We are all welcome here by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg [Elizabeth Berg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Histoire
ISBN: 9780812971002
Published: 2007-04-17T08:26:14+00:00

A little before noon, Peacie shook me awake. “Don’t,” I said. “I’m sick.”

“You ain’t sick. You hungover. Now wake up, I got to talk to you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the sheet up over my head. Peacie yanked it off and then grabbed me by the shoulders to sit me up. Reflexively, I reached out and slapped her. For a moment, we both sat still, staring wide-eyed at each other. I feared for myself. Surely she was going to slap me back, or worse.

But she only said, “Get dressed. Your mother is sick, she got to go the hospital. Riley ain’t there, so I called over the hardware store. Brooks out to lunch, so Dell on the way over. You got to pack her things and help me get her in the car.” She walked out of my room and quickly back downstairs. I lay still, listening to her talking to my mother, and heard my mother’s weak voice, talking back. Then my mother began coughing. And coughing. I knew Peacie would be turning up the positive pressure on the respirator, forcing more air into my mother’s lungs. If she didn’t stop coughing, Peacie would have to fling herself across my mother’s midsection to try to help bring up secretions.

My fault.

Outside, it rained. Perfect. I struck my chest with my fist, hit myself again. Then I got up, got dressed, and headed downstairs.

My mother was lying in bed, her eyes closed. Everything about her looked fragile and illuminated, like Mary in a holy card. “Mom?” I whispered.

She opened her eyes. “I’m fine.”

She was not. I recognized the signs of respiratory distress: the labored exhalations, the sunken eyes, the off color.

“I’ll pack some things for you,” I told her. “Dell’s going to take us to the hospital.”

“Is he?” she asked, and closed her eyes again.

I packed quickly. Into the blue suitcase she kept under her bed I put her photo of me, her favorite lap quilt, and the bed socks she liked to use whenever she had to go into the hospital. Her medications and the complicated list of instructions for taking them. Her toothbrush and makeup. When I picked up her hairbrush, I began to cry. Peacie came into the room and spoke quietly. “You can shut them waterworks off right now. This ain’t no way ’bout you. She got enough to worry about.”

“It’s all right, Peacie,” my mother said, but her eyes stayed closed and she spoke as if she were in a dream. I hoped she was. I knew how much she hated going to hospitals. I wished she could stay asleep until she came home again. Somewhere around the edge of my brain a thought flitted in and out: She might not come home. This was how people with polio often died, a respiratory infection that couldn’t be controlled. And this was the sickest I’d ever seen her.

Peacie had gone back into the kitchen to gather up her own things. I went to sit at the table.

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