-Emily
Part I: Sleepless
Kathrene Grey hadn’t slept in four days. Sure, she had taken twenty minute rests induced by some over the counter sleep aid, and once even closed her eyes for a moment at a red light for a full ten seconds, before the car behind her angrily honked at her tardy response to the green light. But closing her eyes and attempting to relax her body, while better than nothing, was not enough. It was four days ago that she had found out that her mother was going into surgery. It had been an accident that they had found the cancer at all – she had gone in because her neighbor found her passed out in the garden – she was dehydrated and had been in the sun for hours. Kathrene had tried to get a flight down to be with her during the pre-op in preparation, but her mother refused. She was so embarrassed of how she looked with her head shaved that she was insistent on doing this herself.
“I’m in the care of professionals, honey,” she had said. “They’ll take better care of me than you would anyways.”
After an hour and a half of pleading to let her come, Kathrene finally gave up. She had always told Kathrene that allowing your elders to maintain their dignity was the most important thing, even if it seemed silly. So, she hadn’t gone. Instead, she didn’t sleep. At first, in an angry and distressed torrent of emotion, she had gone to the bar a few blocks down and had too many beers with the bar flies that frequented the place. After she was good and lubed, she paid her tab in cash and cried the whole way home. Expecting the alcohol and exhaustion from her reckless sobbing to put her into a deep slumber, she lay in bed and watched the room spin around her. She watched it until she realized it wasn’t spinning anymore, and looked at the clock. Hours had passed, and she had sobered up without sleeping. That was Tuesday. Today was Friday.
Kathrene had never been much of a drinker, but kept the essentials on hand for guests, and enjoyed the occasional glass of wine with dinner. However, it seemed to her recently that a tumbler full of whiskey was the only thing that kept her calm. Presently, she had a glass of it on her lap as she watched an infomercial for some kind of kitchen blender that rendered all other tools useless. Her mother had gone into surgery eight hours ago, and in order to keep from shaking, she had poured and refilled the drink twice. It helped her to keep from hyperventilation, but she didn’t feel the effects of the alcohol at all. She knew if she got smashed, if something happened she might need to hop in the car right away. So she kept sober – drinking slowly, just enough to stay calm.
Her heart rate felt like it never slowed down, and as soon as she distracted herself with work or television and stopped thinking about her mother, she remembered that she hadn’t been thinking and praying for her health and well being, and spiraled again into guilt and anxiety. Her blood pressure had skyrocketed. She checked it the day before yesterday (or was it just yesterday?) at the grocery store at one of those self-administered machines. Mostly she had just needed a place to sit down. She had taken a list for the week’s necessities, and reached the dairy section to discover that she had Oreo cookies, Miracle Whip mayonnaise, and frozen fish sticks in her cart, none of which were on her list. So she had sat down at the blood pressure monitor. Then, realizing what it was, pressed the button and stuck her arm through the cuff. When it showed her abnormally high blood pressure and started blinking with warning, she hurriedly hit the “cancel” button and collapsed back into weeping on the chair. She could not stop herself from crying. Finally the manager came and escorted her into a stingy break room where he made her some tea and watched as the tears silently dripped down her face as she choked the tea down. She left the store without purchasing the now thawed fish sticks.
She was 35 years old – and while her mother had been present for her as a child, it was only five years ago that they actually got to know each other. Between the other three boys that were basketball, water polo, and track stars, Kathrene, while the oldest, was not the prize of her parents’ eyes. She had not done well in school, and was never particularly pretty. She had been over weight most of her life – never able to attain the slim figure that characterized all the women that her brothers brought home to meet the family. She had to go to college out of state because her grades were so poor, and even then, she barely made it through the first two years. But five years ago, there was a moment. A moment when mother and daughter accepted each other for who they were – not for who they wanted the other to be. It was a beautiful moment (though dulled by pain killers, Kathrene had just gotten her wisdom teeth removed), but it had changed the nature of their relationship forever. They talked on the phone frequently, and had plans to take a trip to Italy in the coming summer. The trip was only a few months away, and then they had found out about the cancer. Her mother wanted to cancel the trip, saying,
“If I die, then at least you can get a refund for my ticket!”
Kathrene refused, and kept the reservations in place, knowing that if they planned for the worst, it could only come to pass as such. She felt like the past five years of her life she had opened a door that she didn’t even know existed – like she had been missing out on all of her mother’s brilliance in the past 30 years and just now was able to see how radiant she was.
Her boss had sent her home from work today at lunch time – when she had sent three responses to the same E-mail within 30 minutes. She walked to her desk and said,
“Go home. The circles under your eyes rival a raccoons and you can’t do your job when your mind is in a hospital 300 miles away.”
“I’m fine,” Kathrene said blankly.
“No, you’re not,” Her boss retorted. “You’ve been looking at the same screen for an hour now, and responded three times in three different ways to one question that I E-mailed you yesterday. You are an incredible asset to this company, but if you don’t leave right now, I will fire you, because you need to be at home, and if you won’t go yourself, I’ll make you.”
It was the nicest thing anyone had said to her all week.
So she had gone home, and sat on the couch, knowing that in the next hour her mother would be released from the Operating Room into Intensive Care, or she wouldn’t make it. Either way, she would get a phone call. The infomercial restarted, the shining faces with not enough color correction, too much make up, and saccharine smiles. She left the television on, but looked past it to the telephone. She had checked the connection three times earlier, making sure that the cat didn’t trip over the cord and unplug it, that the handheld batteries were fresh, and finally, in case of a surprise termite attack, that there were no holes in the wall that would allow them to screw up the phone line. She found a dead moth and copious dust bunnies, but nothing that suggested a covert insect plan to thwart her telephone connection.
The minutes ticked on.
Part II: The Call
The phone rang. Kathrene nearly spilled her watery whiskey all over the carpet when it did. She sprinted to the phone and answered with a breathless “Hello?”
“Ms. Grey?” the voice on the other side inquired.
“Yes. This is she.” She inhaled.
“I’m calling about the status of your mother. The surgery was a success and the surgeons are taking her to ICU now. She’ll be awake in a few hours.”
Kathrene exhaled audibly. “Thank you so much for calling.”
“It’s not policy for us to call until the patients have awoken from the anesthetic. We’ve had instances where we give false hope to families and then they file lawsuits for malpractice when their loved one doesn’t wake up, even when they understand the risks.”
“Is that something I need to worry about?” The moment of relief had reescalated back into the now familiar fear and rapid pulse. She sat down on the floor, feeling weakened. The voice chortled.
“She made me promise to call you as soon as she was out. She told me that if she made it through the surgery, she would make it through the recovery, and that she was a tough old bird. She made me promise to call you before she would even let us take her into the Operating Room – so I kept that promise. She’s sure right about one thing – she is a tough old bird.”
Kathrene started to laugh and thanked the man again, and then hung up. She collapsed onto the floor and laughed and cried with relief. She was going to go see her mother, first thing tomorrow, whether she liked it or not. She’d bring a hat that she could wear, and wouldn’t stay for long if she wasn’t wanted – but after the torment of the past few days, Kathrene felt if she didn’t see her mother she would go absolutely batty.
When her bout of relieved hysteria had come to a lull, she plopped on the couch, turned the television off, and fell into a deep sleep.
Part III: The Light
She awoke to the phone ringing. It was after two AM. It had rung four times before Kathrene even heard it, but when she did she shuffled over to the floor where she had left the handheld, and breathed a sleepy “Yes?”
“Ms. Grey?” A woman’s voice this time.
“Yes?” She answered.
“I’m calling about the status of your mother.”
“Oh, did she wake up? Thank you for calling. I spoke to another man earlier who said that she had made it through the surgery, and that she had made him promise to call before she woke up. I know it’s against protocol, but it’s the first time I’ve slept in four days, so I was grateful.”
A brief silence.
“Hello?” Kathrene asked.
“Yes, Ms. Grey, she did wake up. I don’t know if you have been watching the news, but there was a brush fire that started a few hours ago up in the hills. The fire department has been working to extract the residents with homes there, but around a hundred people are still trapped. They are suffering from smoke inhalation, and the ones that have made it out so far are badly burn…” Kathrene cut her off.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why you are telling me this – what does this have to do with my mother?”
The woman sighed deeply.
“In preparation for the victims of the fire, we started to clear out the ICU. We were transporting your mother to the closest facility to us that had the means to monitor her recovery, only a few miles away.”
“And I wasn’t notified?” Kathrene said, upset that they had moved her mother in her fragile condition.
“Please give me the number for the new facility so I can call them and check on her status immediately.”
“I’m afraid they never made it,” said the woman. She sounded tired and sad.
“I’m sorry, what?” Kathrene said, confused.
“En route the ambulance was t-boned at an intersection where another vehicle ran a red light – hitting the back of the vehicle and tossing your mother on her side where she hit her head. With her recent surgery, any head trauma was fatal.”
Part IV: The Trial
Everything after that was a blur. The funeral, the sympathy cards. Then came the arraignment for the person who had been driving the truck. Kathrene was there – she wanted to press charges for the most severe punishment possible, so she had paid her defense attorney to pursue the case that a usual district attorney’s office would have taken on. To them this was just another job, but to her, it was her life. So she had paid the best defense lawyer in town to switch sides and prosecute her case with the help of the DA’s office.
“Manslaughter One,” her lawyer had told her – “that’s the best we can do.”
Their docket was called.
“Will the defendant please rise?” asked the judge.
Kathrene looked over. It was a child. He couldn’t be older than sixteen, standing with what looked like a public defender in a wrinkled suit with a mismatching tie. He had bad acne, was gangly, and his shirt didn’t quite fit. It was short at the arms and made him look even more childish, like a toddler trying to fit into a favorite outfit they outgrew, only to find that the zipper won’t quite zip.
“How do you plead?” the judge inquired.
“Guilty,” said the boy. His voice sounded like it was just beginning to drop, uneven and strange. He started to cry.
“It was my stupid cell phone – I was texting my mom telling her that I was on my way home. She had called three times, but I fell asleep watching a movie at my buddy’s. I hopped in the car to come home straight away when I realized I was past curfew, and I didn’t want to call. I don’t have a headset and I know it’s illegal to talk without one.” He sniffed as he wiped his nose on his too-short shirtsleeves and his voice cracked again as he continued.
“I didn’t even see the red light until the truck was half way inside the ambulance.” He was sobbing now.
Kathrene didn’t even own a cell phone, but she had heard of twitting and Facespace – and how the teen texting craze was problematic in the classrooms of public schools.
She stood up.
“I want to drop the charges.”
“Excuse me?” her lawyer said. “I’ve spent three weeks preparing this case to get you what you wanted, and now you want to drop the charges?”
“Yes” Kathrene said quietly.
“Your Honor, the victim’s daughter would like to drop the charges and since I work for a private firm, if she is not paying me, we’ll need a District Attorney to continue the case.”
The judge sighed irritably and announced that they would reconvene when the case was ready to be prosecuted by the state.
It was only then that Kathrene saw the boy’s mother. She was dressed in a beautiful blue suit and hugging him with tears streaming down her face.
Epilogue
The Sunday Paper Broadcasted on it’s front page:
Reckless Teen Driving Case Goes to State Court
Last April, minor Carl Soumersault crashed into an ambulance transporting patient Beatrice Grey. She had had brain surgery earlier that day and was being moved to a nearby facility for care, as the brush fires last spring required the closest hospitals to have their ICUs ready to intake burn victims. Soumersault ran a red light, crashing into the ambulance, killing Grey. While the charges of manslaughter have been dropped, he has been charged with reckless endangerment, and the death of the woman who had just survived an extraordinary surgery is being broadcasted widely, bringing attention to the issue of teens and reckless driving. The prosecutor who was initially on the case, but was later replaced by a district attorney, has left his private firm on an indefinite hiatus to work to improve the laws of cell phone use and motor vehicles. While making sure that teens are aware of the risk of engaging in cell phone use while driving, the problem of reckless driving for those with new licenses or permits is being more closely examined than ever. Soumersault is looking at many hours of community service, and license revocation until the age of 21 due to his actions last spring. Legislation regarding technology is too slow for how quickly it grows and improves, and in order to keep our roads safe, we must enforce safety in the home at an early age, so even if the law cannot keep up with technology, our parenting can.
