Mackinac

(Read by the author.)

As though blasted by a bolt of electricity from a defibrillator, Eliana straightened up in shock where she was standing at the foot of Kai’s bed. Kai had no teeth, at least none that Eliana could see when the ER doctor removed the ventilator. Eliana thought suddenly about the blazing smile Kai had flashed on stage as they nestled the crown onto her mane of cascading dark hair back, what was it, only five years ago? Eliana’s stunning niece was queen of the county and would go on to place second in the state competition a few weeks later. Now her mouth was a black void that drew Eliana in with malevolent force. As Eliana stared at the gaping wasteland, she became aware of crows squawking in the elm tree outside the ER window. A murder of crows. They seemed to be all over town lately.

Eliana’s own experience as an ER nurse had educated her about the scars on the forearm, about the tracks between the toes if you knew enough about heroin use to look for them there. But neither her training nor her experience offered a clue about how heroin could cause your teeth to fall out. Of course, she realized suddenly, maybe they didn’t fall out by themselves. Kai and her choices, forever striking out at the defenseless family members around her.

Eliana asked the doctor about Kai’s vitals. “A lot of elevation,” the doctor replied. “Heart rate, temperature, white blood cell count. She’s not in great shape, El. I’m so sorry.” The doctor could have hurried away, she was always in demand somewhere, but instead she said, “Let’s go outside and sit for a bit.”  Eliana felt warm gratitude pulse upward in her carotid artery.  Doctor Aparicio was her favorite and would have been even if the bar among the doctors she worked with had been high.

They sat in chairs in the hallway. “Where is Isabelle?” Dr. Aparicio asked.

“She’ll be here as soon as she can,” said Eliana. “She has to find someone to watch Sophie.” A pause. “Isabel will be up to seeing her daughter in that bed, but she doesn’t want the baby to see her own mother looking like that.”

“How old is Sophie now?”

“She’s three.”

“Three,” said the doctor. She didn’t need to say the rest.

“Yeah. I mean, maybe, down the road, Sophie wouldn’t even remember this. But you never know. I sometimes think I can remember things from that age. Even with my dad, I never saw anything as frightening as this.”

“How much has Kai seen her daughter since Sophie was born?”

“Off and on, that’s it. Isabelle is really Sophie’s mom now. She should be just the granny, you know? A young granny. It should be nothing but fun for her. Instead,” she gestured back toward Kai’s bed through the ER window, “it’s this.”

Dr. Aparicio circled her arm around Eliana’s shoulders. “I’ve gotta go,” she said. “But I’ll keep an eye on Kai.”

Eliana nodded. This is how ER docs should be. Compassionate. Consistent. Covering the bases. No mistakes. Nurses, too. No Mr. Carrino episodes. Dr. Aparicio had been a paragon even then, when she could have recommended discipline. “It’s NOT your fault,” she had said then as the orderlies wheeled the sheet-covered body of Mr. Carrino out of the room. “You couldn’t have been two places at once. We all sometimes forget to arrange backup when we get slammed. This place is a zoo.”

Eliana had faced Dr. Aparicio, looked at her directly, but couldn’t stop the tears. “My fault,” she choked. “My fault.”

“No,” Dr. Aparicio repeated. She braced Eliana’s shoulders with her hands. “No one’s fault. It’s what happens here.” Subsequently, she backed up her assertion with the Review Board.

Dr. Aparicio stood, glanced through the window at Kai, and hurried off down the hall. Eliana felt tears again. They surprised her. Even among hardened ER nurses, she was notably tough, but she realized that, right here, right now, she was wobbly.

Back home, Eliana sat in her favorite chair, a rocker next to the front window of the apartment. They’d been lucky to get a unit at the front of the building, overlooking the street. Isabelle never stopped nagging her about the rocker. “El,” she once said. “The kids are in high school, and you haven’t nursed anyone in fifteen years. Come on - a rocking chair?” She gestured at walls covered with pictures, a sofa lined with pillows, old flea-market corner lamps with shades.  “Looks like a grandmother’s living room.” Isabelle favored the spartan look their mother created in their house growing up. Isabelle called it “modern.”

Eliana thought, More like, too lazy to furnish the place and then have to clean it.

Pushing back and forth in the rocker, she forced herself to focus. Who should they call? Who should know about this latest chapter in the family’s absurd saga? It was Isabelle’s decision, of course, since Kai was her daughter, but Izzy would rely on her sister for advice. She would want to talk it out with Eliana, the way they always did when they were kids. Together, they were a small world of buzzing confidences in a universe of silence at the brown clapboard house on 23^rd Street. Drunks came in all styles, the girls came to know in later years. Their father wasn’t the abusive kind. He wasn’t a happy drunk, either, never raising his arms in boisterous song, reciting limericks, or erupting in laughter. He sat in his chair, silent as a cloud of cold morning mist. He would gesture at his daughters, a peculiar upward swing of his crooked elbow, the signal for one of them to bring him another beer. They usually did, while their mother floated through the house holding a cup of tea. One time, they almost didn’t bring the beer. At the refrigerator, Isabelle said, “No.”

“What do you mean, no?” said Eliana.

“I mean, we shouldn’t do this, El. He’ll just get worse.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do? We’re just kids,” said Eliana.

“I still think we shouldn’t,” said Isabelle. “I don’t know. You should know what to do.” She looked at Eliana with a steady, blue gaze that caused Elena to swerve, like a driver wrenching a steering wheel to avoid a crow poking at a crumpled paper bag in the road. Eliana would want to swerve back, plow ahead, hit the crow. She was twelve. She was right. She recovered her voice and said stoutly, “And what do you think he’ll do if we don’t bring him his beer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Of course you don’t know,” said Eliana. “How would you? You’re nine.”

From her rocker, Eliana called Isabelle, who had made it to the hospital and was sitting in the ER beside the still form of her daughter. “We should make some calls,” said Eliana. “Tell people.”

“Who?” said Isabelle.

Eliana paused. “Well. Mom, for one.”

“Yeah, right,” said Isabelle. “She’s busy being a widow. When Sophie turned three last month? Not a word.”

“She doesn’t know how to do this,” said Eliana. “She never knew how to do this. Neither one of them did.”

“And now it’s us,” said Isabelle. “It’s me. Alone with Kai and Sophie. I’m not equipped for this, and I never was. I never learned. Come on, El. Tell me what to do.”.

“What you always do, Iz,” said Eliana. “What you still can do, for your daughter and your granddaughter.”

“Easy for you to say.” Silence. Isabelle’s voice cracked, a fragile egg in a bird’s nest. “I’m sorry, El. That wasn’t fair. You’ve got plenty on your plate at work, every day.” Isabelle knew all about Mr. Carrino.

“It’s okay,” said Eliana. “We’re all under a lot of stress.”

“Anyway, can you come back to the hospital tomorrow?” asked Isabelle. “I’ll be here first thing.”

“Who’ll be watching Sophie?”

“Darren. He’s watching her now.” Darren was new in Isabelle’s life, about a month. Retired mechanic. Older guy. Isabelle had plucked him out of Craig’s List to fix her car one morning when it wouldn’t start. So far, he was a keeper.  “Oh, God, El. What’s going to happen?”

“Whatever it is, we’ll take it day by day,” said Eliana. It was usually the best comfort she had to give to families huddled around her outside the ER, although she  was protected from having to say it to the family of Mr. Carrino. Now, she was amazed it was all she had to offer her own sister.

After they hung up, Eliana realized she hadn’t answered Isabelle’s question about coming to the hospital the next day. She thought about her own kids, her husband, Isabelle, their mother, her patients. She had barely hung on during COVID, watching families say goodbye to grandparents, fathers, mothers, even children, through the hallway windows of hospital rooms, and eventually, incredibly, through outside windows as they stood stamping their feet on the frozen grass, wiping away tears with woolen mittens, crows in the bare trees.

Resources, thought Eliana. In crisis, she was trained as an ER supervisor to identify and allocate resources. What did they have?  The generation above them? They were dwindling, and useless besides: father gone, disassociated mother, an aunt in Canada they never heard from. Their own generation? There was Eliana’s husband Charles, who would cowboy up and hold the fort at home, as he always did. A solid asset. Isabelle’s ex? Long gone, living in Utah or someplace out there. Sophie’s father? Who was he, even? Kai would never say, would never give him up. Isabelle had Eliana and Charles, that was it.  Kai had them too, not that she ever seemed to be aware of it.

When it came down to it, if it came down to it, the government would do the minimum in the absence of anyone else. Kai would be in the state hospital, where staff would look in now and again. If they found Kai with feces covering her hands as she lay rocking back and forth with eyes rolling in her head, would they do anything? Or would they bolt down the hall thinking suddenly about another emergency, telling themselves they’d return later? There’d be no diapers – the hospital would leave that up to family members. It was surprising the hospital didn’t ask relatives to take the soiled sheets home and wash them themselves.

Eliana slumped in the chair. Then, seeing a black flash out the window, she straightened up. A large crow brushed with the sheen of a midnight moon landed on the telephone line over the street. The line bobbed under the bird’s weight and then launched the crow back up into the dark blue of the late afternoon sky. The sky was the color of the water she had seen in pictures of the Mackinac Straits, up in Michigan. In her mind, the crow soared above the twin towers of the Mackinac Bridge. They were still planning to go in the summer, a trip already postponed two years straight because of work. Cruising across the Bridge over the Straits, Lake Michigan to the left, Lake Huron to the right. Would the lakes somehow look different from each other? Crazy – it was the same water.  Maybe a trip over to Mackinac Island, a stay at the Grand Hotel, which she’d seen, over and over, in the movie Somewhere in Time, with Jayne Seymour and Christopher Reeve, strapping and impossibly handsome before landing permanently in his wheelchair after the accident, flashing that magnetic smile to the end. Eliana thought, What if we go now? She’d accrued plenty of time off from the hospital, Charles hadn’t used any vacation time this year, the kids would be on Spring Break next week. The notion of a trip brought to mind their vacation to Florida a decade ago, the flight to Orlando. Those flight-attendant face-mask instructions, which somehow had always stuck in Eliana’s mind. When the masks come down, resist the temptation to put them on your kids first. Put yours on first. You can’t help your kids if you’re disabled.

Eliana thought about calling Charles at work. “A good idea,” he might say. “It would do us all good. Especially you, especially now. We all know how close to the edge you can get, El. Scary, for all of us. Come on, let’s do it.”

Her cell phone buzzed. Isabelle’s voice said, “Hey, Darren called. He has to fly to Sacramento next week. His dad fell and broke his hip, and he’s out there by himself. I don’t know what your schedule is, but do you have any days off next week? Any chance you can watch Sophie? I can’t stand the thought of leaving Kai here alone.” Eliana opened her mouth, but nothing came out. “El?” said Isabelle’s voice. “You there? What about next week?”

More silence. Then, Eliana said, “I don’t know, Iz. I’m not sure about my schedule. Let’s talk about it later. For now, I’ve gotta go.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, talk soon.”

Eliana hung up without saying goodbye, something she’d seen in countless movies and had always driven her nuts. It made her want to call out, “What the fuck? Come on! Nobody just hangs up like that if they’re not mad. Who writes this stuff?”

She lay her head against the back cushion of the rocker, closed her eyes. She pushed lightly with her feet on the braided rug under the chair and then let up. Back and forth, back, forth, in steadily diminishing angles. She felt her own breath, her diaphragm moving up and down, pushing air out of her lungs, pulling it back in. Fading cacophony from the trees on the other side of the window. She drifted, sailing away. As if seen through a billowing curtain of bleached muslin, a ferry plows furrows in the water of Lake Huron. A horse-drawn carriage rolls past the curved facade at the end of the massive colonnaded front porch of the Grand Hotel. The carriage stops, a liveried coachman swings open the door and beckons to her. Inside the carriage, a man with a lap blanket across his knees. A light blue hospital gown covers his torso. Mr. Carrino. He smiles at her, and she steps forward.