Элизабет Страут - Olive, Again

“Can they hear me?”

Jeff turned his head, as though to look at someone. He turned back and said, “Dunno.”

Olive closed her eyes. “I’m very tired,” she said. She heard the chair being pushed back. Don’t go, she wanted to say, but she was too tired to say it.

—

When she next woke, her son, Christopher, was sitting by her bed. “Christopher?” she said.

“Mom.” He put his hands in front of his face. “Oh, Mommy,” he said, “you scared me to death.”

This was more confusing to Olive than anything that had happened so far. “Are you real?” she asked.

Her son’s hands came away from his face. “Oh, Mommy, say something else. Oh please don’t have lost your mind!”

For a few moments Olive was silent; she had to gather her thoughts. Then she said, “Hello, Chris. I haven’t lost my mind at all. I’ve—apparently—had a heart attack, and you have—apparently—come to see me.” When he didn’t say anything, she demanded, “Well? Did I get it right?”

Her son nodded. “But you scared me, Mom. They said you were swearing. And I thought, Oh God, she was swearing? Then she’s gone absolutely dippy, and I thought, I’d rather she be dead than dippy.”

“I was swearing?” Olive asked. “What kind of swearing?”

“I don’t know, Mom. But they got a kick out of it. When I asked, they just laughed and wouldn’t tell me, just that you were really angry.”

Olive considered this. Her son’s face seemed quite old to her. She said, “Well, never mind. I was someplace gorgeous, Chris, and then they brought me back here and I guess I was mad, I don’t remember, but ask me anything and I’ll show you I’m not dippy. God, I hope to hell I’m not dippy.”

“No, you sound better. You sound like yourself. Mom, they said you were dead .”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Olive said. “I think that’s awful interesting.”

Dr. Rabolinski held her hand when he spoke to her; she did not remember that he had done that before. But his hand was smooth and yet a man’s hand, and he held her hand in both of his, or sometimes just one of his hands would hold one of hers as he spoke to her. He had glasses that were fairly thick, yet she could see his eyes behind them; dark and penetrating, they looked at her as he spoke, holding her hand. She was a strong woman, he said, and gave her hand a little squeeze. She’d had a stent put into her artery, he said. She had been intubated; Olive did not know what that meant, and she did not ask. He told her again that she had had a heart attack in the driveway of the woman who cut her hair. She had fallen forward onto her car horn, so the woman came right out and called 911 immediately, and this was why Olive was alive, even though she had had no pulse when they came to get her. But they had brought her back to life.

Looking into Dr. Rabolinski’s eyes while he held her hand, Olive said thoughtfully, “Well, I don’t know if that was such a good idea.”

The man sighed. He shook his head slowly. “What can I say,” he said, sadly.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing to say to that.”

She had fallen in love with him.

Olive stayed on in the ICU unit; pneumonia arrived because of the intubation. These were days when she knew very little of what was happening to her, she had the sense that she was a huge chunk of smelly cheese and every so often someone seemed to mop her up, turning her one way, then the other. She drifted in and out of sleep, and then she seemed to not be able to sleep at all. A deep sadness gripped her, and she could only stare at the ceiling, or try to talk to Christopher—who showed up, she thought, quite a lot—sitting by her bed, talking to her, sometimes looking so anxious that she wanted to say, “Please go now,” but she didn’t say it, she was old and tired and her son was there to be with her. It seemed to her to be one of the few times in her life when she didn’t say what she thought. But when he wasn’t there her sadness deepened, and she understood after a while that she was probably not going to die, but that her life would be very different.

She said this quietly to Dr. Rabolinski when he came to see her and sat on the bed and held her hand. “Your life is going to be very much what it used to be,” he said to her. “You just need to recover, and you will.”

“Ay-yuh,” she said, and she pulled her hand away.

But he stayed seated. Oh, what a nice man he was. She flopped her hand back over to where he could hold it again if he wanted to, but he didn’t, and in her foggy state she understood that she had made it impossible for him to do so.

“Hold my hand,” she said. “I like it when you hold my hand.” And so he held her hand again, and told her that she was being given intravenous antibiotics and they were helping and soon she would be out of here.

—

And then she was out of there, and into a regular hospital room. She stayed in the hospital room for a few days, later she found out it had been seven days, and when she thought of it she thought it had seemed longer than that, and also shorter. In other words, time had become something different. She was moved to a room where her bed looked out a window onto the trees—it was autumn and she watched the maple leaves fall off one by one, sometimes two or three of them would flutter downward—and she liked that. She didn’t like the woman she shared the room with, and she asked that the curtain be drawn between the two beds, and someone did that for her, and Olive said, “Now let it stay that way.”

At night it seemed to her she did not sleep and yet she did not seem to care, or perhaps she did sleep; Christopher had brought her little transistor radio to the hospital for her and she clung to it, held it to her cheek, like it was a stuffed animal and she was a child. In the early mornings, she watched it get light through the window and the sky was astonishing as it changed from pale gray to rose to blue; it backlit the treetops and then penetrated them; Olive really felt astonished by this. Beautiful! And then—so early the sun had barely come up—Dr. Rabolinski appeared, saying, “Hello, Olive, how’s my favorite patient today?”

“Oh hell,” she answered, “I want to go home.” Except she didn’t want to, because she was in love with this man. Privately the shame of this seared her. But she could do nothing about it.

When he asked if she had moved her bowels, she almost died. “No,” she said, looking away. When he asked if she had broken wind, she said, “Don’t know.” And he said, Okay, but let him know when this happened. He sat down on the bed and took her hand. He said she was doing very well, that she could go home in a few days.

“I’m an eighty-three-year-old woman,” she said, looking at him. His eyes behind his thick glasses looked back at her.

And he shrugged and said, “In my world, that’s a baby.”

—

But when they brought in the breakfast trays and the hospital day started she would become querulous and want to go home. Christopher—who had returned briefly to his home in New York City but was now back—showed up, sometimes while she was poking at her scrambled eggs, or sometimes later, but he looked tired, and she worried about him. “I’ve arranged for home healthcare,” he said to her. “Someone will be with you around the clock for the first two weeks.”