Claudia Wair
In a beige room reserved for family, I waited for my mom to come out of surgery. The doctor said it would take an hour and a half, but twice that time had passed. No one came to tell me what was happening. No one at the desk could answer my questions. No one else had been in the waiting room as long as I had.
I tried to focus on the TV on the wall where a married couple discussed their decorating preferences with a designer. Something light and airy for their new kitchen and bath, they said. The designer offered whites and pale blues for the tiles and paint and cabinets. The wife clapped her hands. The husband nodded.
A loud beep over the hospital loudspeaker startled me. I wanted to get up, don a surgical mask and gown, barge right into that operating room and demand to know if Mom would live, if she would still be the mother I knew, if she’d be able to sit outside in her garden watching the birds again. Instead, I visited the vending machines, bought a Coke and Doritos.
On the TV, contractors demolished the couple’s kitchen. Pieces of their old life dismantled and hauled away. The room, like a hollow egg, stood desolate.
My phone buzzed. The surgeon. “There were complications,” he said. Blood loss. A transfusion. ICU. A respirator. “We’ll monitor her. You can see her as soon as she’s settled.”
I lifted my eyes to the TV screen where workers carried in new cabinets and quartz countertops. Men installed white tiles like strange teeth. When the construction was complete, the designer directed the men bringing in new furniture. She gilded the couple’s new nest with little touches: flowers in curvy monochrome vases, throw pillows with geometric patterns.
The woman at the front desk called my name. She told me I could see my mother now. Through the hospital’s maze of fluorescent halls, I found my mother attached to more tubes than I could count. I sat with her, watching the respirator fill her lungs with air, then deflate.
I wondered about the couple and their renovated house. What happened when the designer and TV cameras left? Were they happy in that house with all its whites and pale blues? Did new fixtures and furniture improve their lives?
It was almost midnight when they took Mom off the respirator. She opened her eyes and looked at me. Groggy and disheveled, she reached for my hand.
The nurse repeated “There were complications.”
“Oh my,” Mom rasped. Then she fell asleep.
I curled up in my hospital chair and dozed, dreaming of a room painted blue like a robin’s egg.
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Claudia Wair is a Virginia-based writer. Her work has appeared in Gastropoda, Astrolabe, Tangled Locks Journal, JMWW, Writers Resist, and elsewhere. You can read more at claudiawair.com.