think about how long it will take for them to get to me, of the hurdles that they will leap over. Later, I will realize I haven’t been as clear as I thought. My only imperative mission is to get her to come, now. Everything else becomes haphazard, jumbled through the pain and the intermittent waves of nausea.
“Ok, we are on our way.” The connection is broken, and I stare at the ceiling, knees still up and sagging against each other. Every part of me is shaking.
My mother took me into bed with her when I was sick.
I remember my father carrying me in, my head heavy and drooping against his shoulders. She lifted the heavy duvet cover and let me crawl in beside her.
“Hey, baby.” She rubbed my ears and lifted away a lock of my hair away from my sweaty forehead. “It’s not getting any better, is it?”
I shook my head. My mother was my whole world. I had no reason to doubt or distrust her. She had been a nurse, which I didn’t really understand but was very impressed with. At that age, I could still remember that she had worn mascara and her scrubs to work.
She pulled up my shirt and pressed her cool hand against my stomach. This was a secret only mother seemed to know: I didn’t really run hot temperatures, but if my stomach was really warm, then I was really sick. Years later, when I started college, I would come to be misdiagnosed because of this mysterious lack of fever.
“Bob,” she says, looking toward my troubled father. My mother, even when she was sick and stuck in the bed herself, seemed to me to be authoritative, tight laced. He always seemed to droop when I was sick or crying. “Get the thermometer out for me and the cold medicine.”
My father disappears. For the rest of the night, I cycle in and out of consciousness. I am lost in the heavy covers. My mother’s room is a flaming star, always warm and lit by white-hot fairy lights that are draped around the bed and closet. She never sleeps, so I lose track of time. Every couple of hours, she rouses me to take more medicine and to feel the slip of my stomach with her icy hands. Her stereo blasts with claps of thunder that convulse out of the speakers around the edge of the room. I stare at the murals she has painted across the white walls: long trellises of green ivy and fat roses. Eventually, I lose track of what is and isn’t a dream.
The procedure was supposed to be routine.
My doctor, days before, had simply given me a script and told me to take two pills the night before. “I give them to patients the day before who haven’t had kids,” she explains. She has a distinct, breathy voice that makes me want to trust her. She remembers me from my appointment the year before. “It might make you a little crampy. But it makes things go a little more smoothly.”
I intentionally don’t look up the procedure, because I do trust her. It terrifies me to look up information, to get lost in the digital scrawl of horror stories other women put up. If I had, I might have been more prepared. Instead, I swallow the two pills with some tap water and go to bed.
The next day, it goes quickly.
“You’re doing so well,” the doctor quips. “Take a deep breath for me.”
I don’t remember when I stop breathing. My legs hang in stirrups, my hands pressed at my sides. My body is impossibly still. I am a girl who doesn’t stop talking, using her hands to scoop up more unspoken words out of the air. Now, I lay placid, opening and closing my mouth soundlessly.
“All done, you did so great.” The doctor smiles and looks up at me. Beside her, the medical student also smiles. Her eyes are like bowls of chipped ice. And then the doctor frowns.
“Are you doing ok?”
I shake my head, feeling incredibly hot, flushed. There’s horrible pressure pulsing up from my abdomen.
“She looks really pale,” the medical student observes.
“This is normal, okay?” the doctor assures me. “Sometimes we get a patient that has a vasovagal response. It’s going to be perfectly okay.” She turns to the nurse. “Can you get her those smelling packets?”
They exchange looks that tell me that this is far from normal.
The nurse rips open packets and forces me to sniff ammonia, so I don’t pass out. “Don’t go to sleep on me, alright?” The doctor urges. The medical student places cold, wet compresses against my hot forehead and the back of my neck. They drip down my cheeks and the small of my back. I have gone totally white, my face bleached of color. Eventually, the nurse waves alcohol pads under my nose.
“Do you have an anxiety condition?”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“She looks worse now.”
“Did you take any pain medications today? Before you came in?”
Both doctors look at each other again and then back at me. We have an animated, one-sided conversation. I’m rising and falling in eddies of pain. Eventually, the nurse comes back with a paper cup and some pain medication. The medical student, who I notice is very freckled, starts to feed me crackers, one small bite at a time.
“Take a drink. Now another bite.”
“My mouth’s so dry,” I whisper, but I can feel my body begin to come back into focus. That’s when I start to taste the bile, the sharp kick of acidity that rises up and extinguishes any words from my mouth. The medical student leaves, flipping the lights off so it’s just me holding really still, shaking. I need someone, someone right now. The panic stabs through my brain as I try to stay calm. I need a mom, I need my mom, I need, I just need—
My mother is taking me up in her arms.
I can feel the tilt of my head as she compels me to drink more sticky cough syrup. She gives me saltines and ginger ale that foams in my mouth. My stomach reels and I feel like I’m going to vomit. Heat radiates through my small body.
This might be the last time she looks after me.
I don’t really remember. But it’s the image that I hold onto when I’m really sick, really incapacitated. I feel her hands at the small of my back, rubbing gentle circles there, trying to get me to breathe. Applying pungent Vicks VapoRub when I had bronchitis.
For a long time, I forgot what it was like to have that maternal touch on my back. To have someone pick me up when I’m slumped over, sore and spent. My mother fades into a small spotlight, corner stage. It doesn’t really matter why she went away. I draw up the memory of her only when I’m very desperate. It’s a weakness. I know that it’s compulsion that will rip through me, at the point where I already feel hollow inside. I can’t crave a mother I don’t have.
An hour after the procedure, I feel more like myself. I’m thinking about the way my mother’s bedroom was lit up as a little girl. Looking up at my mother when I was very sick, I was certain that she had a halo trailing across her soft, wispy bangs. It was probably just the fairy lights strung up behind her. The light makes her cheekbones stand out in sharp relief.
In reality, I’m curled in the waiting room, my chin tucked into my chest when the door opens. She’s the first thing I see.
“Hey kid.” Lissa comes in, her face scrunched up with worry. Scott follows at her heels, his face impassive, but somehow also showing concern. “What happened? I’m gonna slap you, you had me so worried.” Her face goes slack with relief. “I was so concerned. We couldn’t make out what you had said, and we went to the wrong doctor’s office. They had no idea what was going on, but they thought you would be here.”
I nod meekly, ashamed. And yet, I don’t regret calling her.
“I was looking up allergic reactions, anything. I thought you were dying. Never do that again.” Later, she will tell me that Scott sped all the way here to get me, a forty-minute drive. Later, she’ll laugh about how she ran from the basement, leaving the door wide open so that the cats, who aren’t allowed, prowled about in unsupervised splendor.
She takes me out for soup and offers her shoulder for me to rest my head.
“It’s okay, I’m really feeling better now.”
When we separate, she gets out of her car and stares at me for a moment. She has one hand on the passenger side door, watching me as I check to make sure I have my keys.
“Make sure to text me when you’re back and settled in bed.” She kisses the crown of my head and smiles. “And we’ll talk tomorrow, keep me updated. Love ya, Kiddo.”
It’s hard to accept love, when all I’ve had is a shadowy image I keep close to my chest. I mechanically recall the memory of my mother, soothing me to sleep. But really, that woman and child faded away a long time ago.
Lissa calls me her bonus daughter.
She pales at the idea of someone hurting her child. In all of my heartbreaks, my moments of physical pain and exhaustion, she has been there. Wrapping me in her arms while I sobbed. Love and trust have never come easily to me. I never knew how much I craved the solid weight of having a parent when I need one.
It’s strange to think of the shift that has happened so quietly. I try to think up the first time she kissed the top of my head, ceremoniously as she does with all her children, every night we are at home. Her lips graze the top of my skull, her hands hovering over my shoulders. And try as I might, there is no Before or After.
I close my eyes and my mother pulls me closer, running her hands through my hair and telling me to take my cough syrup. When I open them, twenty years later, Lissa kisses the top of my head and walks away.
Katherine Brown has studied creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Mary Washington and lives in northern Virginia.